The Future Just Ain't What it Used to Be

One of the 20th century's quickest minds, John Kenneth Galbraith, perfectly captured our latest 21st century mess. "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable....!"

At the moment -- and this financial mess is a moment-to-moment skydive -- our best-and-brightest forecasters seem divided into three triumphant legions. Those who predict Obama's boldness will be our answer....those who predict his boldness will be our disaster....those who make a living by turning such predictions into late-night humor, hot-off-the-press revelations, or, best-of-all for their ego, regularly scheduled cable & blogging rants.

If we shift for a moment from economic forecasting to end-of-life forecasting, some interesting things emerge. At least at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Here Dr. Andrea Phelps tracked the ways terminally ill religious and non-religious patients responded to their treatment options. As reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, religious patients were considerably more willing to undergo intensive (and unpleasant) medical interventions to prolong life than the non-religious ones.

The question that occurred to her medical teams was: Isn't this a contradiction? If one believes in a god and an afterlife, wouldn't the logical prediction be they would be more willing to meet their maker than the atheist?

A pause here.....! Perhaps the real contradiction is in having solvent economists and healthy doctors presume they can predict how out-of-work families and out-of-time patients really feel.

Making any prediction is hard. Especially about the future. Lets face it folks, the future just ain't what it used to be. Which is what anthropologist Margaret Mead meant when she wrote: "No man will ever again die in the same world into which he was born."

Which brings us back to those economic and medical forecasters we pay so much attention to. In today's highly statisticalized age, these have become the GPS oracles of our lives. From the morning weather forecast to the daily NYSE update to the quarterly company report to the annual State of the Union Address to the end-of-life hospice team, we have become a society that waits to hear what the "expert" has to say before we live our day. And yet, didn't old Mark Twain remind us, "Experts should be on tap, never on top!"

The next time our potion of ignorance and fear whets our appetite for an expert -- whether it's about the state of our economy, the state of our health, or the state of our faith -- it might be good to remember the only future they can predict with much certainty is theirs not ours. And when you think about it, rarely with any certainty about theirs either. Because, you see in the final measure, the future is almost always a map we each chart and travel ourselves....