It was a wonderful moment. I understood that economic policy would from then on be easy: All that was necessary was to feed the data into the model and work out at what level to set the policy parameters. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked out that way.
On the use of econometric models, I think often of something Paul Samuelson once said: “I’d rather have Bob Solow’s views than the predictions of a model. But I’d rather have Solow with a model than without one.” We learned a lot at the LSE.