PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

11. FORECASTING DESTINY
In 1975, as a mechanism to absorb oil shocks, the government halted
the decline in coal mining by a legislative act that fixed production at
125 million tons a year. The act caused a clear deviation from the declining
course of coal production, which lasted nine years. At that time
miners staged the longest strike ever, bringing coal production down.
The fact that the level of production dropped to what it should have
been had it followed the pre-decree trajectory made one wonder whether
renewed high-production levels would portend another incident that
would drastically reduce production levels.
Ten Years Later
In 1992, one month after the first publication of this graph,
the prediction came true. The miners did not stage a new
strike, but the government ordered the closing of 61% of the
country’s mining pits, in a move that would bring production
down to the level of the dotted line in Figure 11.1. The move
created an uproar among mine workers, whose vehement objection
reached the limits of a social revolution. I sent a copy
of my book to then Prime Minister John Major telling him
that what he was trying to do was perfectly natural but that it
was previous governments’ decisions that made his job difficult.
The miners’ opposition cushioned the fall but coal production
did drop, as show the circles in the figure. Two years later
(1994) coal production in the U.K. was close to the dotted line
and five years later (1999) it was even closer to the level of
production that could have been predicted back in 1975, before
any interventions by governments and miners.
The second example concerns oil imports in the United States. Figure
11.2 shows the relationship between imports and total domestic
production. 3 Before the oil crisis of 1969, there was a law that limited
imports to a fixed percentage of the total amount of oil available. As a
consequence we see a flat percentage up to 1969.
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