Forecasting the Economy’s Future

I cannot allow Graham Turk ’17’s letter regarding climate change and William Happer *64 to go unchallenged. In his letter, Turk quotes a government study and writes that climate change will “slash the U.S. economy 10 percent by 2100.” The U.S. economy is expected to be about three times larger on a per-capita basis in 2100 than it is today. Even if you accepted the study’s very aggressive assumptions and the 10 percent impact, that would mean that our economy would be only 2.7 times larger per-person than today’s level. Hardly a “slashing.” Personally, I am skeptical of attempts to predict 80 years in the future with any precision.