Failing to predict the future - 9 January 1998

Of all the prophets and false prophets who assail us in the New Year, there's one who's come through absolutely on the button – the climatologists, who 15 years ago spotted a huge stretch of unusually warm water floating across the central Pacific Ocean. It's the reason why today we New Yorkers are feeling our way through a dense, warm fog, with a cold or a cough or, you may have noticed, a throat.

The phenomenon of a thousand miles of warm surface water first appeared on Christmas Eve off Peru, hence it was dubbed after the Christ Child, El Niño. They predicted then that, at indeterminate intervals – nine, ten, 15 years – this stretch of surface warm water would block the cold, and as far as the fish are concerned, the nutritious water that rises from the ocean bottom, with a result that the Peruvian catch took off hundreds of miles south, to Chile.

But the larger, unknown effect was to be worldwide. Immense droughts in Australasia and Indonesia, steady, heavy rains along the California coast and a remarkably mild winter in the north-eastern United States. And so it was and so again, it is, with Australia suffering huge fires, California's coast drenching and we here in New York City, whose normal average temperature at this time of year is about 20º F, 12 below freezing, have been staggering around in 60º, with warm winds from the south meeting the cold ground, producing dense, city-wide fogs, zero visibility at the airports.

Of all the times of the year, this is the one when professional commentators are expected to come up with a prophecy or two about the immediate future of the world, outside their own bailiwick. I don't know when this custom, when indeed the custom of the professional commentator, columnist, came in. I gather he didn't really emerge until after the First World War and only one journalist I ever knew or heard of paused to wonder, as he put it, how we came to be.

This columnist has been dead nearly 30 years, but he's not likely to be forgotten by anybody who could enjoy watching a man kick the language around as deftly and hilariously as anyone since Mark Twain. Westbrook Pegler was the name. A tall, beetle-browed, straight-backed as a grenadier, Chicago-bred newspaperman, who like many another fine American writer, started out as a sports writer and was one of the best until he did a murderously thorough job of exposing the crooked life of the labour boss of the motion picture unions. He went into the life and professional methods of this boss with so much careful digging that he was able to begin a whole series of reports on the man with the simple firecracker of a sentence, Willie Bioff is a convicted pimp. Period.

Mr Bioff never sued. On his way to gaol he simply complained, I've been Peglerised. But one day Pegler graduated from baseball and the horses and football, to writing funny, downright pieces on anything that crossed his mind and what was crossing his mind during his best days was the folly and wastefulness of politicians, the brutal absurdities of Mussolini, the lunacy of Hitler and the mounting crimes of Joseph Stalin – and that at a time when all the best liberal opinion in the West looked on Hitler as a monster but on Stalin as a stern, but interesting agricultural reformer.

And then, one New Year's Day, the time when the readers most expect you to tell them what's in the wind, Pegler sat down and wrote of all the fantastic fog shapes that have risen off the swamp of confusion since the Great War, the most futile is the deep-thinking, hair-trigger columnist or commentator who knows all the answers just off-hand and can settle great affairs three days or even six days a week. Being one of these myself, I've been trying to figure out how we, myriad-minded us, ever came about.

Well, he looked over, without naming anyone, the current crop of famous commentators and having the privilege of knowing most of them in private life, he decided that we include experts on the budget who can't balance an expense account, economic experts who can't find the 5.15 on a suburban timetable, much less read a balance sheet, labour experts who never did a lick of work in their lives, pundits on the technological age who can't put a fresh ribbon in their own typewriters and resounding authorities on the problems of the farmer who never grew a geranium in a pot. Maybe, he concluded, I shouldn't be writing like this, revealing secrets of the trade and all, but I just got to thinking it over and, honest to God, we are getting plumb ridiculous.

I never knew another journalist, man or woman, who had the simple honesty to confess our frailties, most especially the political columnists who take themselves with a seriousness verging on papal pomp. But there's enough truth in Pegler's confessional to persuade me this time to do no prophesying.

But surely, apart from journalists of many specialties and apart from the proved expertise of the climatologists, this time there must be experts in finance, history, economics, the rise and fall of great nations, internal medicine and so on and so on, of course, and we certainly ought to defer to the best of them in meditating on the immediate future, on what it is likely to happen.

Well sir, two things, one daily habit and one experiment a few years ago, make me sceptical of the experts as much as of anybody. The habit is a thoroughly disreputable habit I got into lately. It sets in sometime in the late afternoon, between the end of the typewriter's clacking and the start of the more charming sound of the tinkle of ice. I turn on a channel that for 24 hours a day covers the markets and after they've closed down spends the rest of the evening interviewing a raft of experts, 30, 40, 50 of them in turn, on what happened today to the market, why and what's likely to happen tomorrow.

I used to be mightily impressed by this stream of expertise, until one day a few weeks ago, I decided to keep tabs on the stuff they were saying, past, present and future and I discovered that 50% of the time, their predictions for tomorrow, never mind next week, next year, were way off. Since you didn't know which 50% to believe, they might have just as well have held their breath. The experiment I mentioned, which only added to my doubts about prophets, professional or amateur, happened in that never-to-be-forgotten high summer of 1991.

I was wakened, hours before my normal time, to rise and shine by a telephone call from my daughter in Vermont and through the fog of some dense dream I heard her say the ludicrous sentence, "Gorbachev's been arrested". I said, don't be silly, Gorbachev is the one who does the arresting. Well as most of you will remember, that was only the first of a series of totally unanticipated shocks.

Unanticipated by whom? That's my point. Not only by you and me but by the most famous experts, the internationally distinguished Kremlinologists. In the following weeks I consulted half a dozen of them, either in person or through their latest writings and I'm talking about true experts, so far as modern scholarship can judge, men who had devoted their lives to the history of the Soviet Union. All I wanted to know was, what happened? Why had Communism, 70 years of a terrible, swift revolutionary system, why had it collapsed in just ten days?

Well none of them, in their writings, in their thoughts before that morning of 19 August 1991, had ever been visited by a suspicion, let alone a theory, that the Soviet system was about to be over. None of them had a clue. There was, so far as I know, only one statesman who was on record as saying that the Communist empire, the actual Soviet Union was about to collapse and we could help the collapse along by going beyond them in their bluster about abolishing nuclear weapons. But to scholars everywhere, that statesman was a dummy. His name was Ronald Reagan.

Mind you, I'm not mocking these Soviet experts. None of us, I dare say, with their history, their scholarship, their devotion to their subject, would have done any better, but tapping them after the event for an explanation and finding them as ignorant and bewildered as you and me, only went to show that about great events, nobody is a prophet until it's happened.

Which brings me to today and to another favourite journalist, I quoted him the other week, Paul Samuelson, on the possibly menacing effect on all of us of the Asian financial slump. I quoted him then because his record of prophecy in economic matters has been remarkable. So you can see how, having declined for once to make any New Year predictions on my own account, I should turn to him in the hope he might bring us appropriate cheer.

And what has he to offer? The rather bleak conclusion that the inability of humans to spot the really important trends and events to come is, as he puts it, routine. What is certainly true, he wrote this week, is that the most important trends and events of 1998 won't have been predicted at all. This was so last year when Asia's economic turmoil surprised everyone. Hardly anyone foresaw the collapse of Communism, the advent of AIDS, the explosion of the internet and the dramatic drops in this country in crime and inflation. Our best seers are regularly humbled.

And so they are. The best thing is to make no guesses, hope for the best, expect the worst and maintain a cheerful expression.

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