NEWS Release - Speech by Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer - At the Warwick Economics Summit, Coventry, United Kingdom -February 11, 2017
"I'd Rather Have Bob Solow Than an Econometric Model, But ..."
Introduction: Econometric Models and a Eureka Moment
Eureka moments are rare in all fields, not least in economics.1 One such moment came to me when I was an undergraduate at the London School of Economics in the 1960s. I was talking to a friend who was telling me about econometric models. He explained that it would soon be possible to build a mathematical model that would accurately predict the future course of the economy. It was but a step from there to realize that the problems of policymaking would soon be over. All it would take was a bit of algebra to solve for the policies that would produce the desired values of the target variables.