Education Quote by Edgar R. Fiedler

Forecasting, Fiedler suggests, is a profession that can turn expertise into a kind of well-polished emptiness. The line lands because it flips the familiar academic boast - knowing more and more about less and less - into an accusation: forecasters chase breadth so aggressively that their knowledge thins out into vapor. Its elegance is in the glide from “less and less” to “nothing”, a rhetorical slope that mimics how small concessions in prediction (a wider error band, a softer claim, more caveats) can end with a forecast that’s technically unfalsifiable and practically useless.

As an economist, Fiedler is poking at the incentives baked into the forecasting industry: you’re rewarded for having an opinion on everything, for being quotable on deadline, for sounding calibrated even when the underlying system is chaotic. So you generalize. You build models that travel well across sectors, countries, and cycles. You trade thick understanding of a specific market or institution for portable frameworks and a constant stream of “outlooks”. The subtext is not that forecasters are dumb; it’s that the job selects for a kind of intellectual overreach while punishing humility.

The timing matters, too. Fiedler’s career spans the postwar era when macroeconomic management, econometrics, and faith in technocratic steering all ballooned - alongside repeated embarrassments: oil shocks, stagflation, sudden recessions. The quip is a reminder that when uncertainty is the product, expertise can become performance, and omniscience is often just ignorance with better charts.