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Prediction Track Record

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 2 months ago

DEJA VU - Perils of Prediction

By CYNTHIA CROSSEN WSJ 1/08/2007

(Seeing Rubber Cities) (And an End to Cars)

 

 

If you are tempted to make predictions about the future at this time of year, consider keeping them to yourselves. History can so easily make a fool of you.

 

All of the predictions below, made in the past century, appeared in reputable newspapers or magazines. A few -- very few -- turned out to be remarkably prescient, such as one made by Maj. Gen. George O. Squier in 1911: "The time will surely come," he said, "when the methods of electrical intercommunication will have been so developed and multiplied that the people of the world's different countries may become real neighbors."

 

That same year, Richard Lucas of the Royal College of Surgeons in England made the unlikely prediction that some day human beings in the future would become one-toed. "The small toes are being used less and less as time goes on," he opined, "while the great toe is developing in an astonishing manner." In 1929, a New York City haberdasher, John David, predicted that "the well-dressed man of 2020 will wear shorts for every occasion except formal events."

 

Jean Guthrie, associate editor of Better Homes and Gardens, said in 1942 that the housewife of the future would know how to repair radios, irons, lamps, washing machines and cars.

 

It's easy to make fun of dreamers -- and, who knows, one or two might still turn out to be right. You have to give credit to those who dare to guess how the world might look a decade, or even a century, later. In 1925, nobody fell on the floor laughing -- at least not publicly -- when Harvey W. Corbett of the American Institute of Architects said, "Fifty years hence automobile traffic will have entirely disappeared from the surface thoroughfares of New York City, and people will be shot through tubes like merchandise."

 

Transportation has provided especially fertile ground for the wrongheaded. "The giant airplane of 300- to 400-passenger capacity, while technically possible," wrote a U.S. aviation official in 1944, "appears to offer little economic advantage and to involve a great sacrifice of convenience for the traveler, owing to the inevitable reduction in scheduling frequency which results from using such large units."

 

Ten years earlier, Charles F. Kettering, vice president of General Motors, had said, "It is not difficult to envision that in the future, the entire system of aerial transportation will be unaffected by fog and weather conditions in general."

 

Hybrid automobile-airplanes, according to Bill Stout, research director of the Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corp. in 1943, "will fly through the air and then fold their wings like a housefly and run along the road."

 

Predictions are almost invariably tinged with wishful thinking. In 1914, Sir Henry Blake, a British government official, foresaw the noiseless city, where rubber would replace brick, stone and asphalt as street paving. That would be helpful in the utopia imagined by Prof. D. F. Fraser-Harris, who in 1946 predicted that in the future, "The right of all adult persons whatsoever to eight hours per night of tranquil repose will be admitted as inalienable as their right to exist."

 

Those happy snoozers might live in the house described by John Sutherland, dean of the Boston University School of Medicine in 1912: It will be "equipped with electrical apparatus which will, without the inmates knowing it, keep them constantly charged with electricity, thereby warding off many of the ills and aches that flesh has hitherto been heir to."

 

Perhaps most of all, prophets have been optimistic about the future of war -- or the absence thereof. In 1911, an English clergyman, William Henry Fitchett, suggested, "There will, in the near future, be a revolt, both of the reason and the conscience of the civilized world, from the state of armed peace which at present prevails, with its ever-multiplying fleets of Dreadnoughts and its universal training for war. The appliances for war have grown to such a scale that war itself will be recognized as impossible."

 

Business executives tend to stick to short-term predictions, but James Lewis Kraft, the cheese maven wrote in 1925, "I do not suppose anyone else ever planned a cheese business to live through the ages. After we are gone, there will be Kraft salesmen trekking the veldt of Africa, braving the snows of Siberia and battling the superstitions of Mongolia -- all earnestly striving to increase sales."

 

So, who can best guide us into the future?

 

In 1937, Hadley Cantril, a psychology professor at Princeton University, studied the relative prophetic ability of various types of people. He sent a questionnaire asking for predictions about world affairs to several hundred people, divided into social and professional groups: bankers, editors, lawyers, public-relations counsel, Communists, historians, economists, social psychologists and laymen.

 

Only one prediction could be checked against events -- whether Congress would let President Roosevelt reorganize the Supreme Court -- and the majority got it wrong.

 

But Dr. Cantril also found some interesting comparisons among categories of people. The two groups who were most confident that their predictions were correct were the bankers and the Communists. Their predictions, however, "were generally opposed."

• Email me at Cynthia.Crossen@wsj.com.

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