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COPYRIGHT 2001 The Miami Herald
Byline: Gregg Fields
Mar. 25--They were new truths of the New Economy.
The Dow would hit 36,000.
The federal surplus would reach $1.5 trillion.
Stock options would rival salaries as a means of compensation.
So much for trusting the experts.
As investors mop up the mess left by the stock market's slow-motion crash, as workers wait for their options to rise back above water, and as Congress considers whether revenue projections are reliable enough to enact a huge tax cut, a central question remains unanswered:
How come nobody saw it coming?
The simple answer is, because economics has a hard time measuring, assessing and predicting the biggest variable of all: human behavior.
Of course, it wasn't the only area where economists misjudged things recently.
True, there were those who felt stocks were overvalued, but no one foresaw the Nasdaq dropping over 60 percent of its...
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