Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today is August 3rd, 2020, and my guest is author Margaret Heffredin.

She is a professor of practice at the University of Bath, Lead Faculty for the Forward Institute's

Responsible Leadership Program. Her latest book and the subject today's conversation

is uncharted how to navigate the future. Margaret, welcome to Econ Talk.

Thanks very much. It's great to be talking to you.

So your book opens with the story of three economic forecasters from the 1920s.

They had a lot in common. Tell us how they lived and how they forecast

and what that has to do with your, the theme of your book, uncharted.

Sure. So these are the three men who I think are broadly considered to be some of the founding fathers of forecasting as an industry.

And probably the best known of them is Babson, partly because of the college which he founded.

And Babson really believed, he was a fervent Newtonian and believed that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

And he was really one of the first people in a whole line of economists who aspired to make economics

really as pure a science as physics. So he really placed great, great faith in this Newtonian concept,

if you like, what we would now call boom and bust. And he believed he had a way of kind of navigating the economy through those two extremes.

Irving Fisher by contrast was an academic. He was a man of immense young promise.

And he was really very famous for his predictions and for providing advice to investors.

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