---
license: mit
language:
  - en
pretty_name: IGM Forum Economist Consensus
size_categories:
  - 10K<n<100K
tags:
  - economics
  - surveys
  - consensus
  - igm-forum
configs:
  - config_name: statements
    data_files: statements.csv
    default: true
  - config_name: votes
    data_files: votes.csv
  - config_name: statements_consensus
    data_files: statements_consensus.csv
---

# IGM Forum Economist Consensus

Every IGM Forum poll from the [Kent A. Clark Center for Global Markets](https://kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/) (US, Europe, Finance panels), spanning **2011–2026**, normalized to a uniform schema with a direction-blind consensus metric.

- **Code & blog post**: https://github.com/pradyuprasad/igm-consensus
- **Interactive chart**: https://pradyuprasad.com/writings/economists-agree/
- **Source**: https://kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/

## Files

| File | Rows | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| `statements.csv` | 1,146 | One row per poll question (text, date, panel, vote shares, source URLs). |
| `votes.csv` | 50,410 | One row per economist-question pair (vote, confidence, comment, affiliation). |
| `statements_consensus.csv` | 1,146 | `statements.csv` enriched with the HHI consensus index, dominant-direction score, percentile rank, and confidence-weighted variants. |
| `methodology.md` | — | Coverage stats, panel breakdown, quality checks. |

## The consensus metric

The chart in the linked blog post ranks questions by **HHI** (Herfindahl-Hirschman concentration) on the three vote shares:

```
HHI = share_agree² + share_uncertain² + share_disagree²
```

- `1.00` = unanimous; `0.33` = perfectly diffuse three-way split.
- Direction-blind — survives wording flips like "X is good" vs. "X is bad".
- Asymmetry-sensitive: scores 60/39/1 (settled) higher than 60/30/10 (real dissent), unlike top-share alone.

## Coverage

- **558** poll pages, **0** failures, **0** duplicates
- **1,146** statements: **US** 644, **Europe** 377, **Finance** 125
- **50,410** votes from **193** distinct economists at top departments (MIT, Harvard, Chicago, Stanford, Yale, Berkeley, Princeton, Columbia, plus European/finance equivalents)
- 553/558 pages use the official "Download Poll Data" CSV as source of truth; 5 special crisis-rating pages use HTML chart shares.

See `methodology.md` for the full audit.

## Quick start

```python
from datasets import load_dataset

statements = load_dataset("pradyuprasad/igm-consensus", "statements_consensus", split="train")
print(statements[0])
```

Or with pandas:

```python
import pandas as pd

url = "https://huggingface.co/datasets/pradyuprasad/igm-consensus/resolve/main/statements_consensus.csv"
df = pd.read_csv(url)
print(df.sort_values("consensus_score", ascending=False).head(10))
```

## License

MIT for the schema and code that produced this dataset. Underlying poll data is from the IGM Forum — consult the [Clark Center site](https://kentclarkcenter.org/) for terms governing redistribution of the original surveys.