>>740566Economics is famously a field where people make bad predictions, the internet is famously a place where people make overhyped predictions. If their predictions come to pass in (say) February, are you really comfortable smugly lording over them that they were just over 2 months out in their prediction? (Linguistically, of course, "by the end of the year" is unambiguously, but mathematically to predict disaster to within 1/6 a year is pretty good!)
The point on NGDP targeting is not that they would retreat to a weaker position, it is that you are attributing GDP with a sacrosanct nature which it does not really hold for them. You're confusing the map and the territory: it's economic growth they love, GDP is just a snappy way to allude to it. It is as though you think fast drivers worship their speedometers, not speed itself.
I say "reasonably well correlated" because I can specifically picture the sort of chart that comes when you correlate GDP with any kind of wellbeing measurement, which is a very strong / shape with a handful of outliers above and below. To say that there's a 1:1 relationship invites someone smugly pointing out that New Zealand is much less of a shithole than the UK for basically the same GDP per capita, as though this invalidates the fact that Australia is much better and Somalia is much worse.
(And as though many of these things aren't simply explained by country level GDP being the wrong resolution: London and the South East of the UK have reasonable GDPs per person, but other parts drag the country as a whole down by being developing world tier. It's correct in one sense to say that
on average the UK is better, but there isn't really an average in a dysfunctional state.)