Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the increasing plurality of competing economic forecasting expertises. It highlights their epistemic disagreements and their distinctive interests, before showing that they still share a common understanding of the economy, resisting the emergence of divergent alternatives.

Paper long abstract:

The evolution of economic planning in France since the 1950s has fostered the development of state expertise in predicting economic futures. However, starting from the 1970s, forecasters' failure to accurately describe and analyze important economic fluctuations led to the emergence of competing expertise from the private sector, independent institutes and universities.

This increasing complexity of the French economic forecasting institutional landscape has led to what some forecasters termed as "institutional pluralism without a diversity of methods." The inability to foresee economic downturns such as the subprime crisis resulted in a polarization within the ecosystem, between highly applied approaches focused on anticipating the effects of economic policies debated in the public arena, and more academic approaches centered on refining models and software.

This paper, drawing on ethnographic studies conducted within different poles of economic forecasting, examines the impact of diversified expertise on the economic knowledge generated and disseminated to guide policies amidst uncertainty. Firstly, it demonstrates that the imperatives and goals of experts vary greatly: academic forecasting tools follow an epistemology vastly different from that of field forecasters. The paper also explores the role given to health and environmental issues by economic forecasters. Overlooked before 2007, they are now gradually gaining attention as a distinguishing factor among experts.

Nevertheless, these reflections are still constrained by a particular conception of the economy shared across different arenas. Despite the diversity of forecasting contexts, there is a lack of genuine pluralism in conceptualizing alternatives for understanding the impacts of socio-ecological transformations on the economy.