12-11-1999

GOVERNMENT: False Prophets

Televangelists, credit cards, shopping malls, just-in-time inventory,
occupational health and safety, greater personal liberty, financial
independence for women, prosperity for all--oh yes, the year 2000 promised
to be a paradisiacal scene. Or so it appeared to a prescient Edward
Bellamy in his best-selling 1888 novel, Looking Backward: 2000-1887.
Bellamy was a journalist and a utopian socialist from Massachusetts, who
saw the future as he wished it to be. He predicted that ordinary Americans
would


live to age 85 or 90 ("old age approaches many years later and has an
aspect far more benign than in past times," he wrote), and that they
could "look forward to an eventual unification of the world as one
nation."


Well, not yet, but keep checking back.


Jules Verne, too, got a lot of things right. As early as the 1860s, the
world's first modern science fiction author wrote about motorized
carriages fueled by internal gas (that is, hydrogen) combustion, and even
fax machines--"photographic telegraphy [that] permitted transmission
of the facsimile of any form of writing or illustration." He laid out
technical specifications for sending men to the moon that proved eerily
similar--in the escape velocity, the travel time, the shape of the capsule
and its component materials, even the splashdown site--to those of NASA's
first manned lunar flight. The many parallels "will blow you
away," says Graham T.T. Molitor, the vice president and secretary of
the World Future Society.


Given the pace and unpredictability of change in this mad, mad world, in
which even the weather--a closed physical system--is orders of magnitude
too complex for the most powerful computer to comprehend, it is
astonishing that prognosticators ever get anything right. Yet occasionally
they do. Even as George F. Kennan, in 1947, offered his diplomatic
prescription for containing the Soviet Union, he declared that the
emerging superpower "bears within it the seeds of its own
decay." In 1959, science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein wrote
about a high-tech suit of armor that would also add to a soldier's
strength, an idea that U.S. military labs are now pondering. Herman Kahn,
the futurist and nuclear strategist, predicted in 1967 that the year 2000
would see the widespread use of computers, lasers, personal pagers, VCRs,
satellite television, and organ transplants.


The same year, an intellectually august Commission on the Year 2000
published several papers, among them the views of sociologist David
Reisman on the prospect of an unrelentingly competitive society;
anthropologist Margaret Mead on a narrowing of the gap in gender roles;
then-professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan on a mechanism much like vouchers
as a market-based way to help the poor; and law professor Harry Kalven Jr.
on the threat that technology posed to individual privacy. Alvin Toffler,
a best-selling futurist, accurately foresaw (in his 1980 book, The Third
Wave) the shift from an Industrial to an Information Age that would favor
customization over standardization, decentralized over centralized
authority, and small-is-beautiful over bigger-is-better. "He just
nailed it, every time," says Jeffrey A. Eisenach, the president of
the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a libertarian think tank.


But Toffler also predicted the use of paper wedding dresses, and Kahn
expected human hibernation, control of the weather, and possibly the
elimination of arthritis by the century's end. Jules Verne proposed using
a cannon to launch men toward the moon, then wrote an adventure taking
place inside a hollow Earth. Edward Bellamy imagined a blissful socialism
that knew no money, poverty, jails, or social distinctions--in which
lawyers had vanished because, as a character in Looking Backward marvels,
"the world has outgrown lying."


Well, no. Politicians, policy wonks, and prophets who have sought to
foresee the world as the millennium turns have been wrong--often laughably
wrong--much more than they've been right. Whatever happened to the robot
maids, as then-Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Glenn T. Seaborg expected
in the 1960s to see in 2000, or the chic woman's ornamental use of
"live butterflies fluttering around her hairdo," as The New York
Times foretold, or an auto-plane for every adult? Earthlings aren't
exploring in person the limits of the solar system or living underground,
as science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once predicted. Nor have hovercraft
replaced automobiles, as Marshall McLuhan, the author of Understanding
Media, divined. In 1983, Vincent DeVita Jr., the director of the National
Cancer Institute, said that annual cancer deaths could be cut almost in
half by 2000; they've fallen, but by less than 10 percent.


Prophecy is hard. It was believed in the '60s that a War on Poverty might
soon succeed. The '70s saw a revival of Malthusian fears--predictions of
famine and long-term oil shortages, as population outstripped resources.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.


People who assumed stormy days ahead in geopolitics have found some
sunshine instead. Anyone who counted on improving human nature in hopes of
improving society has seen those hopes dashed. The successful
prognosticators, the few of them, have relied on artful extrapolations of
existing trends, or on deep insight into the dynamics of things--or on
dumb luck.


But luck comes and goes, deep insight is rare, and extrapolations don't
always work. Recall country-and-western singer Ray Stevens' 1992 ditty,
"Working for the Japanese," which predicted that soon we'd
"drink nothing but Kawasaki sake and Honda wine and Mitsubishi light
beer."


Predictions, in other words, aren't really about the future at all, but
about the present. Some soothsayers look at the time in which they write
and figure the future has to be better. Bellamy's vision of a socially
harmonious 2000 was a reaction against the rude industrialization and
labor strife of his day. Other foretellers believe little will change but
the faces. In 1968, the president of the Carnegie Corp. of New York, Alan
Pifer, predicted that the year 2000 would see "campus demonstrations
led by militant youngsters whose badge of defiance to the corrupt and
conservative world of their elders (the present student generation) will
be crew cuts." He was right about the crew cuts.


Truly foretelling the future, after all, requires something more than
peering into the distance; it takes seeing around corners, too. For it's
the changes that no one can foresee--in technology, in social habits, and
from cataclysmic events--that tend to alter things beyond
recognition.


Probably that was why, at a conference on the future of warfare hosted by
the Air Force in 1985, the pilots and scientists in attendance found it
"more productive" to hear what science fiction writers had to
say than to rely on academics and hard-headed consultants who try
predicting the future, recounts Joe Haldeman, the author of 15 science
fiction novels. Military strategists, he says, figured to learn more from
an hour of "off-the-wall, unpredictable, blue-sky"
musings--touching on then-outlandish notions, such as computer bugs and
weapons operated from afar--than from a conventional, fact-trapped view of
what the future may hold.


Jeremiahs of the Oil Patch


What chance do we have of foretelling the future, when we don't even have
a clue about what's happening now? Why is crime down? Why are teen births
on the wane? Experts haven't the foggiest. So the politicians are free to
say whatever they like (and they do).


Even the simplest of demographic extrapolations are tricky to get right.
What could be easier than predicting the nation's population a couple of
decades ahead, given that most of the people who'll be living then are
already alive? But census projections are notoriously inaccurate. In 1964,
Hans H. Landsberg of Resources for the Future predicted that the U.S.
population would reach 331 million by 2000. In 1967, the Census Bureau
projected a population of 282.6 million to 361.4 million, a range that
rested on different assumptions about immigration restrictions, abortion
laws, and such social customs as the spacing of children. Latest census
estimates put the U.S. population at 273.6 million.


On demographics, as on most other things, "we get it wrong all the
time," says Irwin M. Stelzer, the director of regulatory studies at
the Hudson Institute. One reason, he says, is the likelihood of errors in
economic projections; a modest misjudgment in the rate of growth in gross
national product--which drives so many other projections--can yield huge
errors in analytical conclusions. And something else is at work: When
forecasts carry implications for policy, "everybody has a stake in a
certain outcome," Stelzer points out. "They don't lie or torture
the figures, but they bring to it a set of assumptions," which helps
them to contemplate a set of competing, equally plausible options and to
choose among them.


Consider, for instance, what happened to expectations about the future of
oil during the turmoil of the 1970s. After the Arab oil embargo and the
Iranian revolution touched off successive oil shocks, it became almost an
article of faith--among oil companies, environmental activists, and
federal energy analysts alike--that oil reserves were in dangerously short
supply and that prices would jump to as high as $100 a barrel and never
return to where they had been before. "The era of `cheap energy' has
ended," Texaco's then-chairman, Maurice F. Granville, penned in 1977,
in an Oil & Gas Journal supplement called "Petroleum/2000."
Electric utilities, calculating (for state regulators' benefit) the value
of a proposed nuclear power plant throughout its presumed life, assumed
that oil would cost $100 a barrel. With a high-falutin' market price in
mind, Exxon spent more than $1 billion on buying oil-shale lands.


James R. Schlesinger, who was Energy Secretary in the Carter
Administration, went so far in 1978 as to present to a House subcommittee
a graph (based on CIA findings) predicting that the free world's demand
for oil would overtake its productive capacity in the early 1980s.
"Unless our nation has planned wisely and well," Schlesinger
warned, "it will face difficulties as severe as anything we have
experienced since the 1930s."


All of this proved to be nonsense, of course. OPEC's power collapsed, the
world is awash in oil, and prices are currently much lower in real
terms--even with the recent run-up--than they were in the late '70s and
early '80s. So why was everyone so wrong? For one thing, "governments
need crises," Stelzer ventured. Oil companies and environmentalists,
each for their own reasons, found solace in high prices.


Even a Republican such as Schlesinger had a hard time seeing a market at
work. "OPEC ministers were known for being very, very arrogant at the
time," Schlesinger recalls, "and we tended to believe them"
when they vowed to keep oil production restrained and prices high.
"This was a different kind of cartel," or so it seemed, in
Schlesinger's account, and oil was considered a different sort of
commodity--a driver of the world's economy, consumed rather than
reprocessed, and fairly impervious to price changes.


Michael C. Lynch, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, offers an explanation he says might be found "in the
`Journal of Abnormal Psychology,' not the `Journal of Energy Economics.'
" The anxiety over the OPEC-induced shortage, he suggests, somehow
turned into a panic over a possible physical shortage.


Such a jump in logic, "in retrospect, [is] hard to explain,"
acknowledges Jay E. Hakes, the chief of the government's Energy
Information Administration, but "when you first look at the data,
[the conclusion] makes a lot of sense." After all, oil resources are
finite, production in the continental United States had been sliding since
1970, no big U.S. fields remained to be found (even in Alaska), and
domestic oil demand had more than doubled every decade since 1945.
Worldwide, oil production capability looked strictly limited, as well as
politically unreliable, as Mideast oil kingdoms bad-mouthed foreign
influences, and bankers worried about recycling petro-dollars.


Besides, pessimism about oil's future was nothing new. "The sky is
always falling," observes Edward D. Porter, the research manager at
the American Petroleum Institute. First, it was whale oil that was being
disastrously depleted because of overhunting. Then the oil seeps in
Pennsylvania threatened to give out, before the first well was drilled in
1859. Late in the 19th century, Pennsylvania officials saw just four or
five years of supply remaining; then came the Spindletop gusher in
Beaumont, Texas, in 1901, and the roughnecks soon ruled the Lone Star
state.


Each time, the prophets of doom failed to count on high prices to curb
demand and to bring forth new supply. "There's nothing new about the
process of innovation--it's been going on ever since the industry got
started," says economist Morris A. Adelman, an MIT professor emeritus
and one of the few oil analysts who declared in the 1970s--to hoots and
hollers--that prices would settle back down and that the harder people
looked for oil, the more they would find. ("Give him a couple of gold
stars," Hakes says now.) "The big question," Adelman
explains, "is who is winning the race between depletion, on one hand,
and knowledge, on the other."


So far, knowledge is. Rising prices carried oil drilling to new and
costlier places, such as the North Sea, the tar sands of Venezuela, and
now the Caspian Sea. Even more crucial has been the role of
technology--some of it serendipitous, much of it a result of oil's
preciousness. "We're getting so much smarter in how to extract
oil," says Paul R. Portney, the president of Resources for the
Future, a nonpartisan Washington think tank on environmental and natural
resource issues. He cites the computer-based 3-D seismic technology, which
has vastly reduced the cost of locating oil; deep-water drilling, such as
in the Gulf of Mexico; and "slant drilling" in several
directions, to recover more oil from a given formation than through a
single, vertical hole. Contrary to the experts' best guesses, says Hakes,
"oil has sort of hung in there."


The Soviet Union Forever


It wasn't only about oil and food that midcentury predictions were almost
universally gloomy--and wrong. When it came to geopolitics, where the
facts are iffier and the ideological blinders are thicker, the
predilection to expect more of the same proved stronger still.


The Cold War was at times alarmingly grim, and a hard realism set in.
Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, during a debate with
Richard M. Nixon in their 1960 campaign, suggested that "10, 15, or
20 nations will have a nuclear capacity" by 1964, up from four.
Herman Kahn wrote in 1967 that as many as 50 nations (including Germany,
Indonesia, Japan, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia) "might have
access" to nuclear weapons by the 1990s. He was off by 42.


The proliferation of nuclear weapons wasn't the only geopolitical fear:
The hostile superpower that already had the bomb looked scarier still.
Even Westerners who might have scoffed at Soviet leader Nikita S.
Khrushchev's 1956 prediction--"We will bury you!"--saw no reason
to anticipate the reverse. The hard-nosed Kahn assumed the Soviet Union
would survive at least until 2000. A fantasy history called The Third
Millennium: A History of the World, AD 2000-3000, published in 1985,
figured on a Soviet Union until 2800 or later. "Having a major world
power vanish from one's life is not a thing you [expect to]
experience," sighs Henry J. Aaron, a venerable economic analyst at
the Brookings Institution.


Except that it was the fantasy that, in the end, proved realistic. Who
knew? Well, Kennan did, for one. Writing as X in Foreign Affairs in 1947,
he described the Soviet Union as essentially fragile, in that the
Kremlin's ruthlessness in suppressing its citizenry was eventually bound
to inflame a popular reaction. If anything disrupted the unity of the
Communist Party, he wrote, "Soviet Russia might be changed overnight
from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of
national societies."


Even as a powerful Soviet Union became an undeniable, shoe-banging fact,
the occasional analyst glimpsed something beyond. "Barring a
war," Robert Conquest, a Soviet historian at the Hoover Institution
on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, wrote in 1960,
"another decade or two may see enormous changes. ...The regime must
evolve or perish." Again and again over the years, he predicted that
the Soviet Union wouldn't last, reasoning that a totalitarian government
was sure to ossify and prevent the economy from changing as needed.
"The situation resembles the Marxist one," he explained in a
recent interview, "of a society with an economy and politics that
don't fit. It was bound to blow up."


Edward N. Luttwak, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies and a self-described "dabbler" in Soviet
matters, began during the 1980s to predict the USSR's demise, but for a
different reason. Born in Transylvania, Luttwak said he became acutely
aware at an early age of "nationality," which became "the
chief engine" of the strung-together empire's disintegration.


The traditional foreign-policy thinkers--the Henry A. Kissingers and the
like, who believe in balances of power and in conventional means of
diplomacy--are by nature ill-equipped to color outside of the lines. Which
raises the most curious case of all: Ronald Reagan. Not only did the 40th
President, unschooled in diplomatic practicalities, call for the downfall
of Communism--he predicted it. In 1982, while speaking before the British
House of Commons, he borrowed Karl Marx's terminology to declare that
democracy "will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of
history." Was he prescient, or merely so naive as to believe that
whatever he wished for would come to pass?


"Ronald Reagan never got caught up in all the complexities,"
says Donald Kagan, a historian at Yale University. "He thought
simply. And when you do think simply about this question, things really
are clear. ...He knew the [Soviet] system was wrong, and that right would
be done. All it took was for us to do our job." Analysts generally
credit Reagan for increasing the strain on the Kremlin by casting the
Soviet Union as the Evil Empire and by upping defense spending by many
billions of dollars that the Soviets felt obliged to match.


In so successfully imagining an unimaginable world, Reagan surely must
have been helped by having been a denizen of Hollywood. Only someone so
agile at creating his own reality would find himself discussing (with
Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, in Reykjavik, Iceland) a world without
nuclear weapons. "Ronald Reagan was an idealist in the classic sense
of the word," Luttwak ventures. "The movie will not end with the
bad guys victorious."


Pollyannas About Poverty


If a prone-to-be-paranoid public is apt to expect the worst about the
excesses of the marketplace or the dynamics of inscrutable superpowers, it
can also show a certain lofty--if misplaced--faith in the possibilities of
human nature.


Recall, for example, some of the expectations about education from the
1960s. Such best sellers as Summerhill School and Education and Ecstasy
pointed to a free-style education that rested on an assumption that
schoolchildren are naturally self-motivated to learn. Optimism about
education wasn't new. Many have touted radio, then television, and most
recently the Internet as instruments to transform the nation's classrooms,
notes Jeffrey Mirel, the director of education studies at Emory
University. "No technology is going to impact knowledge, let alone
wisdom."


An even greater hubris inspired the War on Poverty. "In our
lifetime," President Lyndon B. Johnson told Democratic contributors
in 1964, a few weeks after he had proposed an anti-poverty program to
Congress, "God willing and with your help, we are going to wipe out
poverty in America." That year's annual report by the Council of
Economic Advisers had described the "conquest of poverty" as a
simple matter of arithmetic--an achievement "well within our power.
About $11 billion a year would bring all poor families up to the $3,000
income level we have taken to be the minimum for a decent life." In
1966, anti-poverty czar Sargent Shriver wrote a memo to Charles L.
Schultze, LBJ's budget director, describing "the realistic goal of
ending poverty by 1976." In 1967, economist James Tobin wrote an
article in The New Republic that was headlined: "It Can Be Done!
Conquering Poverty in the U.S. by 1976."


Such optimism was perhaps understandable. Sheldon Danzinger, a professor
at the University of Michigan and an expert on poverty, points out that
World War II had been won, the economy was booming, and Americans put
"great faith" in science and in social science. The War on
Poverty, he recalls, "was really a noble calling." Why be cowed
by the biblical prediction that the poor will always be with us?


Even at the time, though, people close to the problem had their doubts.
"I was in the trenches, and it was discouraging," recalls H.
Ralph Taylor, who had been involved in housing in Somerville, Mass., and
New Haven, Conn., before running LBJ's Model Cities Program from 1966-68.
Part of the problem was too few federal resources, he says, especially
after the escalation in the Vietnam War.


Worse, though, was that urban problems proved more intractable than the
do-gooders imagined, complicated by race and the dark mysteries of human
motivation. The economists' straightforward arithmetic didn't take into
account the disincentives and changes in habit that government programs
may encourage. "In the era of the '60s, and even into the Nixon
Administration, [people] were just generally much more optimistic about
what could be done to deal with these problems by government programs than
is now the case," says Schultze, currently a senior fellow emeritus
at Brookings. The government is pretty good at building highways or at the
bureaucratic task of running Medicare for the elderly, he explains. But,
as has been learned during the past 30 to 40 years, "it's just a hell
of a lot harder...to make major changes in human behavior and to inculcate
knowledge and all of that." Indeed, he adds, "some things you do
may make the problem worse."


This insight has left us sadder about the future, perhaps, but wiser as
well.


Dull Dreams


Or so you'd think. Then why don't foiled forecasters learn from past
mistakes? Colin J. Campbell, a Geneva-based oil consultant, got much
notice as the co-author of a piece in Scientific American last year
predicting that world oil production will peak before 2010. Did Paul
Ehrlich, the gloomy ecologist, feel chastened after he had wagered
$1,000--and lost--in a bet with Julian L. Simon, a University of Maryland
economist, who believed that human ingenuity could make up for any strains
on the Earth's resources? To measure shortage or plenty, they bet in 1980
on whether the prices of five commodities that Ehrlich picked (chrome,
copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten) would rise or fall by 1990. Ten years
later, after the prices of all five had fallen--by more than half
overall--Ehrlich paid off. "The bet doesn't mean anything," he
told a reporter for The New York Times at the time. "Julian Simon is
like the guy who jumps off the Empire State Building and says how great
things are going, so far, as he passes the 10th floor," he added,
contending that the prices might yet rise.


Someday, of course, Ehrlich may yet be proved right, much like the wizened
British officer of lore, perched on a bar stool somewhere, who had been
predicting a major war every year for the past 50: Twice, he had been
correct. Almost anything can happen, and people are wont to apply
something other than their best rational judgment in looking
ahead.


Which is why the mundaneness of our current imaginings seems a trifle
depressing. Americans once dreamed about abolishing poverty and colonizing
space, and preferred big fins on their cars as a reminder of their grand
ambitions. But now, even the science fiction is prosaic. It's
"similar to regular fiction," says author Haldeman, in its
"concern about lives that are static and meaningless and concern
about large institutions that are out of control. ...I see very little
predictions of actual utopia."


Celebration over the impending turn of millennium, which has been pretty
much left to advertisers, has shown precious few signs of becoming a
meaningful event. Not that it should. Paul Boyer, a historian at the
University of Wisconsin who has written a book on biblical prophecy, notes
that the millennial themes of Christianity refer to the span of a
paradisiacal reign, not to any particular starting date. But he also
reports that Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century Calvinist preacher,
speculated in his personal journals that the year 2000 would touch off the
world's seventh--and last--millennial epoch, a time of bliss before
history ends and eternity begins.


Surely that's just another prediction bound to miss its mark.


Burt Solomon

National Journal