Shorten Your Horizons

Humans are fantastically short sighted, yet we think we are ingenious by virtue of our capacity to reason. It has always struck me that, while the horizon appears to be in the remote distance -- many people reasonably assume that we can see for hundreds of miles -- it is in fact seldom more than a few miles away.

Most people expected the Soviet Union to have decades of life left, and then it collapsed overnight. Almost no one saw the recession coming, nor will they predict the next one. Few, in those glorious years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, foresaw the carnage of the twentieth century. Almost no one, several years ago, saw the coming rise of right-wing populism. If anything, the ascendance of the left seemed inevitable. And as everyone keeps repeating, almost no one, even on the nights of the elections, saw Brexit or Trump.

In today's Times Oliver Kamm has a column reassuring us that there is a reliability in economic forecasts. I always read Kamm as he's someone with whom I seem to disagree with on nearly every issue, but whose writing I find useful and well thought out. I won't pretend I have even the slightest comprehension of economics as a discipline, but from I understand Kamm's column seems to simply say that uncertainty forebodes economic problems. Well, yes. But the smallest and most unexpected thing can set off uncertainty. It is often irrational, entirely a result of fear, and is the furthest thing from a science. The mere publication of forecasts showing economic downturn seems to be enough to cause economic downturn (the immediate fall of the pound following the 2016 referendum being what immediately comes to mind).

I suspect that if a few hundred influential economists were to write down a set of predictions for the state of the economy in a year's time, seal it in an envelope, then open it a year later, most would be considerably mistaken.

One might have more luck simply betting against other people's predictions. Man is more often wrong than he is right. He is too optimistic a creature, too proud to admit folly, too stubborn to admit doubts, content to either wish for an ideal future or else for a dystopia which will fulfil all the prophecies he has espoused and believed up until then.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take though for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

There is only one far-reaching prediction that is true: in the end we are all dust, swept away by an unsympathetic universe. I am inclined to believe there is a God, and therefore an afterlife, so this is not too dreadful a thought for me. But even an atheist is surely comforted -- perhaps more so than the believer who faces the prospect of eternal justice -- by the certainty of eventual nothingness.