(Roughly) Daily

For as long as there have been markets, there have been those who forecast them. Bob Seawright explains why, for all of that “practice,” forecasting is never– and never can be– a precise nor “perfect” pursuit…

… On our best days, wearing the right sort of spectacles, squinting and tilting our heads just so, we can be observant, efficient, loyal, assertive truth-tellers. However, on most days, all too much of the time, we’re delusional, lazy, partisan, arrogant confabulators. It’s an unfortunate reality, but reality nonetheless.

But that’s hardly the whole story.

We are our own worst enemy, but there are other enemies, too. Despite our best efforts to make it predicable and manageable, and even if we were great forecasters, the world is too immensely complex, chaotic, and chance-ridden for us to do it well…

Eminently worth reading in full for Seawright’s accounts of human nature, complexity, chaos, and chance– and of the ways in which they make confident predictions of the future a “Fool’s Errand.”

As Niels Bohr once said (paraphrasing a Danish proverb), “it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”

(Image above: source)

* John Kenneth Galbraith

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As we seek clarity, not certainty, we might recall that it was on this date in 1983 that Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me with Science” reached #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.