Time Essay: Why Forecasters Flubbed the '70s

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First, the forecasters, with no known exceptions, remain human beings; as such, they are subject to the same capricious influences of optimism and pessimism as everyone else. Even the most detached analyst, in the words of Edward Cornish, founder of the World Future Society in Washington, "comes to a choice of a pessimistic or an optimistic scenario." Meanwhile, real events blurt forth utterly indifferent to optimism, pessimism and statistical probability.

Second, the typical forecaster is triumphantly rationalist. This may be an admirable trait, and yet such a mind tends, against all the lessons of history, to exaggerate the importance of rationality as an influence in human behavior.

The rationalist mentality is often too easily enchanted by the sweet orderliness of charts, graphs and logical analysis. Says Economic Planner Rosemary Scanlon of New York: "The danger comes when you believe that these computer print-outs are facts instead of just future possibility."

There is also danger in forgetting that the world and people often go berserk for no good reason at all.

Third, the forecaster, like every human, is thwarted not only by the future's dark density but by a tendency to misread the present. In 1969, for instance, analysts and social observers generally mistook the transient conniptions and rebelliousness of the 1960s for an enduring mood.

Later they found, in the words of Irving Rein, professor of popular culture at Northwestern University, that "the revolution just stopped and one day you opened your eyes and it was like 1956 all over again on college campuses." Economic prophets similarly misconstrued ephemeral quirks of the economic apparatus as fundamental trends.

The simple alternative to such lapses in any decade or time is to look coolly at the present and remember history's most striking lesson: this too shall pass. It is not an easy lesson to keep in mind, particularly when the future, even next week's, will ever remain essentially opaque. It must be, as so many have said, that the seeds of tomorrow are buried in today. But they lie much too deep, and germinate much too subtly, for ordinary eyes — or even computers — to detect all of their potential fruits.' —Frank Trippett