Fortune Tellers: The Story of America's First Economic Forecasters

Friedman (Birth of a Salesman), a historian at Harvard Business School, delivers an account of the early days of economic forecasting that reveals how American's fiscal climate was once even murkier than it is today. He investigates men who struggled to understand the mysteries of the nation's economy like Roger Babson, Irving Fisher, John Moody, C.J. Bullock, Warren Persons, Wesley Mitchell, and Herbert Hoover. Theirs was an era of great experimentation, as is evidenced in the work of Fisher, who pushed for the implementation of mathematic and statistic considerations in economics, and Mitchell, co-founder of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Delving into the forecasters' backgrounds, Friedman examines the effects of tuberculosis on the careers of Babson, Fisher, and Persons, and finds humor in their personal lives%E2%80%94Fisher's associate Karl Karsten, for instance, wrote an unpublished work of speculative fiction called Horse in A Limousine. Friedman also catalogs these men's failures: Moody had to sell his Manual after the Panic of 1907, Fisher was mired in debt late in life, and Babson was the only forecaster whose prediction regarding the Great Crash proved accurate. Friedman has crafted an intriguing portrait of men feeling their way through the economic dark, a situation that feels all too familiar today. 28 halftones. (Dec.)