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Iran’s mass ballistic missile and drone attack on Israel last week raised anew the specter of a widening Middle East war that draws in Iran and its proxies, as well as Western countries like the United States. The urgent need to defuse tensions – starting by ending Israel’s war in Gaza and pursuing a lasting political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – is obvious, but can it be done?
A survey of economists is published in the November 2012 issue of Foreign Policy. One question was whether we thought that the US unemployment rate would dip below 8.0% before the election. When FP conducted the poll at the end of the summer, unemployment was 8.1-8.2%. Now it’s 7.8%. Only 8% of the respondents said “yes.” (I was one. I basically just extrapolated the trend of the last two years.)
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My fellow economists choose defense spending and agricultural subsidies as the two categories of US federal budget that they think the best to cut. They rate the euro crisis as the greatest threat to the world economy now and are particularly worried about Spain.
For a slideshow presentation of the results, see “The FP Survey: The Economy.” Or in a magazine format: “If we’re ever going to get out of this slump, what will it take? We asked more than 60 leading economists to tell us.”
Also, here is a recent poll from The Economist, asking similar questions of NBER and NABE economists: “Asking the Experts,” Oct. 6.