Predicting the future

Developments tomorrow and the day after are more certain than is often assumed

As soon as you mention the word ‘forecasting’, someone cracks a weak joke about crystal balls. Next, you have to endure a slide show about the future. The speaker begins by deriding past forecasts, saying each has turned out hopelessly wrong. His list of mistakes includes

‘Everything that can be invented has been invented’ – the head of the US Patents Commission, Charles Duell, 1899
‘I think there is a world market for maybe five computers’ – the man who built up IBM, Thomas Watson, 1943
‘640K [of computer memory] ought to be enough for anybody’ – Bill Gates, 1981.

In fact, that’s all fake news. There’s no evidence that Duell, Watson or Gates said any of this.

No matter. Not knowing that Oscar Wilde got there first (An Ideal husband, 1895), the presenter warns you to expect the unexpected. You’re naïve, he says; by contrast, the presenter has seen through the arrogance of forecasters before.

Yet in fact the future isn’t as uncertain as cynics make out. We can be absolutely sure, for instance, that the next talk about forecasting will begin with the revelation that the pace of change is on the increase, and with the subtle admonition that only the speaker has kept up.

It’s also pretty certain that, if you’re reading this on a Monday, tomorrow will be a Tuesday.

Anyway, simple and unimpeachable tools for forecasting exist. If professionals in public finance, say, search Amazon for ‘public finance’, and go on to sort the resulting titles by publication date, they’ll find that R Craig Wood and David J Thompson’s tome Financing Public and Private Education will be on sale in November 2019, and that the fourth edition of Terence Dwyer’s seminal Taxation: the lost history will be on sale in March 2020. There’ll likely be press launches, a few reviews and some debate about these books when they emerge; so all that can be prepared for now.

Or search Wikipedia for ‘2019’. There’s comprehensive coverage of the sports fixtures, technological developments and other scheduled events (arts, politics) that are more or less bound to happen next year. Then search Wiki for ‘1919’ or ‘1969’, and suggestive cultural anniversaries come into view.

Assemble all these known facts into a kind of mosaic, and one can easily tap into part of tomorrow’s zeitgeist.

Quite a lot of the future is a safe bet. For instance: if you elect to forecast something today, you know already that sneers will follow. Yet if predicting the future is widely regarded as a futile exercise, demand for such predictions is up – because everyone sees the years to come as more and more uncertain.

That’s a paradox. However, topical paradoxes are a useful point of departure for analysing future trends. Take once again the future of forecasting. There it’s right to begin by asking why, nowadays, forecasting is so much wanted, yet so much ridiculed.

From the CIA’s inability to predict the end of the Cold War, to the failure to anticipate Grenfell and a second fire at Glasgow School of Art, the Great Forecasting Blunders of Our Time have encouraged scepticism, the force of which must be understood if forecasting is to move forward.

Successive Governments, too, have inadvertently reinforced that scepticism. From Labour’s 2007 calibration of UK obesity in 2050 to the Treasury’s 2016 claim that, 15 years after Brexit, each British household would lose £4300 in GDP, government infatuation with forecasting-based ‘evidence’ has discredited my profession.

For 30 years forecasting has had a bad rap. Done right, however, it can inspire a sense of agency in a world of impotence.

To say that nobody can predict the future has become as much a dogma as to say that nobody has a monopoly on the truth. Now is a time not to despair about predicting the future, but to get more serious about it.