IT SEEMS SAFE to assume that most readers of this piece have now pored over all of the economic forecasts for 2003, and decided between the doomsayers and the optimists. Or perhaps latched onto a consensus such as that of the 66 economists surveyed by BusinessWeek. That august assemblage of experts expects the U.S. economy to be growing at an annual rate of 3.6 percent by the fourth quarter of this year, and the jobless rate to have declined from its current level of 6 percent to 5.7 percent.

Why people study economic forecasts is a bit of a mystery, since the track record of economists is well below that of weather forecasters. I suppose some sense of certainty–even a false one–is more comforting than conceding that the economic future of a complex economy such as ours is essentially unknowable.