Forecasts in Hindsight

The May-June 2009 issue of THE FUTURIST is on the way to subscribers soon from the World Future Society. Here's a sneak peak at the Future View editorial:

Forecasts in HindsightBy Cynthia G. Wagner

Every now and then, we at THE FUTURIST are asked to look back at previous forecasts to see how we did. Many magazines have turned back the clock briefly to recall what topics interested the readers (or at least the editors) 10, 20, 50, or even 100 years ago.

So a curious thing happened when I picked up the May-June 1989 issue of THE FUTURIST to see what we were forecasting then. I had an overwhelming sense of déjà vu.

In the Future View editorial “Tomorrow? Who Cares?” economics professor Thomas Oberhofer wrote of the consequences of short-term focused and greed-driven financial maneuvering by businesses and individuals alike. He attributed this phenomenon to impatience.

“When we are impatient with the little things, it is hard to be patient with the big things,” he wrote. “We see this in many areas of contemporary society. Financial markets in the 1980s have been driven by merger activity and corporate raiding as a means of capturing value. This is in lieu of the old-fashioned way of investing in productive capacity and building a business. Consumers have plunged into debt to enjoy a fling today, often with limited concern for the longer-term consequences of their actions. And the American people have tolerated the creation of massive federal indebtedness and the international erosion of their financial power in the world economy.”

Oberhofer advised economic policies that created incentives for patience and disincentives for immediate gratification, though he noted that implementing and enforcing such policies would require a change in the cultural mind-set.

Looking around the international financial landscape just now, I think I can safely say that cultural mind-sets are very difficult to change: Impatience persists, exacerbated by accelerating change in all directions and by a proliferation of distractions.

Several other topics we covered 20 years ago ring familiar today, too, including the cover story, “Cars That Know Where They’re Going” by Robert L. French, a consultant on vehicular navigation systems. Indeed, as he foresaw, the use of GPS in cars today is widespread.

“Once a sufficient fraction of all cars are equipped with navigation systems,” French predicted, “even unequipped drivers will benefit because traffic will be spread uniformly over the road network.” Unfortunately, this forecast has not quite met with success, though perhaps today’s traffic congestion is not as bad as it could have been without drivers’ ability to better manage their personal routes.

What else was on THE FUTURIST’s mind? Among the other feature articles in the May-June 1989 issue were “Renewable Energy: Power for Tomorrow” by Robert L. San Martin, “Human Factors: The Gap Between Humans and Machines” by Edie Weiner and Arnold Brown, and “A New Era of Activism: Who Will Frame the Agenda?” by Rafael D. Pagán Jr.

Pagán foresaw the impacts of the Information Age creating better-informed and better-connected citizens, who would pursue an active interest in improving public and private institutions. But he warned of fallout from anti-corporate movements: “Leaving the authorship of public policy to activists is irresponsible,” he argued. “Corporations can find a way to retrieve eroded public trust, can be dynamic participants in the debates of our time, and can fairly balance the social contract between themselves and consumers.”

Pagán was clearly optimistic on corporate responsibility, both for self-regulation and for stewardship. “The doctrine of the stewardship of the earth has developed dramatically in the last two decades,” he noted. “Now we are coming to see ourselves as caretakers, and we are holding ourselves responsible for the way we use our resources.… The choice for industry is no longer whether it will be responsible, but how.”

Our World Trends & Forecasts section likewise covered topics that continue to have an impact on our lives and futures, such as family–work balance, investments in children’s health and education, and the phenomenon of “environmental refugees”—entire groups of people forced into migrating due to insurmountable environmental problems. As Hurricane Katrina painfully illustrated, some problems just cannot be planned away, but they can (and must) still be planned for and, if possible, prevented.

And that lesson continues to be the principal subject matter of THE FUTURIST and the World Future Society.

About the Author
Cynthia G. Wagner is managing editor of THE FUTURIST.

For further discussion of financial manias and their causes and impacts, see Chapter 11, “The Past as a Guide to the Future,” of Futuring: The Exploration of the Future by Edward Cornish (WFS, 2004), which may be ordered from Amazon.com.

Back in the old office, back in the day.