I predict predictions will be wrong.

So it's August and oil has soared to yet another record high. Expect it to hit $200 a barrel soon.

Or at least, that was what experts told us a couple of months ago. Then the price dropped. And dropped some more.

Huh. Who predicted that?

Well, a couple of months ago I wrote that "the experts have been wrong before. They may be wrong again." So you could say I predicted it, although what I really predicted was that the predictions could be wrong. And that's about the safest prediction anyone can make.

We are bad at predictions. All of us. Laypeople are clueless, not surprisingly. But experts are no better.

Over the course of 20 years, Philip Tetlock, a University of California psychologist, followed the prognostications of esteemed political scientists, economists, journalists and others whose work involved "commenting or offering advice on political or economic trends." In all, Tetlock's experts made 82,361 predictions. They were appallingly inaccurate. Tetlock discovered a flipped coin would have done better.

Collecting predictions is something of a hobby of mine and, inevitably, the accurate predictions in my files are vastly outnumbered by the howling mistakes.

One of the most famous bad calls came from a writer named Norman Angell. In 1910, Angell published The Great Illusion, a popular book that argued Europe's economies were so interconnected, war between the Great Powers was impossible. Four years later, the First World War erupted.

Angell is rarely mentioned today for any reason but mockery. It's important, however, to remember that Angell's thesis was "the most conventional of wisdoms," as historian John Keegan puts it. As late as the summer of 1914, when the march to war was visibly accelerating, H.N. Brailsford declared "there will be no more wars among the six great powers." And in September 1914 -- a month after war had broken out -- The Economist insisted on "the economic and financial impossibility of carrying out hostilities many more months on the present scale."
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So Norman Angell's failed prediction isn't merely an example of an expert getting a vital issue very wrong. It's an example of an entire generation of experts getting a vital issue very wrong. That's much more sobering.

It's also an example of an optimistic prediction turning sour, but pessimistic predictions have no better track record. Think Y2K.

And yet, pessimistic predictions -- some spanning decades and centuries -- are so popular they are practically a publishing genre in themselves. The king of catastrophe is James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, who foresees "an abyss of economic and political disorder on a scale that no one has ever seen before."

Of course, Kunstler said much the same about Y2K but that doesn't dampen the enthusiasm of his many fans.

Why people put such stock in predictions is baffling to me. Philip Tetlock's research conclusively demonstrated the inaccuracy of even the simple, near-term predictions of experts. So why would anyone expect writers to be more accurate when they cobble together elaborate scenarios set decades in the future?

Try a simple thought experiment. Imagine it's 1935.

You're recently married. You have decided you will only have children if the world they grow up in will be safe and prosperous. So how do things look?

Bloody awful. Over the previous 20 years, the most terrible war in history was followed by the rise of totalitarianism. Right now, the world is mired in the Great Depression and lots of smart people think liberal democracy won't survive.

So you wait a decade. And what a decade it was. An even more terrible war brought the Holocaust and the atom bomb. H.G. Wells now says "the end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded." Who wants to bring children into this?
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So you wait another decade. Now the world is in the grips of a Cold War that threatens to extinguish civilization. And lots of experts are sure it will. "War has been following war in an ascending order of intensity," writes the renowned historian Arnold Toynbee, "and today it is already apparent that the war of 1939-1945 was not the climax of this crescendo movement." In one of the most famous books of the era, The Vital Center, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. summed up the mood as "tense, uncertain, adrift. We look upon our epoch as a time of troubles, an age of anxiety."

So you get a dog.

But here's the funny thing: Babies born during the Great Depression or the first half of the post-war baby boom turned out to be the luckiest in world history. The Third World War never came. Instead, there was prosperity so great no previous generation could have imagined it.

Shouldn't you have predicted that? No. Almost no one foresaw all that good fortune. But you should have predicted that the future would be unpredictable. And you should have rolled the dice.

Writing in a recent issue of The National Interest, esteemed economist Jeffrey Sachs has some interesting predictions about our future. It is possible there will be "rapid and equalizing economic growth," Sachs wrote. It is also possible there will be "regional and global instability and conflict." It all depends. "Will our era be a time of wondrous advances, based on our unprecedented scientific and technological know-how, or will we succumb to a nightmare of spreading violence and conflict?"

It could be good. Or it could be bad. Time will tell.

Now that's a wise prediction.

You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

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