Despite numerous failures, economic forecasting has maintained its interest and importance. But both the forecasting instruments and the understandings of time that inform them have changed fundamentally. The paper examines three forecasting tools, developed by American and European economists and businessmen from 1920 until 1955, and investigates the different temporalities associated with the tools and their implications. In the early 1920s, American and European economists celebrated the (1) Harvard Index of General Business Conditions, which was based on a cyclical understanding of time, as the first “scientific” approach to business forecasting. But the unstable economy of the 1920s and 1930s and the growing influence of the Federal Reserve prompted contemporaries to question the index’s value. Because the past was no longer perceived as a reliable guide to the future, economists and businessmen on both sides of the Atlantic experimented with forecasting approaches that were based on a linear understanding of time. The paper goes on to discuss the (2) Leading Indicators established at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the 1930s and the (3) survey-based forecasting approach employed by American companies in the aftermath of the Great Depression and, two decades later, by economists in Europe. While the Leading Indicators were based on data from the past, but allowed for a dynamic, time-variant application, the surveys inquired about the expectations of economic agents. By investigating the different designs and workings of the tools, I show that their different temporalities brought about different interactions between economic and political decision-makers.
