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The fortune sellers : the big business of buying and selling predictions / William A. Sherden.
LIBRA CB158 .S456 1998
Available from offsite location
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Sherden, William A.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Forecasting.
- Forecasting--History.
- History.
- Physical Description:
- xi, 308 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
- Place of Publication:
- New York : John Wiley, [1998]
- Summary:
- The Fortune Sellers contains in-depth explorations of the seven most prevalent forecasting professions today - meteorology, economics, investments, technology assessment, demography, futurology, and organizational planning. As Sherden uncovers their historical roots and traces their track records, he deftly reveals just how accurate - or inaccurate - their predictions really are. Fascinating historical facts, scores of actual examples, and a wealth of eye-opening statistics illuminate the difference between reliable real-world information and spurious guesswork. In the Fortune Sellers, you'll discover: how anyone who is counting on a weather forecast more than a day or two in advance might just as well flip a coin; how economics earned its nickname - the "dismal science" - and why it sticks; how profits from prediction work on Wall Street; how academia, business, and the media feed our fascination with science fact and fiction and future technology; how futurists - predictors of societal change - use the infirm foundations of social science to predict everything from utopia to techno-totalitarianism; and how prognosticators failed to predict many milestone events, including the stock market crash of 1929, the recession of the 1980s, and the fall of East Berlin.
- Contents:
- Chapter 1 The Second Oldest Profession 1
- The Reign of Error 5
- Future Imperfect 6
- Voodoo Economics 8
- Eve of Destruction 10
- The Last of the Tooth Fairies 13
- Chapter 2 When Chaos Rains 15
- A Brief History of Weather Forecasting 20
- The Butterfly Effect 25
- The National Weather Service and the Problems of Prediction 32
- "Tonight's Weather Is Dark, Followed by Widely Scattered Light in the Morning" 34
- The Storm Chasers 38
- The Long View 41
- Gray Skies 45
- The Art of Almanacmanship 47
- Hold Those Snowblowers
- and Flip a Coin 52
- Chapter 3 The Dismal Scientists 55
- Economists: Who Are They and What Do They Do? 56
- Misleading Indicators 61
- From Chaos to Complexity 68
- The Economy as a Complex Nonlinear Adaptive System 73
- ECON 101 75
- It's the Data, Stupid! 77
- Self-Inflicted Wounds 81
- Chapter 4 The Market Gurus 85
- The Pagans of Wall Street 86
- Random Harvest 91
- What Does the Market Really Know? 94
- Fifteen Minutes of Fame 96
- Financial Junk Mail 102
- At No Time Has Market Timing Worked 104
- The Stock Pickers 106
- The All Americans 110
- The Old Financier's Almanac 112
- Irrational Expectations 115
- Mining Chaos 119
- "A Touchstone for the Intelligent and a Tombstone for the Audacious" 121
- Chapter 5 Checking the "Unchecked Population" 125
- The Real Dismal Scientists 129
- Humans as Predators and Prey 131
- Population Momentum and Predictability 134
- A Lot of Accuracy, But Not Much Skill 138
- The Calculus of Death 139
- The Wild Card of the Unborn 143
- The Burgeoning Late Arrivals 145
- Standing Room Only 147
- Will There Be Feast or Famine? 149
- Are We Running Out of Gas? 152
- Hazardously Wasted? 154
- The High Price of Success 156
- Chapter 6 Science Fact and Fiction 159
- High-Tech Anxiety 161
- The Dark Art of Technology Forecasting 166
- Promises, Promises 169
- Out of the Blue 174
- The Hidden Path of Technological Darwinism 178
- Proceed with Extreme Caution 190
- Chapter 7 The Futurists 195
- The Infirm Foundations of Social Science 196
- The Newtonian Socialists 201
- From Utopia to Techno-Totalitarianism 205
- Futurology 210
- The Trend Spotters 218
- An Excuse to Do the Inexcusable 224
- Chapter 8 Corporate Chaos 229
- The Management Science Myth 232
- Back to the Future 236
- The Illusion of Control 238
- The Future Does Not Exist 241
- Thriving in the Future 246
- The Murky World of Leadership 254
- Chapter 9 The Certainty of Living in an
- Uncertain World 259
- Thinking Critically 260
- Que Sera, Sera? 265.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 286-297) and index.
- ISBN:
- 0471181781
- OCLC:
- 36969639
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