I suppose I should expect to get trashed in the WAPO after calling them Fox on 15th all the time. Still, economist Mark Zandi's comment that: "the economy has been measurably worse than anyone expected," should not go unchallenged. It may have been worse than he expected, or the economists with whom he talked regularly expected, but some of us (including Nobelists Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz) were not at all surprised by the severity of the downturn. The problem is not that economists are always surprised by the economy. The problem is that the media tend to rely almost exclusively on those who are.
--Dean Baker
