Looking for Tomorrow (and Tomorrow)

By Frank Trippett

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. --Niels Bohr

Asked to make sense of Pharaoh's dreams about fat and lean cows and plump and withered ears of corn, Joseph took them as signs of coming events. The Book of Genesis records his forecast: "Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt. And there shall arise after them seven years of famine." Pharaoh was so pleased to get a fix on the future that he made Joseph the ruler of Egypt. If Joseph materialized now, politics would make it hard for him to get his old job back, but with his proven foresight he would soon find work.

Today people crave to know what lies ahead at least as much as they did in Pharaoh's time. Probably more. Modern times have created a perpetual bull market in futures. Society spends so much time looking ahead that the present sometimes seems entirely forgotten. Corporations live for the next quarter; ordinary citizens exist to fulfill next summer's vacation budget. Governments at all levels stay mired in hassles over how things will turn out.

All the tools of technology are brought into the effort to see around the distant bend in the river. Thus planning has grown into a full-fledged industry in the 20th century. The trend is striking, but even more impressive is how little mankind has progressed LA its efforts to plumb the future since those days of prophetic dreams.

Still, scarcely a salient public issue

comes up that does not demand at least an effort to read the future. How long will the recession go on? Whither Central America? Will the energy crisis ever come back? Will space become a theater for military action? Society flourishes or languishes by guessing the drift of things. If it had guessed right about consumer trends a few years ago, the auto industry might not be in such a sorry state. But in that industry, as Chrysler's chairman Lee la-cocca put it, "you make a decision and then wait three years to get the stuff kicked out of you." Congress has such a hunger to know coming trends that it requires the President to project budget deficits five years ahead--an exercise to whose futility Ronald Reagan recently attested. Said Reagan: "I have to be honest with you and tell you that while I have to project. . . I don't believe what I'm saying."

Even professional planners are learning (from bruising themselves on the future's impenetrable surface) to put only qualified belief in their own findings. Says Roy Amara, president of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif.: "Anything that you forecast is by definition uncertain." Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM, would surely have agreed, and perhaps not too long after forecasting "I think there is a world market for about five computers." Leon Eplan, ex-president of the American Institute of Planners and now chairman of the city planning department at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says that the planning profession has finally been chastened by the uncertainty of technological change. Says Eplan: "When I started my career, I was predicting 20 years into the future. I never do that any more."

Economic forecasters have taken a conspicuous bloodying in recent years for their habitual failures. They suffer even more than usual difficulty when they work for the Government, according to Rudolph Penner, who was chief economist in the budget office under President Gerald Ford. Says Penner: "One of the great problems is not so much that economists are not good at forecasting but that the politicians insist on very rosy numbers." Indeed, most politicians may secretly agree with David Stockman's private theory about national planning: "None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers."

If looking ahead--planning, predicting--were only a matter of technique, there would doubtless be simple technical explanations for the repetitious failures. But the great uncontrollable element in the human future is just that--its humanity, profoundly quirky and ultimately unpredictable. Energy analysts expecting sustained oil shortages failed to realize that people would start conserving as dramatically as they did. Many marketing forecasters underestimated the buying trends of the 1970s because they assumed prices and income controlled spending. Recalls Robert Gough, senior vice president of Data Resources, Inc. in Lexington, Mass., consumers spent like mad because they expected ever higher prices. Says Gough: "What was missing in our equations was this price expectation phenomenon."

The human factor, above all others, has made the words unintended consequences into a buzz phrase among professional planners. And "unintended consequence" is simply a euphemism for what people actually do with what is given. The carefully planned federal highway system, for instance, was not intended to promote suburban development while draining vitality from the cities--but it accomplished just that. Says Louis Masotti, professor of political science and urban affairs at Northwestern University: "Such unintended consequences go a long way toward explaining the sorry state of cities today."

There is no respectable argument against efforts to plan. The practicality of looking ahead has been more than proved by the results of occasional failures to do so. One useful symbol of inadequate planning might be the S-curve bridge that Chicago had to build when its north Lake Shore Drive failed to end at the same place as its south Lake Shore Drive. Even so, the fact that planning can help does not mean that a constant preoccupation with tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow) is beneficial.

It is not. There are reasons why folklore and religious teachings warn people against giving too much of their attention to the future. Taking too much thought for the morrow can, in fact, insulate a person far too much from the reality of the present--and the real nature of the future. It is not what futurologists make it out to be--some palpable thing rushing toward society, projectile-like, out of the void. "The future is smashing into us so forcefully that it can no longer be ignored," say Edward Cornish and others of the World Future Society in one of their books. They add: "A maelstrom of social change has engulfed the world." If so, what has engulfed the world is not something out of a menacing tomorrow but only yesterday coming to fruition.

Actually, the future does not exist except as a concept, a cosmic wisp of possibility. How people view it can make big differences. What befalls society around the bend in the river will not come hurtling out of space (weather excepted) but will have arisen out of today. "The present," as Philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz put it, "is pregnant with the future." The highest prudence consists not of looking ahead but of giving the best care to the burgeoning and, for better or worse, fruitful moment at hand. --By Frank Trippett

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