“Events my dear boy, events.”
- British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s response to a query about the most difficult aspect of governing.

“A week is a long time in politics.”
- British Prime Minister Harold Wilson

Admit it. You have experienced this emotion. You desire something more when you know that you cannot have it. It appears that the desire to know the future is not unlike this craving. Although many people intuitively seem to know that the future cannot be predicted, humans still seem hardwired to want to know the future. Business spends huge amounts annually for consultants and futurists to inform them about the future. They do this despite the fact that these experts for the most part are not held accountable for their forecasts and, if monitored, these forecasts would prove wrong more often than not.

As the foregoing quotes suggest, politics is inherently unpredictable. Yet political parties and the media spend millions on polling. There are no guarantees that these polls will be accurate. A lot depends on how the surveys are worded, when and where they are conducted and to whom the questions are addressed. And there have been some famous polling errors: the erroneous predicted defeat of Harry Truman at the hands of Thomas Dewey and the incorrect prediction of a Labour Party victory in the 1992 British Parliamentary election.

David K. Foot is a well known Canadian demographer and futurist. His ideas do not always deal specifically with politics, but his ideas are relevant for public policy development. The success of his book “Boom, Bust And Echo” should not be surprising. In a way, it is very seductive: it has highly appealing and easily understood arguments and is promoted by an author with prestigious credentials. Most titillating is his assertion that demographics explain about two-thirds of everything. If demographics explain two-thirds of everything, then one assumes that those business people and politicians who master this subject will profit immensely by anticipating future needs and wants.

And yet if his ideas were tracked now, they would be a huge embarrassment. Clearly, the most significant event after the publication “Boom, Bust & Echo” has been the global recession of 2008-2009. The recession has ravaged economies around the world, destroying jobs, financial institutions, industries, dreams of home ownership, pensions and crippling David Foot’s theories in the process. Boomers are not going to be spending lavishly on quality products and services because they no longer have money and secure pensions.

The Black Swan event is a concept that both Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson would have understood. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book “The Black Swan” is critical of society’s tendency to place too much trust in so called experts. The Black Swan idea refers to an old western misconception that all swans are white, a view that was later refuted by the discovery of Black Swans. We tend to be blind to the randomness in the world, and rare and improbable events in fact occur more frequently than we think. The terrorist attacks on September 11th and this current recession are just two examples of how reality is more complicated and unpredictable than we think. These two former British Prime Ministers might have been surprised by the scope of this recession, but they would not have been surprised that no one had predicted it.

If you want to find truly accurate forecasts, you must travel back to the dark ancient recesses of history where true wisdom resided. Nostradamus is one of only a few oracles whose predictions have been proven to possess uncanny accuracy. I challenge anyone to find more accurate predictions. For example, he foresaw the Presidency of George W. Bush: “In the southern kingdom, the king’s son, born dumb and blind, will too ascend the throne…” and he foretold the leadership of Stephane Dion: “…in the northern regions, the village idiot will fail to overthrow a hard arse king.” Okay, okay, I am joking. But you get the picture. We can’t predict the future, but at the same time we find the subject immensely fascinating and highly addictive.

In a forthcoming post, I will examine the theories of a famous psychologist as they relate to politics, which promise to be, if not more accurate, far more seductive than polling and demographics.

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Tags: canadian political forecasting, harold macmillan, harold wilson

This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Federal Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.