Isn’t it interesting and enlightening to consider what people once thought the future would be like? Popular Mechanics has (or had) a feature in the magazine showing an excerpt from an old issue with visions of the future. This video shows a 1960’s vision for what the home kitchen would look like in only a few decades.
But what about all of these economic forecasts? Putting Wall Street aside, how well have our public forecasters done? The government publishes and announces all kind of forecasts at pretty much every strata. We have economic forecasts for employment, commodity prices (a year ago or so I read a military report on energy prices featuring 20 year oil price forecasts!); binary policy forecasts (Saddam Hussein has WMD); related temporal forecasts (an event will happen by a certain date); there’s just a surfeit of government and policy forecasts. There is not, to my knowledge, any database of these predictions.
If anyone has any interest in working on a project like this, let me know!