Is The Economist Always Wrong?

The Economisthas been likened to the “voice of God”. The comparison is not meant flatteringly. But it raises a fair question. A deity would be omniscient. How accurate, by comparison, are our predictions? Rigorous fact-checking usually saves us from embarrassing errors about the present. The future is trickier.

bête noire. Yet these howlers, and others, have given rise to the charge that, far from being all-knowing,

The Economistis so reliably wrong that the smart move is to bet against it. There is no better time to double down on a stock-market rally than when we start fretting about a bubble. Last year the then chairman of Reform UK, a populist-right party, called

The Economistthe “ultimate contrarian indicator”, while complaining about our criticism of his party’s fantasyland fiscal numbers. (A few months later, the party reversed course and ditched those policies.)

The Economistlay claim to a creditable forecasting record? Predictive perfection is not our goal and we aim mainly to inform and stretch minds. But ideally we would be right more often than wrong. To assess our record with something approaching neutrality, we took the 7,000 or so leaders

The Economisthas published this millennium and fed them into GPT-5.5, an artificial-intelligence model.

The Economist.

Nostradamus or dumb us?

Extinction of the car giants

“It may be just a matter of time before a big carmaker considers using America's Chapter 11 bankruptcy law to shed its pension liabilities, as several steel companies and airlines have already done”

The Economistwas downbeat about the world’s economic prospects, we were exuberant about technology. Sometimes this exuberance turned out to be justified. We declared smartphones the future of computing in 2002, said that something like streaming would devour DVDs in 2008, and cautioned in 2011 that a flood of Chinese-made cars would wash over the West. Still, our techno-optimism occasionally got ahead of itself. Distributed electric grids (boosted by

The Economistin 2000), cheap bioethanol (2003), open standards for social media (2008) and augmented reality (2016) have yet to bring about the breakthroughs we prophesied.

The Economistwas convinced by the false claim that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction, but was right in 2003 to doubt Vladimir Putin was a true democrat. We toyed with the idea that China’s Communist Party might give ground on democratic reforms. In America we correctly forecast that Ted Cruz would not win the 2016 election, but for the wrong reason: we thought that his combative antics would alienate moderates. In fact, Donald Trump offered an even more furious alternative and still bested Hillary Clinton.

Sources: GPT5.5; S&P 500;

The Economist