2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY
2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY
5081 GENERAL HYPOTHESIS OF AGGREGATED EXPECTATIONS
The core concept is that:
The future outcome of a (macro) issue - economic or political - will be largely determined by the expectations of those, in the population affected, whose aggregated individual decisions will shape that outcome.
The corollary is that changing the expectations of this population will change the (macro) outcome.
Underlying this statement are three major assumptions:
The outcome will be decided by many individual decisions [made by the whole population involved, not just by the key economic actors involved in the rational expectations hypothesis], such that no one such single decision will unduly affect the overall aggregate [not the personal outcomes typically explored by behaviouralists]. decision.
The outcome will not be unduly constrained by any resource scarcity, or bottle-neck.
The separate individual decisions, and hence the overall aggregated outcome, will on average be swayed by the individual expectations [usually observed by practical marketing research techniques, not predicted by theoretical models] of this population, as well as specifically by individual needs and/or wants; and the latter can be assumed to be random in nature, cancelling out when aggregated [this is similar to the forecast errors typically allowed for in rational expectations work, which are also essentially random with a mean value of zero. It is the reason this generalised theory is not applicable to individuals’ own circumstances.].
1 April 2003
Other pages you might like to consider are:
5155 LEGITIMATION, 5037 CORRUPT GOVERNMENT, 5069 THE EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES, 5128 WESTERN REACTIONS TO POLITICAL CHANGE, 5150 MANAGEMENT FOCUS, 5022 ESTABLISHMENT GROUPTHINK, 5138 THE SCENARIOS, 5199 SHAPING THE FUTURE, 5086 EXPECTATIONS, 5198 RATIONAL EXPECTATIONS AND LIMITED INFORMATION, 5088 HYPOTHESES RELATING TO EXPECTATIONS
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