Tufte’s Short Post # 14: Perhaps our expectations were inflated

Perhaps our expectations were inflated. How quickly we have forgotten that the 4 best years in the history of the global economy were … 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006. I don’t subscribe to the view that economically we get a hangover from the good times. But I do find it reasonable that, just as our current expectations exaggerate the negative, our expectation of what good times should look like is more optimistic than it should be.

There’s an arthouse film called Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. You’re getting Twenty-Six Short Posts from Dr. Tufte. :) These are on why it’s difficult to understand the current macroeconomic situation. Joe Baker is not a macroeconomist, but we all do a little bit of everything at SUU, so he has to teach principles of macroeconomics sometimes. The other day he asked for pointers about summing up for his students why we can’t quite figure out what’s wrong with the economy. I came up with 26 reasons, most of which have been discussed in class, and all of which are now required.