Innovation in Software

We can all remember the futurology clips from the 1960s suggesting we’d all have hover-cars and silver jump-suits by now, so it surprises me that newspapers still try and predict the future. I definitely expected more from The Independent

What they fail to appreciate is:

• The forecasts have always been wrong in the past. There is no reason to be confident they will be right in the future. Not just immigration figures, but shifts in employment, prosperity, house prices, interest rates (which are managed by the central banks!), share prices, the weather tomorrow…
• They’re not taking into account movement in the opposite direction. Yes, your parents’ house in the South of France or Spain is considered immigration by the French.
• We actually need to get to 75 million in the UK by 2030 to keep the state pension system working as it does today, but they ignore that because it doesn’t fit the political agenda de jour.

I’m a liberal (in the European sense of the word), and I find the “Immigration is always bad” argument morally repugnant, but that’s not what I want to focus on in this article. Rather, I’m interested in how mainstream media goes about handling forward forecasts. They typically:

• Don’t ask questions about whether forecasted figures are accurate, or how they could be accurate
• Don’t ask questions about whether figures are representative of the complete picture, or even what “complete” means
• Don’t ask questions about what the forecast actually means in real terms beyond the gut reaction

In short, they’re terrible at understanding possible future outcomes and analysing them. If they were working in the technology industry they would instead know:

• Forecasting is inaccurate
• We never have full sets of data
• We can’t really know what it means until we get there

That would however make for lousy newspaper copy. “Immigration may or may not be a bad thing, or a good thing, depending on what actually happens” is not as catchy as “Immigration out of control”.

How do we educate politicians, journalists and the public about how best to deal with these figures though? This industry is about as good as it gets with future forecasting (although we struggle to see paradigm shifts and anything > 3 years out), so is there anything we can share that others might learn from?

[UPDATE]: Comments like the one I’ve approved below have started coming in. Hmph.

I know from past experience that whenever you talk about immigration, a bunch of BNP/nationalist nutjobs (who are very clued up as to how to find and comment on blogs that even lightly touch on the subject) tend to pass by and start making silly statements. I’ve let this one through to demonstrate my point – whilst glancing on racism in a way the author probably hoped I wouldn’t notice, it’s not as bad as others – but let me please, please stress: I’m not having a debate about immigration here, I’m discussing how the media handles forecasting in general. Immigration is the story today, but I’m talking about a trend that applies to everything from viral epidemics to what the weather will look like next week.

Please do not add comments of the “but we’re going to run out of space” or “the schools will collapse” vein here – they simply won’t get approved, as they’re not relevant to what I’m really talking about above. Making vague statements about “ethnicity” is likely to just make me think you’re an idiot.