Donald Ratajczak is a “what if” man. What if consumer spending went up? What if housing construction went down? Would interest rates skyrocket? Would the stock market turn from a bull into a bear?
Mr. Ratajczak has the answers. For 27 years, the founder and director
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of Georgia State University’s Economic Forecasting Center has been making a name for himself as a professional prognosticator. Prices, inflation, Alan Greenspan’s next move: When it comes to predicting the future, Mr. Ratajczak is a lot more reliable than the average crystal ball.
Maybe that’s why major news organizations seem to have his number on their speed dials. The New York Times, USA Today, CNN, CNBC: Mr. Ratajczak has talked to them all -- a lot.
“I got known as someone who gave jazzy quotes,” he says in signature sound-bite style. “But that wasn’t my purpose. I was just trying to explain economics.”
He won’t be explaining it on a campus any longer. Mr. Ratajczak traded his directorship for emeritus status in May. But he isn’t planning to rest on his laurels. He’s bursting with ideas for dot-com ventures and newspaper columns. And he wants to keep right on making bold pronouncements about an uncertain economy.
How does he do it? As a leading econometrician, Mr. Ratajczak uses mathematical models to predict what will happen to the economy if, say, a policymaker fiddles with this variable or adjusts that interest rate. And he almost always gets it right.
In 1994, Mr. Ratajczak won the Blue Chip Economic Indicators’ Economic Forecasting Award, given to the economist who has made the most-accurate forecasts of the U.S. economy over a four-year period. In 1996, BusinessWeek named him the most-accurate economics forecaster in the country. That was the same year that The Wall Street Journal dubbed him one of the 20 most-quoted economists in the world.
Since 1974, he’s written 1,300 weekly columns for Atlanta’s Journal and Constitution newspapers, enough, the paper reports, to fill 15 books.
Asked about his prodigious output, Mr. Ratajczak replies, “I want to talk to people. It’s important to have a voice out there.’
Especially when you’re speaking about things investors and policymakers care about, not just arcane subjects of interest only to dusty academics, he says. Too often, scholarly journals address issues on the periphery of the economy, not the center. “I don’t see us advancing a lot of the knowledge,” explains Mr. Ratajczak, who now holds a distinguished fellowship at Georgia State. “In the movement to make things mathematical,” to beef up the scientific side of economics, “we’ve failed to explain actual behavior.” And for a behavioral science, that failure is “fundamental,” resulting in piles of academic publications that are “less relevant” than what’s appearing in next week’s newspaper column or next quarter’s forecast, he insists.
“I care about my profession as much as anybody. That’s why I criticize it.”
He also is willing to criticize himself. He’s grown stale in the classroom, he candidly admits.
“When you’re cooking with a class, there’s no greater high in life,” he says. “I’ve had that feeling.”
But not recently. “I’m not as excited as I was. I walk into class and think, ‘I already said that.’” And then he starts thinking something else. “Am I doing the best job? Is there something I could do better?”
He doesn’t know the answer, but he’s willing to find out. “At my age,” says the 57-year-old economist, “I have maybe one more job in me.”
Actually, he has more like three or four. He’ll keep cranking out his newspaper column and plans to write a book -- one that tackles tough questions like why we have a government and how large it should be.
And he’s not going to stop telling other people -- or countries -- how to get the biggest bang from their bucks. He’s advised Japanese ministers on how to attract foreign investors and jetted to the Middle East to predict oil prices. And he plans to keep sticking his nose into other people’s business, says Mr. Ratajczak, who just ordered new business cards with the title “consulting economist” printed under his name.
But, these days, he’s most excited about his own business -- the dot-com business, that is. The retiree’s latest brainchild is an Internet enterprise administering -- how fitting -- 401(k) retirement plans. For most businesses, that’s an onerous task, but it’s a lot easier on the Internet to expand investment choices, change people’s portfolios, even advise folks on where best to put their money, Mr. Ratajczak says. And you can’t underestimate the value of sound investments, he adds. He wouldn’t be retiring now if he hadn’t made some.
Next on Mr. Ratajczak’s to-do list: a venture-capital company to drum up money and shell out advice for start-up technology companies in and around Georgia.
Asked about Mr. Ratajczak’s latest ventures, Sidney E. Harris, the dean of Georgia State’s College of Business, replies, “Don’s ahead of the curve -- once again.” Mr. Harris hopes the forecasting center won’t fall behind without its founder. He is interviewing two “names of national stature” for the directorship, and hopes to make an appointment this month.
Naturally, Mr. Ratajczak can’t resist bowing out without making a few final forecasts about academe. It’s going to change “dramatically,” he says. Given the sky-high tuition costs, it will have to, he says. “When inflation rates fell to 4 percent and medical costs stayed at 10 percent, we attacked the medical area,” he notes. “We’re next.”
Right now, Mr. Ratajczak is eager to put the number crunching on hold -- at least for a few weeks. He’s heading to Nova Scotia on his first summer vacation in 32 years.
After that, who knows? “I’m not retiring,” the economist says. “I’m redirecting.” These days, the big question on Mr. Ratajczak’s mind isn’t “What if?” It’s “What’s next?”
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Page: A18