Dismal scientists miss optimism in jobs data

Last week's jobs report shocked just about everybody with a PhD in economics. On average, economists expected that the economy would shed more than 100,000 jobs. The actual number was only 11,000, and the unemployment rate declined, to 10 percent.

Economists were almost unanimously incorrect about the start of the recession, fundamentally clueless about the depth of the recession, and now it's looking like they will get the end of the recession wrong, too.

Data surprise all the time, of course, but the divergence between consensus and reality in this case was unusually large. It calls into question other elements of the consensus view.