Time & Perspective Quote by Earl Wilson

The joke lands because it treats expertise as a kind of retroactive storytelling, not foresight. Wilson’s line skewers the economist’s most public-facing promise: prediction. By flipping the timeline, he turns “expert” into someone who excels at after-the-fact justification, always armed with a fresh reason the world refused to cooperate. It’s not that economists are useless; it’s that their authority often survives being wrong, because the performance is less about accuracy than about narrating complexity in a way that sounds inevitable.

Calling this out in a single sentence is classic mid-century American wisecrack: brisk, skeptical, built for a newspaper column and a culture newly addicted to expert commentary. Postwar America saw economists move from back rooms to microphones, tasked with explaining inflation, recessions, and consumer confidence to a public that wanted certainty. Wilson punctures that aura by implying the job is basically damage control with equations.

The subtext is a populist dig at elite insulation. When a plumber botches a pipe, you get a flood; when an economist botches a forecast, you get a press conference. The line also captures a modern media dynamic: predictions are content, and explanations are content, and the cycle rewards confidence more than accountability.

As an athlete, Wilson’s outsider posture matters. Sports culture values the scoreboard: you called the play, it worked or it didn’t. His punchline imports that ethic into economics and finds it wanting.