Insured Social Security workers (cont’d). Refer to Exercise 14.58.

a. Compute the exponentially smoothed series for the annual number of workers who are fully and permanently insured for Social Security. Use the smoothing constant w = .5.

b. Plot the number of workers and the exponentially smoothed values on the same graph.

c. Use exponential smoothing to forecast the number of fully and permanently insured workers in 2020 and 2021. What is the drawback to these forecasts?