Editorial: an analysis of failure

摘要

While clearing up a box containing lecture notes for lectures given over the last 40 years I came across quite a large file on forecasts and forecasting. Many of the collected clippings seem quite surprising in the current climate of opinion e.g. ' "Containers will never catch on" said a leading liner shipowner at Southampton yesterday' (1968). 'Sixty economists for OCL made serious mistakes in estimating future profitability of the proposed service as they assumed the containers would last forever and would never get lost' (around 1970). At the end of the 1960s leading consultants advised the American, French, Italian "and UK governments to build great passenger liners, as the United States were doing, when with the falling demand and the benefit of hindsight we obviously would have suggested the opposite. And of course it wasn't only maritime economists that made mistakes. A University (Polytechnic) memo instructed all courses to contain some liberal studies. It suggested that by 1990 most people would only have to work say one day a week. (In the early 1970s many were convinced that robots would do all the work.) Doctors used to say 'Go to work on an egg' and, in fact, from every branch of science one can list numerous lists of mistakes and false assertions. Even Einstein, we are now assured didn't get it right. Of course much depends on how you define a failure or a wrong assertion. Weather forecasters will blandly assert that they are correct for most of the time, so they must have their own personal definition of correctness.