Why Forecasters Flubbed the '70s

By Frank Trippett

The decade just ended left behind a great many fresh reminders of why prophets have always had difficulty winning honor on their own turf. The forecasting about the 1970s turned out to be a pathetic flop. Virulent inflation and an epochal energy crisis are only two of the most ominous realities that eluded the visions of virtually every forecaster. Moreover, the failure was marked by far more than the understandable inability to foresee all the astonishments to come; many, perhaps most, of the positive projections also turned out to be dismally wrong. To mention only one, the twinkle-toed, bell-bottomed, bead-draped, mind-blown, laid-back Consciousness III that Charles Reich saw aborning in The Greening of America (1970) proved to be a huge bag of promises, or threats, or wind, that never quite got delivered.

The 1970s diverged socially, politically and psychologically from the paths and contours that the futurists imagined. Actuality put the lie to most prophecies long before anybody in the U.S. had even heard of the Ayatullah Khomeini or imagined the trouble he would bring. Well before Iran, it was evident that forecasters, including the most respected, had flubbed by failing to foresee the fateful sagging in U.S. productivity, the influx of women into the work force (hence increased dual income), the decline in the birth rate, and the wrenching financial crisis in such cities as New York, Cleveland and Chicago. The 1970s, in other words, flatly disregarded most of the advance billings.

Gross differences between history and human anticipation of it are as old as the practice of prophecy. Most respectable forecasters are already painfully aware of the shortcomings of their art, and little is to be gained by rubbing their noses in the disparities. (For one thing, it might distract them from the job of forecasting the 1980s.) Still, a certain amount of carefully aimed derision is justified in a world increasingly buffeted by overblown future schlock. Most of all, it is useful to try to understand why the predictions about the 1970s so often came to nought.

How would life in the U.S. be if a mere sampling of the 1969 prognostications had been accurate? The economy would be stable, steadily growing, with perhaps a bit of inflation. A superboom in housing would have occurred: a second home would be as ordinary as a second car. Vertical takeoff planes would be much in use. A safe fast-breeder reactor would be perfected. Space-shuttle flights would be regularly scheduled. Anticancer vaccine would be available at the neighborhood clinic. Ugly transmission lines would all be underground. People would be shopping by two-way cable television. Teaching machines would be widely used. Office work would be mostly automated. An electronic control lane for trucks and buses would make passenger cars safer on the highways.

Let us also consider some of the less sanguine projections. The disaffected young would have been rebelliously out front browbeating the Establishment in waves of dissent that would have continued to expand after the 1960s. Widespread religious fervor would have found a channel in a holy crusade against technology. Assassinations would have been frequent. Unrest would have swept through high schools. A grain glut might have triggered an agricultural depression. A breakdown of the cities would have produced chaos beyond anything ever seen before. Some urban areas would have banned the use of gasoline-powered automobiles. Do-it-yourself facelifts would have been on the market.

Admittedly, the end of the 1960s brought forth a few sound intimations about the years that were to follow. The forecasters generally sensed that the world would get by without general war, that the U.S. and Soviet Union would manage greater mutual restraint. A number of observers guessed that American society would move into a hard-to-define period of reflection, a time for "sorting out," as Columnist Joseph Kraft called it. Economists, in any thorough analysis, were not flatly wrong in projecting continued prosperity; there has been that in spite of the discombobulations of recession and soaring prices. But the cumulative forecasts of politicians, sociologists, philosophers, scientists and journalists, including some of those that found their way into this magazine, fell dismally short of even hinting at the actual shape and tone of the society that took form in the '70s. Such was the record that Education Professor Ronald L. Hunt, who designed the nation's first graduate program in futurism at California's San Jose State University, says that the 1980s ought to open the "age of humility" for forecasting.

Why did so many guess so wrong about so much? There are a variety of answers, but disappointingly few illuminating ones from the forecasters. Professional analysts, enamored of their computers and software and printouts, tend to mutter and mumble about technical imperfections in their still young methodology. Many admit that they erred by simply extrapolating from the trends that seemed evident as the '60s decade ended. Translation: they predicted that the present would persist into the future. Says Boris Pushkarev, vice president of New York's Regional Plan Association: "It's easy to continue trend lines. It's hard to predict changes in trends." Translation: it is hard to know what is going to happen. The '70s were especially hard, according to Peter Schwartz, head of S.R.I, (formerly Stanford Research Institute) International Futures Group, because they featured so many "low probability events." Translation: forecasters, just like ordinary people, are finding out that life is full of surprises.

There are bound to be more satisfying and fundamental explanations for the recurring shortcomings of forecasting and prophecy. In fact, there are three distinct reasons, among which the interplay is intimate and intricate.

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

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