Consistent failure does not seem to cultivate humility

From Grim Stock Signals Piling Up as Wall Street Mulls Recession Odds by Elena Popina and Vildana Hajric. The article in general is a reportage of the various concerns about stock market conditions. They have this aside:

Economists haven’t always done a great job predicting contractions. A 2014 study by the International Monetary Fund’s Prakash Loungani found that not one of 49 recessions suffered around the world in 2009 had been predicted by the consensus of economists a year earlier. Loungani previously reported that only two of the 60 recessions of the 1990s had been anticipated a year in advance.

Over the years I have seen numerous reviews such as this and the findings are very similar. Whether it is the Fed or consensus of economists, or the Treasury Department, or whomever - No one has a good track record of forecasting economic turns with any usable precision or accuracy.

We understand aspects of the complex system which is the economy, indeed, we have some very good knowledge about very specific aspects. But the economy is a dynamic, chaotic, complex, compilation of loosely coupled systems, outcomes of which are a product of emergent order.

With all our expertise, we fail with some consistency and yet never obtain to a state of humility.

UPDATED: Related - Economics, History, and Contingency by Arnold Kling.

2. But Tyler is right to characterize economists as working with deterministic models. I have an essay in the works that argues that this is so much the worse for economists. The short version of the essay is that the real world has characteristics that invalidate the deterministic models, and instead outcomes are much more contingent.

I believe that there is a sense in which economics is history. Economic outcomes are affected not just by the configuration of households and firms but by the path that got us here. Unfortunately the typical economic model operates purely in the present, or even outside of time altogether. The economist acts like a man who comes from Mars and thinks he can predict what firms and households will do tomorrow based on what he can observe today, without having to ask anything about what was going on yesterday.