Nostradamus, Eat Your Heart Out

Nostradamus, Eat Your Heart Out
by Josh London

The holiday season is upon us, the New Year is just round the bend and the prediction/prophecy business is in full swing. Why this particular pastime has proved so popular I’ll never know. Consider some of what has been thrust our way in the past.

Edward Bellamy, journalist and a utopian socialist from Massachusetts, predicted in his best-selling 1888 novel, Looking Backward: 2000-18, that by the year 2000 there would be a blissful socialism at work that knew no money, poverty, jails, or social distinctions—in which lawyers had vanished because, as a character in Looking Backward marvels, "the world has outgrown lying."

But given the pace and unpredictability of change in this chaotic world, in which even the weather—a closed physical system—is orders of magnitude too complex for the most powerful computer to comprehend, it is astonishing that prognosticators ever get anything right. Yet occasionally they do.

Even as George F. Kennan, in 1947, offered his diplomatic prescription for containing the Soviet Union, he declared that the emerging superpower "bears within it the seeds of its own decay." In 1959, science fiction writer Robert Heinlein wrote about a high-tech suit of armor that would also add to a soldier's strength, an idea that U.S. military labs are now pondering. Herman Kahn, the futurist and nuclear strategist, predicted in 1967 that the year 2000 would see the widespread use of computers, lasers, personal pagers, VCRs, satellite television, and organ transplants.

The same year, an intellectually august Commission on the Year 2000 published several papers, among them the views of sociologist David Reisman on the prospect of an unrelentingly competitive society; anthropologist Margaret Mead on a narrowing of the gap in gender roles; then-professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan on a mechanism much like vouchers as a market-based way to help the poor; and law professor Harry Kalven Jr. on the threat that technology posed to individual privacy.

Alvin Toffler, a best-selling futurist (in his 1980 book, The Third Wave), accurately foresaw the shift from an Industrial to an Information Age that would favor customization over standardization, decentralized over centralized authority, and small-is-beautiful over bigger-is-better. "He just nailed it, every time," says Jeffrey Eisenach, the president of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a libertarian think tank.

But, that said, prognosticators and would-be prophets are wrong—sometimes disastrously, usually laughably—more often than they are right.

Prophecy is hard. It was believed in the '60s that a War on Poverty might soon succeed—poverty won in the end. The '70s saw a revival of Malthusian fears—predictions of famine and long-term oil shortages, as population outstripped resources. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

People who assumed stormy days ahead in geopolitics have found some sunshine instead. Anyone who counted on improving human nature in hopes of improving society has seen those hopes dashed. The successful prognosticators, the few of them, have relied on artful extrapolations of existing trends, or on deep insight into the dynamics of things—or on dumb luck. But, of course, luck comes and goes, deep insight is rare, and extrapolations don't always work.

Predictions, in other words, aren't really about the future at all, but about the present. Some soothsayers look at the time in which they write and figure the future has to be better. Bellamy's vision of a socially harmonious 2000 was a reaction against the rude industrialization and labor strife of his day.

Truly foretelling the future, after all, requires something more than peering into the distance; it takes seeing around corners, too. Often it's the changes that no one can foresee—in technology, in social habits, and from cataclysmic events—that tend to alter things beyond recognition.

What chance do we have of foretelling the future, when we don't even have a clue about what's happening now? Why is crime down? Why are teen births on the wane? Experts haven't the foggiest. So the politicians are free to say whatever they like (and they do).

Even the simplest of demographic extrapolations are tricky to get right. What could be easier than predicting the nation's population a couple of decades ahead, given that most of the people who'll be living then are already alive? But census projections are notoriously inaccurate. In 1964, Hans H. Landsberg of Resources for the Future predicted that the U.S. population would reach 331 million by 2000. In 1967, the Census Bureau projected a population of 282.6 million to 361.4 million, a range that rested on different assumptions about immigration restrictions, abortion laws, and such social customs as the spacing of children. Latest census estimates put the U.S. population at 273.6 million.

Indeed, demographic studies and forecasts get fowled up all the time. One obvious reason for this is the likelihood of errors in economic projections; a modest misjudgment in the rate of growth in gross national product—which drives so many other projections—can yield huge errors in analytical conclusions. Another obvious, though often overlooked, problem is often at work: When forecasts carry implications for policy everybody has a stake in a certain outcome. Which is not to say that anyone would falsify or torture the figures, but it does increase the likelihood that the researcher brings to it a set of assumptions which helps him to contemplate a set of competing, equally plausible options and to choose among them. And this sort of error plagues a great many empirical studies that are policy driven or that are designed to help formulate/inform public policy.

Of course, none of this matters. The predictions won’t stop coming down the pipe, the valueless empirical studies shall continue to be undertaken and commissioned—often at public expense, and I shall continue to be irked by it all. Sigh.

Well, I predict I shall be annoyed near the brink of insanity and will, eventually, be driven to kill... oh, joyous thoughts.

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