WHEN we decided in 1969 to create a Board of Economists, we were certain that experts with wide academic and governmental experience would help our Business section's analysis and reporting. Just how valuable the nine-member board was to prove became clear as economic problems worsened and the Nixon Administration finally launched its New Economic Policy in August 1971. At its very first meeting with TIME staffers two years ago, the board had a sense of where events were headed. The U.S., the members agreed, was at a new and dangerous turning point. Since then, the board has periodically made concrete predictions; this week TIME'S Economy section publishes a prospectus for 1972 that draws heavily on the board's projections.

The economists' first annual forecast was just a shade optimistic, but closer to the facts than most projections for 1970. The board members' predictions of 1970's gross national product averaged out at $983 billion and unemployment at 4.5%; the figures actually turned out to be $974 billion and 4.9%. The calculations for 1971 came a good deal closer. A year ago the board put the G.N.P. at $1,049.2 billion, with unemployment rising to 6.2%. The actual figures: $ 1,050 billion and 6.2%.

Individually, as well as collectively, the board members have displayed a certain clairvoyance. In June 1970, for example, Robert Triffin, one of the world's leading monetary experts and master of Yale's Berkeley College, accurately predicted a world monetary crisis that would result in the revaluation of foreign currencies. Perhaps the most startling look forward came later that year, when Arthur Okun, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Johnson, outlined in detail an incomes policy. The proposal, preceding President Nixon's wage-price freeze by nine months and Phase II by well over a year, shared several important characteristics with the plan finally adopted by the Administration.

Says Marshall Loeb, senior editor of the Business and Economy sections: "Our job as journalists is not so much to forecast as to report and explain. But predicting is important because other people base their decisions on it. And it's fun--particularly if you're fortunate enough to be right."

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