You knew it all along: Economists can’t forecast the economy worth a hoot. And now we have a scholarly study that confirms it. Better yet, the corroboration comes from an impeccable source: the Federal Reserve. The study compared predictions of important economic indicators — unemployment, inflation, interest rates, gross domestic product — with the actual outcomes. There were widespread …

  The economist Kenneth Arrow, who died last month at age 95, was a model academic — brilliant, creative, precise, unfailingly modest. If only his fellow economists would stop misrepresenting his work. In the 1950s, Arrow and others proved a theorem that, many economists believe, put a rigorous mathematical foundation beneath Adam Smith’s idea of the invisible hand. The theorem …

  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is just one of many federal agencies marked for drastic funding reductions to enable a big boost in military spending. But the cuts proposed for America’s center of weather and climate research reveal alarming pitfalls in President Donald Trump’s approach to budgeting: a reluctance to invest in the future, a disregard for …