Why So Many COVID Predictions Were Wrong

Updated at 12:13 p.m. ET on April 7, 2022.

As many prominent policy makers reckon uncomfortably with persistent inflation after months of forecasting that the phenomenon would be transitory, I’ve started making a list of other pandemic predictions about the economy that never materialized. There was the eviction tsunami and the “she-cession” and the housing-market crash, and you can’t forget the state- and local-government deficit explosion. In each case, expectations set by economists, policy makers, advocates, and businesses have not been borne out. Let’s take them together, one by one.

In August 2020, the Aspen Institute released a report warning that 30 million to 40 million people in the United States were at risk of eviction, a number equivalent to roughly one in 10 Americans. But in December 2021, Princeton’s Eviction Lab found that in the 31 cities where it had collected data, all but one recorded fewer eviction filings than the historical average. Not only was the prediction startlingly off base—evictions actually declined.

From May to August 2020 more than 40,000 people and found that roughly 25 percent of women were considering leaving the workforce “or downshifting their career” that year. As the Harvard economist Claudia Goldin has , much of the media coverage of this finding failed to note that 20 percent of men were considering leaving the workforce or cutting back. A hypothesized that the pandemic would reduce women’s share of the workforce for years to come. However, as Goldin writes in a , the labor-force participation rate for women ages 25 to 54 was the same in November 2018 as it was in November 2021: “Employed mothers, by and large, did not leave the labor force