The forecast scandal was a systemic orientation bias, not mere incompetence

Evidence

Again, if this track record was widely known already to have been so very poor, then missing the onset of the crisis should not have caused such consternation on its own. … Rather, the crisis brought to consciousness for the lay public the portent that there was a specific bias in the orientation of the profession, a bias that ruled out of bounds predictions of the sorts of global system-wide breakdowns that had galvanized those living through 2008–11. Hence what the clientele thought they were buying—a sort of neutral reconnaissance of the near future, a species of early-warning insurance—did not correspond very well with what the economists had been proffering. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 695

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s core thesis about the ‘thought collective’ policing what counts as legitimate economics — the bias is structural, not individual.
• SEED: Angle: prediction markets and expert forecasters sell neutrality and early-warning insurance, but the product is a well-defended ideology preventing systemic breakdown from being thinkable.