When it's wrong to be right

It is a safe prediction that environmental problems will be more severe 20 years from now. Even if we immediately stopped adding greenhouse gases to our atmosphere, what we have already put there will have effects for a long time.

It is also safe to predict that we will continue to learn of ill effects on our health, and the health of other living beings on earth, from the chemicals we are adding to the environment.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1c1d5a9e-bb29-11dd-bc6c-0000779fd18c.html

The vision thing
By Chris Giles
Published: November 25 2008 20:24 | Last updated: November 25 2008 20:24

It has been a bad year for economic forecasters. So bad that royalty wants to know what went wrong. “Why did no one see it coming?” Britain’s Queen Elizabeth asked during a visit to the London School of Economics this month.
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It is a safe prediction – and the only one I shall make – that the topics that grab our attention 20 years from now will differ from those that consume us today and, if anyone has guessed what they are, it is only by accident. The future is unknowable. As Karl Popper observed, to predict the creation of the wheel is to invent it. To anticipate a new political force or economic theory, or even a new product, is to take the main step in bringing it into being.
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Still, you might think there would be large rewards for those who succeed in anticipating these events. You would be wrong. People who worried before 2000 that the “new economy” was a bubble, or warned of the terrorist threat before September 11 2001, or saw that credit expansion was out of control in 2006, were not popular. They were killjoys.

Nor were they popular after these events. If these people had been right, then others had been blind or negligent, and the latter preferred to represent themselves as victims of unforeseeable events. As John Maynard Keynes observed, it is usually better to be conventionally wrong than unconventionally right.