Monday, March 24, 2008

A History Of Wrong Predictions By The Chief Economists of the National Association of Realtors


A History Of Wrong Predictions By The Chief Economists of the National Association of Realtors. This would be the discredited David Lereah and Lawrence Yun.

Click on the image for a larger version. David Lereah left the NAR in May 2007.

5 comments:

bearmaster said...

Great chart!

Anonymous said...

The larger version is not legible.

Anonymous said...

An interesting post on MarginalRevolution.com which applies to the NAR economists:

Why Anti-Cassandras Get the Media Attention

Paul Krugman today bemoans the fact that on the housing crisis and especially on Iraq the people who get the most media attention are those who got it wrong.

"It’s even worse, of course, on the matter of Iraq: just about every one of the panels convened to discuss the lessons of five disastrous years consisted solely of men and women who cheered the idiocy on."

(Brad DeLong, Dean Baker and others have made similar complaints.) I think the fact is correct so what is going on?

The answer is media incentives. It wasn't just the experts who were wrong, the majority of the American people got Iraq and housing wrong. The war was popular in the beginning and people continued to buy houses even as prices rose ever higher. So what does the American public want to hear now?

The public wants to hear why they weren't idiots. And who better to explain to the public why they weren't idiots than experts who also got it wrong?

Anonymous said...

Well.. we just hired him !!

http://indiaplay.blogspot.com/2008/03/luddic-research-announces-unhedged.html

http://indiaplay.blogspot.com/2008/03
/luddic-research-announces-unhedged.html

..and he *will* prove invaluable..

Anonymous said...

Wow... I thought I was the only person who paid attention to the comments of that wacky Lawrence Yun. I actually see him much in the same way I see George Bush. If he tells me things are okay, I can be pretty sure they're going to hell in a hand-basket faster than you can say dubya.