MIAMI – Whether it’s policy gurus like Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve or academic theorists like free-trade champion Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, economists are widely viewed as people who can divine where society needs to go and discern how to get there.

But that blind faith has been shaken by recent trends that economists either missed or were wrong about. These include everything from the rise of outsourcing, the mammoth trade and federal deficits and, perhaps most significantly, the drop in the dollar.

In a world of rapid change, rising risks and global competition, good economic projections are more important than they ever have been.

“Why have economic forecasts missed the mark so much?” asks Steve Morrell, Barry University economist. “I don’t have a good answer.”

It is possible, of course, that in due time the dollar will revive, hiring will pick up and Washington will balance its budget. In which case, economists won’t look wrong so much as early. Indeed, timing has always been a problem for prognosticators, whether they were foretelling the beginning of a market rally or the end of a recession.

Morrell and others freely acknowledge that there appear to be changes afoot in the economy that the experts aren’t prepared to discern or examine.

For one thing, the nature of expansions and contractions in economic output seems to have changed. In the past it was largely the result of fluctuations in supply and demand.

Today, business cycles seem more affected by structural changes in the economy, such as the rise of globalization. In many cases, uptrends today are created by new industries that no one saw coming.

The prime example is the Internet-led boom of the 1990s. More recently, a major shift toward greater reliance on temporary workers has made that sector one of the fastest growing in the country.

Conversely, current job losses are more likely to represent positions that have been permanently lost rather than temporary layoffs, as was the case in the manufacturing-dominated 1970s’ economy.

Business cycles that reflect permanent shifts rather than temporary imbalances can leave economists behind the learning curve when it comes to gathering and analyzing data on phenomena too new to understand.

Lakshman Achuthan, managing director of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, concurs. The institute was founded by the late Geoffrey Moore, who spearheaded the development of the leading economic indicators index, considered one of the preeminent forecasting tools for the economy.

Economics, says Lakshman Achuthan managing director of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, has always been weak at assessing turning points in the economy. That’s because it relies heavily on so-called linear forecasting – basically, projecting current trends outward.

The problem is, when a boom collapses into a recession, or a downturn turns into a recovery, it may be months before economic models respond. That’s why, for instance, it is often a year or more before economists can say when a recession ended.

But Achuthan says another curiosity about the current economy is an unusual disconnect between economic trends that formerly moved in unison.

For instance, historically when economic output expanded at a solid rate – as it now is – and corporate profits were high, hiring followed suit. When productivity soared, workers got raises.

Although most economists – including Greenspan – contend that a hiring binge is just around the corner, Achuthan says it isn’t necessarily going to happen. Job growth and economic growth are no longer bound together the way they once were.

“Cycles are de-linking,” he says. “It happens. It creates a very lopsided recovery.”

The question is, why is it happening? Achuthan suspects it’s largely linked to outsourcing, a phenomenon that is occurring on a scale not seen before – four times faster than in the 1990s.

“That’s the part that has everybody flat-footed, the speed of the shifts,” Achuthan says.

In the past, jobs migrated outside of the United States, to be sure, such as apparel work to the Caribbean Basin.

But today they’re going to countries like China, which has the tremendous labor pool and capital to simply supplant America’s industrial production. Worth noting, he says, is that manufacturing accounts for 11 percent of the U.S. labor force, but 111 percent of all job losses in the last three years.

“That’s a permanent structural shift, and it’s clouding perceptions of the economy,” he says. “The presumption is growth equals jobs, they all go together. What our cycle analysis around the world shows is, you can have a disconnect longer than you think.”