LET’S face it: economic forecasting is an act of sheer hubris. Which, of course, only incites people to do it.

The stock market offers its predictions, and, occasionally, it’s even right. As the economist Paul Samuelson once put it: “The stock market has called nine of the last five recessions.”

Economists have an even worse record, particularly when it comes to predicting downturns. In 1929, for instance, the Harvard Economic Society declared that a depression was “outside the range of probability.” Whoops.

Then there is the matter of the last recession. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that the downturn began in December 2007. Few people realized it at the time. A survey by Blue Chip Economic Indicators that month found that, as a group, economists believed that the economy would grow by 2.2 percent in 2008. Instead, it began to shrink.