Forecasting the Future Takes a Little Horse Sense

My belief that the future cannot be foreseen ranks in public acceptance with my insistence that 1990 is not the first year of this century’s last decade, but the last year of its ninth decade.

From the avalanche of year-end newspaper stories, ads and television bits welcoming this as the last decade I concede that the public perception will prevail over the simple mathematical facts, and the turn of the century will be celebrated--one year early--on Jan. 1, 2000.

Meanwhile, readers continue to challenge my dogmatic argument that the future is not foreseeable.

Alexander Weir Jr. of Playa del Rey predicts, for example, that the weather tomorrow will be the same as it is today. His point is that if he makes that same prediction every day of the year, by year’s end he will have been right more often than wrong.

Given the equability of our climate, that is hardly different from calling pennies heads or tails. One is bound to be right about half the time.

Willard Olney of Hesperia argues that it’s a question of semantics (as almost every argument turns out to be). He explains: “Pat predicts it will rain. Mike predicts snow. It rains. Who predicted the future? Both did. Pat predicted correctly, but both predicted.”

Olney seems to be saying that a prediction is a prediction, whether it turns out to be right or wrong.

True. I predicted last July that Michael Dukakis would win the presidential election. The day before the election, I predicted that George Bush would win. Both were predictions. But only one was right.

“I conclude,” Olney says, “that everyone predicts the future all the time, and those who do it well enjoy the most success.”

As any gambler can tell you.

Perhaps I should change my rule to say simply that there are no sure things. My prediction on the day before the election that Bush would win was no sure thing, even though the polls made it look a certainty. Bush might have died of a heart attack. He might have been assassinated. The Soviets might have nuked Washington. (None of our think tank seers foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.)

The possibility that Bush might have died on the eve of the election raises, in retrospect, an ominous question.

Suppose the majority had voted for Bush anyway, the momentum being hard to stop. Would that have meant Dan Quayle was automatically elected President?

If we recognized that we cannot see into the future, we would be spared a lot of fatuous remarks. Journalist Lincoln Steffens, for example, is supposed to have said, after a visit to Bolshevik Russia, “I have been over into the future, and it works.” (Mr. Steffens thought so highly of this remark that he put it into his autobiography.)

Anatole France was closer to the mark when he called the future a time that “is hidden even from those who make it.”

James R. Gallagher of Huntington Beach says I am wrong about psychics and sends me a flyer for a $49 class in parapsychology and extrasensory perception at Orange Coast College.

It says, “Please bring a paper and pen.” I’m glad they haven’t entirely neglected the basics.

Meanwhile, I have a letter from Bill Campbell of Glendale that seems to define the future as the inevitable result of the present.

“I don’t know who said it,” he says, “but it seems apropos: ‘Southern California, the sun shines, nothing ever happens, then all of a sudden . . . you’re 60.’ ”

That reminds me of another bit of wisdom whose author I don’t know: “Life is something that happens to you while you’re thinking of something else.”

But Dean W. Terlinden of Long Beach offers a parable suggesting a view of the future that is optimistic:

“A man sentenced to death made a proposition to the king in return for his life. The king had a favorite white horse that he worshiped. The man promised he would teach the horse to fly within a month and at that time (if indeed the horse flew), the king would be obliged to set the man free.

The man figured, quite correctly, ‘Within a month the king may die, the horse may die, or I may die; but best of all--the horse may learn to fly.’ ”