Bernanke on the Difficulty of Economic Forecasting

In a commencement address at Boston College Ben Bernanke gave more insight into his childhood as a brilliant child from a working class family in South Carolina and the importance of education. He also gave this description of the difficulty of economic forecasting:

Like weather forecasters, economic forecasters must deal with a system that is extraordinarily complex, that is subject to random shocks, and about which our data and understanding will always be imperfect. In some ways, predicting the economy is even more difficult than forecasting the weather, because an economy is not made up of molecules whose behavior is subject to the laws of physics, but rather of human beings who are themselves thinking about the future and whose behavior may be influenced by the forecasts that they or others make.