PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

11. FORECASTING DESTINY
first century. The problems do not seem to lie with physical resources
but rather with international cooperation, an area where decision makers
could be more effective.
Most energy forecasters today focus on the technological side of the
energy picture. They are trying to find in technology all causes, effects,
and solutions. Marchetti strove to redress the balance a little by overstressing
the importance of the frame. He summarized his advice in a
warning: “Don’t forget the system, the system will not forget you.”
The French have a delightful fable written by La Fontaine about a
busy fly which buzzes around the horses pulling a heavy carriage up a
hill. Once at the top, the fly feels exhausted but self-satisfied with her
good work. This fable seems to apply to much of the behavior of decision
makers. One wonders how many “burdensome decisions” had to be
made during the last 150 years to keep the market shares of primary
energy sources so close to the straight lines of Figure 7.6. 9
LITTLE CHOICE
Predictability of a system’s behavior implies a certain amount of predetermination,
which is a taboo in Western society, particularly among
forceful, strong-willed individuals of the kind typically encountered in a
dynamic company’s marketing department. These people like to plan
out the future in long, heated discussions in which forecasts are heavily
influenced by the strongest personality present. Marketers are people
with enthusiasm; their scenarios of the future are often biased toward
flattering their egos with notions of possessing the power of free will.
My experience is that marketers’ long-term forecasts also tend to be
systematically biased in favor of their new products and against the old
ones. In general they fail to pay adequate attention to the natural progression
of well-established processes such as substitutions, phasing-ins,
and phasing-outs.
My first frustrating experience with marketers was when I confronted
them with notions stemming from observations of stability in
the automotive industry; for example, that innovative gadgets and price
wars have little impact on car buyers, as can be evidenced by the very
smooth growth of car populations. (The number of cars in use in the
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