During the Great Plague of London, in 1665, the people listened with avidity to the predictions of quacks and fanatics. Defoe says that at that time the people were more addicted to prophecies and astronomical conjurations, dreams, and old wives' tales than ever they were before or since.

-CHARLES MACKAY, EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR DELUSIONS AND THE MADNESS of CROWDS, 1841.

Two years and three months after President Jimmy Carter had his "unpleasant talk" with the American people, he did it again. Except this time he was really grim.

"I had planned to speak to you about an important topic-energy," Carter said solemnly to a television camera. It was July 15, 1979. The president sat at the big desk in the Oval Office. "For the fifth time, I would have described the urgency of the problem and laid out a series of legislative recommendations to the Congress. But as I was preparing to speak, I began to ask myself the same question that I now know has been troubling many of you. Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to solve our serious energy problems? It's clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper-deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession."

It had been a rotten year. Inflation was rising and the economy was stumbling into recession. Carter's greatest triumph-the signing of a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel at the White House-was forgotten days later when an accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania seemed to confirm Americans' worst fears about nuclear power. Meanwhile, revolution in Iran had produced a militant government and uncertain oil supplies, a tenuous situation that OPEC exploited by jacking up prices.

The gas shortages started in California and spread east. Lineups were ma.s.sive. It could take hours to get to the pumps. Frustration and exhaustion sp.a.w.ned fistfights-even shootings and stabbings. In one infamous incident, a pregnant woman was beaten. The shortages were especially tough on truck drivers, so a national strike was called. Most truckers stopped work, leaving food rotting in fields and store shelves growing increasingly bare. The minority who kept driving suffered vandalism and a.s.saults so widespread that the National Guard was called out to provide armed escorts in at least nine states. In one incident, a trucker who refused to join the strike was told via CB radio that he was losing a tire; when he pulled over to check, he was shot. "If someone shoots at you, threatens you, then you can use full force against them," advised Alabama governor Fob James after a trucker was murdered on State Highway 72. In June, truckers and teenagers in Levittown, Pennsylvania, set fires and fought running battles with police in the first full-scale gas riot. "This country is getting ugly," a White House staffer declared.

It seemed as if everything was coming unglued. Three days before Carter took to the airwaves, at a "Disco Demolition Night" promotion held at Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox, stoned fans shouting "Disco sucks!" raced onto the field and tore the place apart. The president's approval rating sank lower than Richard Nixon's in the blackest days of the Watergate scandal.

Things were no better elsewhere. In Britain, a ma.s.sive public-sector strike crippled the country, making 1979 "the Winter of Discontent." The gloom was punctuated by occasional terrorist attacks. When Prime Minister James Callaghan tried to calm the nation with confident words, he was walloped with the instantly famous headline "Crisis? What Crisis?" and promptly lost office to Margaret Thatcher.

All this was before Carter delivered his July address. Still to come in 1979 was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the disturbingly symbolic crash of the American s.p.a.ce station Skylab, and the taking of hostages in Tehran. "Hardly more than a quarter-century after Henry Luce proclaimed 'the American century,' American confidence has fallen to a low ebb," wrote social critic Christopher Lasch in his 1979 best seller The Culture of Narcissism. "Those who recently dreamed of world power now despair of governing the city of New York. Defeat in Vietnam, economic stagnation, and the impending exhaustion of natural resources have produced a mood of pessimism in higher circles, which spreads through the rest of society as people lose faith in their leaders. The same crisis of confidence grips other capitalist countries as well. In Europe, the growing strength of communist parties, the revival of fascist movements, and a wave of terrorism all testify, in different ways, to the weakness of established regimes and to the exhaustion of established tradition. Even Canada, long a bastion of stolid bourgeois dependability, now faces in the separatist movement in Quebec a threat to its very existence as a nation." Who could the public look to for salvation? Trust in government had waned, especially after Watergate. Science and technology had been revered in the 1950s and 1960s but that faith, too, had suffered in the 1970s. More than one observer was reminded of William Butler Yeats's famous line "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold."

Other leaders might have put on a brave smile and promised better days ahead, as James Callaghan did. But not Jimmy Carter. After canceling his planned speech on energy, he retreated to Camp David and asked a wide array of guests to come and tell him what they thought of his presidency and the state of the nation. For ten days, academics, labor leaders, businesspeople, preachers, governors, and congressmen sat down with the polite and humble man from Plains, Georgia, and told him they didn't think much of his presidency and the state of the nation was awful. Carter listened stoically to every word. He even went looking for more, with visits to the homes of two middle-cla.s.s families who got over the shock of having the president in their living room and told him that, well, they didn't think much of his presidency and they thought the state of the nation was awful. They did think President Carter was very nice, however.

For one of Carter's advisers, it was a bittersweet vindication. Pollster Pat Caddell had long been arguing that a profound loss of faith-in government, in the military, in science and technology, in society and each other-was at the root of America's woes. Only by tackling that could the president hope to make a difference. Carter's other advisers were wary of this tack. They wanted him to stick to gas lines, inflation-the usual stuff of government. But by the time Carter decided to retreat to Camp David, Caddell had the edge. When Carter invited the three prominent cultural critics whose books formed the foundation of Caddell's case-Christopher Lasch, Daniel Bell, and Robert Bellah-he won. The result was Jimmy Carter's address of July 15, which would have a ma.s.sive audience and, the White House knew, would define Carter's presidency. Officially, it was known as the "crisis of confidence" speech, but the media immediately dubbed it the "malaise" speech, even though Carter never used that word.

"I invited to Camp David people from every segment of society," Carter said from the Oval Office. "I got a lot of advice. Let me quote a few of the typical comments that I wrote down." Picking up a piece of paper, Carter carefully recited a long list of comments like "You don't see the people enough anymore" and "Mr. President, you are not leading this nation-you're just managing the government." Carter looked pained. "This kind of summarized a lot of other statements: 'Mr. President, we are confronted with a moral and spiritual crisis.' "

Of course, this was Carter's point. While the threats of energy shortages and inflation were serious, the "crisis of confidence" threatens "the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will," he said. "The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America."

The signs were all around. "For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world. As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other inst.i.tutions. This is not a message of happiness or rea.s.surance, but it is the truth and it is a warning." He was right. It was not a happy message. And Carter insisted that solutions would not be found in mere economic fixes. More money would just buy more things and consumerism was another symptom of the disease. "Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human ident.i.ty is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose."

At last, in the final section of the speech, Carter returned to the usual talk of policies and legislation. But by then, political observers were numb. The president had told Americans there was something wrong with them. And him. No president had ever said anything remotely like it before. Network news anchors looked slightly stunned. Then came another surprise: The White House's telephone operators were overwhelmed by thousands upon thousands of phone calls, 84 percent of which expressed support for the president. A poll taken the following day found the president's approval rating had shot up an astonishing 11 percent. In the days and weeks that followed, the White House was snowed under with letters-85 percent of which praised Carter for saying what had to be said. The speech may have been critical and depressing, but for much of the population it was also urgent and true.

This isn't how "the malaise speech" is remembered, however, thanks to Carter's decision to fire his entire cabinet a few days after the speech. The move was intended to make the president appear decisive, but instead he looked desperate. As historian Kevin Mattson has demonstrated, the proximity of the speech to the firing resulted in the two events being jumbled together in the public mind. The speech was further tainted when Carter's opponents used his talk of "malaise"-it didn't matter that he had never used the word-as proof that the president was defeatist. And so a triumph was redefined in memory as a debacle.

But that evening in July 1979, Americans did respond to Jimmy Carter's grim prognosis of a "crisis of confidence." It rang true. As Caddell's polls showed, Americans had fallen into a funk. Their famous optimism had faltered. After more than a decade of bad news and frightening predictions, the country had come to believe the present was awful and the future would be much worse.

We can think of "the seventies" as the years sandwiched between 1969 and 1980, but historian Bruce Schulman considers the real beginning of the era to be 1968. It was the year of the rupture-the violent moment when a.s.sa.s.sins' bullets cut down 1960s idealism (Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr.), and setbacks abroad (the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) hinted that America's might was waning. It was also a cultural watershed, as social changes that started at the fringes in the 1960s began to spread into the mainstream. Schulman notes that a high school yearbook from 1966, "or even 1967 or 1968, shows clean-cut faces, ties, and demure dresses; they resemble stereotyped images of the 1950s. But the 1972 or 1974 yearbook reveals s.h.a.ggy hair, beads, granny gla.s.ses."

The defining feature of the era was change-a tidal wave of young people, women's lib, black consciousness, gay pride, the s.e.xual revolution, legal abortion. Many basic a.s.sumptions about right and wrong crumbled with startling speed. In 1968, three-quarters of Americans told pollsters they disapproved of marriage between whites and nonwhites; ten years later, that had fallen to one-half. In 1969, only 57 percent of Americans said they would vote for a qualified woman to be president; a mere six years later, 76 percent said they would. In 1970, Yale law professor Charles Reich argued in The Greening of America, which first appeared as an essay in The New Yorker, then as a book, that the counterculture was rapidly replacing a consumerist and obedient mindset with a new egalitarian and spiritual way of looking at the world, which Reich called Consciousness III. It would be nothing less than a revolution without violence and everything would change. Many were thrilled by Reich's vision; many more were frightened and appalled. The New Yorker received more mail in response to Reich's essay than to anything it had ever published, and Reich's book was an instant smash, dominating best-seller charts for months and generating pa.s.sionate debates for years.

All this ferment suggested promise and peril, and no change better represented the dual-edged nature of the fast-moving reality than no-fault divorce, a legal innovation that swept the Western world in the 1960s. It made splitting up easy, and the "Me Generation"-Tom Wolfe's coinage-did it with abandon. At first, this was widely believed to be to everyone's benefit because ex-spouses would be happier, and happier mothers and fathers would make for happier children, but it didn't take long for people to realize this was naive. The reality of divorce was captured in Kramer vs. Kramer, the painfully sad story of a couple's battle for custody of a frightened child that won the Academy Award for best picture of 1979 and was the year's top box-office draw.

Another big change was unambiguously bad. Crime and disorder soared, especially in the rapidly decaying inner cities, and munic.i.p.al governments seemed powerless to stop it. New York was in the worst shape-City Hall teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, the subways were a filthy no-man's-land, and Central Park was reduced to a punch line: "The city of New York is importing a temple from Egypt to be placed in Central Park," Johnny Carson told his Tonight Show audience in 1970. "That's what we need is a temple. We can go in there and pray to get out of the park alive." No one saw anything good in New York's future, a sentiment reflected in Taxi Driver, The Warriors, Escape from New York, and other movies and novels that imagined the city becoming an urban ruin populated by the feral, the psychotic, and the terrified. And the plague wasn't confined to the United States or to garden-variety criminals. Terrorism surged around the world. Even Canada suffered bombings and kidnappings. "From countries as disparate as Britain and Nigeria and the Soviet Union," wrote New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, "there are reports of increasing criminal violence and of official inability to cope with it. Is there some universal desperation, some loss of social glue?"

The use of illicit drugs rose even more rapidly than crime. In 1969, a mere 4 percent of Americans had ever smoked marijuana; eight years later, one-quarter had. When Richard Nixon became the first American president to declare a "war on drugs" in 1969, heroin could be found only in a few major American cities, while cocaine was restricted to the elite circles of the "jet set"; a decade later both drugs had spread across the country, and cocaine was so popular that Time magazine ran a cover featuring a martini gla.s.s filled with white powder-the new c.o.c.ktail of the upper-middle cla.s.s. The story was the same in every other Western country, but nowhere was the change more dramatic than in Britain. For decades, the British government had allowed doctors to prescribe maintenance doses of heroin and other drugs to addicts. Addiction rates were extremely low and there was literally no black market in drugs anywhere in the country. But in the late 1960s, that program was sc.r.a.pped and things started to change. Cindy Fazey, an expert on drug use, was working in the Home Office in 1969 when the head of the drugs branch "called me into his office and said, hey, look at this. He opened his drawer and there's this little plastic bag. And that was the first time we'd seen illegal heroin." Within a decade, British addicts numbered in the tens of thousands and a previously unimaginable subculture of addiction, disease, squalor, and crime was growing like mold on old bread.

Then there was the economy. Since the end of the late 1960s, the long postwar boom had slowed-stock markets would be stuck in the mud for more than a decade-but it was the Arab oil embargo of 1973 that finished it off. As oil prices soared, country after country plunged into recession. Unemployment rose. Inflation exploded. Economists were dismayed because, according to standard economic theory, the horrible combination of stagnation and rising prices-"stagflation"-wasn't possible. And yet, there it was. "Inflation, our public enemy number one, will, unless whipped, destroy our country, our homes, our liberty, our property . . . as surely as any well-armed wartime enemy," President Gerald Ford told Congress in 1974. Watergate made everything worse because government could no longer be trusted; like a crippled boat in a hurricane, the United States was adrift at the worst possible moment. A Gallup survey released in June 1974 revealed "a profound sense of disillusionment, even despondency, over Watergate and economic conditions." Things went reasonably well between 1976 and 1978, but for the most part the ills that befell developed economies in 1973 continued to worsen as a long-term decline in manufacturing in the United States, Britain, Canada, and many other Western countries left millions of low-skilled blue-collar workers without jobs or prospects. The fear was intense. In 1968, the Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index hovered in the 130 range: By the end of 1974, it was a miserable 43. Pessimism like that wouldn't be seen again until the crash of 2008. In The New York Review of Books, the historian Geoffrey Barraclough cited a long list of authors who foresaw either depression or the rise of fascism before delivering his own verdict: "The odds, it seems to me, are that we shall get both."

"What is in your future?" asked Howard Ruff in his 1978 book How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years. "A grisly list of unpleasant events-exploding inflation, price controls, erosion of your savings (eventually to nothing), a collapse of private as well as government pension programs (including Social Security), vastly more government regulation to control your life, and eventually an international monetary holocaust which will sweep all paper currencies down the drain and turn the world upside down." Ruff told his readers to move to a small town, buy gold, and store a large quant.i.ty of food to protect themselves against shortages. How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years was praised by everyone from corporate executives to senators. Former CIA director and future president of the United States George H. W. Bush called it "sound advice." Even Ronald Reagan was a fan of Ruff's. Some 2.6 million copies of How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years were sold, making it one of the best-selling financial advice books of all time.

Abroad, things looked just as bad for the United States and other Western countries. Maybe worse. In 1968, as the last bits of the British Empire crumbled away, Britain announced that after more than a century and a half in the Persian Gulf, it could no longer afford to patrol the region and all forces would be removed by 1971. The worsening situation in Vietnam made many Americans wonder if the United States had begun the long decline suffered by the British Empire; when the last helicopter lifted off the roof of the American emba.s.sy in Saigon, many were certain it had. In The End of the American Era, an influential book in the early 1970s, political scientist Andrew Hacker interwove fears of declining American power abroad with worries about consumerist rot at home. "America is the first nation in history to have succeeded in bestowing material comfort and moral equality throughout the majority of a population," Hacker wrote. That triumph had the unfortunate effect of making people selfish. Wanting only private pleasures, Americans had no collective goals and would not sacrifice for the common good. This was why the United States was failing in Vietnam and why any future wars would be fought without support at home. "Americans will no longer possess that spirit which transforms a people into a citizenry and turns territory into a nation," Hacker wrote. "America's terminal hour has arrived at a time when most Americans still see their nation as vigorous in potential and youthful in spirit. Few are prepared to consider the possibility that their country will never again experience the stature it has so recently known." Hacker wrote those words in 1968. Five years later, they weren't accurate: By then, lots of Americans were prepared to consider the United States a fading power. The sting of wounded pride was sharp. In 1973, when the crusty old Canadian newspaper columnist Gordon Sinclair broadcast a table-pounding defense of Americans-"I am one Canadian who is d.a.m.ned tired of hearing them kicked around!"-radio announcer Byron MacGregor set it to the strains of "America the Beautiful" and released it as a single. It got to number four on Billboard's Top 100.

As if all this weren't enough, the growing environmental consciousness of the 1960s turned frighteningly dark in the decade that followed. "I do not wish to seem overdramatic," cautioned U Thant, the secretary general of the United Nations in 1969, "but I can only conclude from the information that is available to me as Secretary General, that the members of the United Nations have perhaps ten years left in which to subordinate their ancient quarrels and launch a global partnership to curb the arms race, to improve the human environment, to defuse the population explosion, and to supply the required momentum to development efforts. If such a global partnership is not forged within the next decade, then I very much fear that the problems I have mentioned will have reached such staggering proportions that they will be beyond our capacity to control." Chilling as it was, Thant's warning was mild compared to many others. "If current trends are allowed to persist," a statement by leading British scientists began, "the breakdown of society and the irreversible disruption of the life-support systems on this planet-possibly by the end of the century, certainly within the lifetimes of our children-are inevitable." Published by The Ecologist magazine in 1972, The Blueprint for Survival called on the British government to tax resources, end all construction of new roads, and draft a plan that would ultimately cut Britain's population-fifty-five million at the time-by one-half.

A similar call for an end to escalating populations and consumption became one of the most famous and influential doc.u.ments of the era. The Limits to Growth was a report prepared for the Club of Rome, a group of industrialists, economists, scientists, and others concerned about environmental and social problems. Using computer modeling techniques developed by MIT professor Jay Forrester, researchers examined population, industrialization, resource consumption, food production, and pollution and attempted to forecast how each would play out in the decades ahead. It was a monumental task. Not only was each of the issues huge and complex, they combined to form intricate feedback loops. Forrester's techniques were supposed to model these dynamics and deliver accurate forecasts, and that, combined with the fact that the number crunching was done by a powerful new computer, gave the impression of cutting-edge science. The report's reception among academics was decidedly mixed. Some were impressed; many others thought it was nonsense-decades later, Paul Krugman, the economist and n.o.bel laureate, called it "a mess." But with economic and environmental worries on the rise, The Limits to Growth was a popular sensation even before the oil embargo of 1973 produced shortages of gas and products either made from petroleum or otherwise dependent on cheap oil. Americans became nervous. Would the shortages spread? In late 1973, a congressman commented that the government was having trouble getting supplies of cheap toilet paper, which inspired jokes on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, which led, in turn, to panic buying that stripped the shelves bare for almost two months. It seemed the "age of scarcity"-a phrase that got a lot of use over the decade-had arrived.

"Will this be the world that your grandchildren will thank you for? A world where industrial production has sunk to zero. Where population has suffered a catastrophic decline. Where the air, sea, and land are polluted beyond redemption. Where civilization is a distant memory. This is the world that the computer forecasts. What is even more alarming, the collapse will come not gradually, but with awesome suddenness, with no way of stopping it." This terrifying summary, appearing on the first page of the 1972 edition of The Limits to Growth, was written by the publisher, not the researchers. The report itself is mostly dry and technocratic, which added to its aura of scientific authority. In the report's own words: "If the present trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next 100 years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in population and industrial capacity." That distant time frame makes it impossible-even four decades later-to definitively judge the report's accuracy. It is also a little misleading. Although formally a forecast for a century out, the whole tone and focus of The Limits to Growth-particularly the projections that showed that radical changes implemented immediately would stop the disaster but the same changes introduced in the year 2000 would not-was on the very near future. The authors were also quick to claim vindication when things got ugly in 1973. "If I had stood up in March 1972 and said that within two years we would see beef on the black market in this country, and retail food prices up 20 percent or more, and families going cold for lack of heating oil, I'd have got very long odds," Dennis Meadows, the lead author, said in The New York Times. "But those things have happened, and they will continue happening."

Fears of overpopulation and starvation mounted steadily. "Next to the pursuit of peace, the greatest challenge to the human family is the race between food supply and population increase," warned President Lyndon Johnson in the 1967 State of the Union address. The same year, William and Paul Paddock published Famine-1975!, which said the most terrible famines in history were "foredoomed." In 1968, Paul Ehrlich became an intellectual celebrity when he made the same case in The Population Bomb. Even the "father of the Green Revolution," the scientist Norman Borlaug, was terrified of what was coming. "Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the 'Population Monster,'" Borlaug declared in a speech accepting the 1970 n.o.bel Peace Prize. "Currently, with each second, or tick of the clock, about 2.2 additional people are added to the world population. The rhythm of the increase will accelerate to 2.7, 3.3, 4.0, for each tick of the clock by 1980, 1990, and 2000, respectively, unless man becomes more realistic and preoccupied about this impending doom." Increased agricultural yields were important, but, Borlaug insisted, "there can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort." The situation became critical in 1973. In 1974, at a World Food Congress in Rome, delegates listened somberly to dire forecasts by the likes of Philip Handler, a nutritionist and president of the United States National Academy of Sciences, who concluded that the worst pessimists-the Paddocks and Paul Ehrlich-had been on the mark. In a new introduction to the 1976 edition of Famine-1975! (suitably renamed Time of Famines), the Paddocks crowed that "this volume demonstrates that it is possible to predict the course of at least some human events."

Paul Ehrlich was also emboldened by the way things were going, and he published a string of jeremiads, each more certain of worse disasters than the last. "In the early 1970s, the leading edge of the age of scarcity arrived," he wrote in 1974's The End of Affluence. "With it came a clearer look at the future, revealing more of the nature of the dark age to come." Of course there would be ma.s.s starvation in the 1970s-"or, at the latest, the 1980s." Shortages "will become more frequent and more severe," he wrote. "We are facing, within the next three decades, the disintegration of nation-states infected with growthmania." Only the abandonment of growth-based economics and other radical changes offered any hope of survival. And some countries were doomed no matter what they did. India was among the walking dead, Ehrlich was sure. "A run of miraculously good weather might delay it-perhaps for a decade, maybe even to the end of the century-but the train of events leading to the dissolution of India as a viable nation is already in motion." j.a.pan is almost certainly "a dying giant." Same for Brazil. The United Kingdom was only slightly better off. The mere continuation of current trends will ensure that "by the year 2000 the United Kingdom will simply be a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people, of little or no concern to the other 5-7 billion people of a sick world," he wrote in an earlier paper. Of course, it could be worse than that: Thermonuclear war or some variety of ecocatastrophe were distinct possibilities. "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000, and give ten to one that the life of the average Briton would be of a distinctly lower quality than it is today." Not that Americans are in any position to gloat, Ehrlich cautioned. The United States is entering "the most difficult period ever faced by industrialized society." This dark new age may well see the end of civilization. Ehrlich noted that those in the burgeoning "survivalist" movement were stockpiling supplies in wilderness cabins-"a very intelligent choice for some people"-but he and his wife had decided to stay put. "We enjoy our friends and our work too much to move to a remote spot and start farming and h.o.a.rding," Ehrlich wrote. "If society goes, we will go with it."

The sulphurous smell of doom even wafted from the pages of mainstream newspapers. "Civilization as we know it in modern America may be in for a drastic change," concluded a four-part series of articles that ran in the Knight-Ridder chain of newspapers in December 1974. "The crisis burst into public consciousness with a dramatic rise in oil prices a year ago, threatening world depression. But as time has pa.s.sed, it has become clear to both statesmen and scholars that far more than energy is involved. Suddenly, not one but a host of powerful forces has come together-intricately interrelated-to shake the very foundations of life in the modern industrialized world." A former secretary of the interior is quoted saying that in the near future, the interstate highway system "may very well be used primarily as a right-of-way for trains and for bicycling." Chicago's proud new Sears Tower may have an even more ign.o.ble fate, the reporter noted. "Before this century is out, it may become a towering museum, as useless as the pyramids along the Nile, and just as symbolic of a bygone age."

Unless revolutionary changes were made at every level, argued Richard Falk, a legal scholar at Princeton University, in This Endangered Planet, "people will increasingly doubt whether life is worth living." And it would only get worse. After "the Politics of Despair" in the 1970s, Falk wrote, the 1980s would witness "the Politics of Desperation," the 1990s would see "the Politics of Catastrophe," and the twenty-first century would be "the Era of Annihilation." Other observers agreed. "The logical answer to the question 'has man a future?' is 'probably not.' Or, to be more accurate, man has many possible futures but the most likely ones are disastrous," wrote the British scientist Desmond King-Hele in The End of the Twentieth Century? "The 1980s could witness even greater catastrophes than the 1930s," warned a panel of international statesmen chaired by former West German chancellor w.i.l.l.y Brandt. French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing was gloomier. He called the crises in energy, food, population, and economics the "four hors.e.m.e.n" of the modern Apocalypse.

"Look for the present sociological problems such as crime, riots, lack of employment, poverty, illiteracy, mental illness, illegitimacy, etc., to increase as the population explosion begins to multiply geometrically in the late '70s," wrote evangelist Hal Lindsey in The Late Great Planet Earth. "Look for the beginning of the widest spread famines in the history of the world. Look for drug addiction to further permeate the U.S. and other free-world countries." There would be "limited use" of nuclear weapons, Lindsey predicted, and American economic and military power would fade. The "United States of Europe" would form under a charismatic dictator and take control over the West. The Soviet Union would invade Israel, but the Red Army would be crushed by Europe. China would then march on the Middle East with a stupendous two-hundred-million-man force, only to be annihilated in the battle known as Armageddon. Finally, Jesus Christ would descend from heaven to smite Satan and establish G.o.d's kingdom on earth. With its strange mixture of biblical prophecy and hip lingo-the Rapture will be "the ultimate trip," Lindsey enthused-The Late Great Plant Earth became the top-selling book of the 1970s.

In 1970, futurist Alvin Toffler had argued in Future Shock that the human brain couldn't cope with the accelerating pace of change. We may all go mad, Toffler warned. By 1979-with rioters shouting "Disco sucks!"; millions of people scanning the clouds for heavily armed angels; and the president on TV talking about a collective nervous breakdown-that was one prediction that seemed exactly right.

THE AGONY OF NOT KNOWING.

We want control. We need control. And bad things happen when we don't have it.

In an unsettling study, elderly residents of a nursing home were placed in rooms where everything was handled by others, right down to the arrangement of the furniture and the selection and care of a houseplant. With no decisions to make, their environment was pleasant but completely out of their control. Other residents of the home were given the same room and treatment, but they were asked to decide how the furniture would be arranged and they were asked to select and care for a plant. A year and a half later, 30 percent of the residents without control had died, compared to 15 percent of those with control. Plenty of other research points to the same conclusion: If we do not perceive ourselves to have at least a little control of our surroundings, we suffer stress, disease, and early death.

Control is such a fundamental psychological need that doing without it can even be torture. I mean that quite literally. I spent the better part of 2003 investigating torture in Egypt, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere, and the essential point to emerge was that torture is not about physical pain. That is merely one of the torturer's tools. At its core, torture is a process of psychological destruction. And that process almost always begins with the torturer explicitly telling the victim he is powerless. "I decide when you eat and sleep. I decide when you suffer, how you suffer, if it will end. I decide if you live or die." That is the torturer's mantra.

Knowing what will happen in the future is a form of control, even if we cannot change what will happen. Torturers know this. It's why they avoid routines by constantly varying the time of interrogation sessions, what is done to prisoners, and how long it lasts. Often they will do things that make no sense-shout nonsense, make impossible demands-to further bewilder the prisoner. When all is uncertain, nothing is predictable, and that is terrifying. In an experiment disturbingly similar to torture, researchers in the Netherlands asked volunteers to experience a series of twenty electrical shocks while their bodies were monitored for sweating, rapid breathing, and elevated heart rates-physiological evidence of fear. Some of the partic.i.p.ants were given twenty strong shocks. Others were given seventeen mild shocks interspersed randomly with three strong shocks. All partic.i.p.ants were told in advance what sort of shocks they would get, which meant that what would happen was predictable for those receiving the twenty strong shocks but unpredictable for those receiving mostly mild shocks. The result: People who experienced the mild-but-unpredictable shocks experienced much more fear than those who got the strong-but-predictable shocks. Uncertainty is potent. And experienced interrogators know it. "The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself," noted a CIA manual on interrogation obtained in 1997 by reporters at The Baltimore Sun. "The threat to inflict pain, for example, can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain. . . . Sustained long enough, a strong feeling of anything vague or unknown induces regression, whereas the materialization of the fear, the infliction of some sort of punishment, is likely to come as a relief."

Given how devastating uncertainty and lack of control can be, it's not a surprise that we have some powerful psychological defenses against both. The "illusion of control" discussed earlier is a big one. Another is superst.i.tion.

When the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski studied the daily lives of native people living on the Trobriand Islands of the South Pacific, he noticed that while the islanders used magic rituals abundantly, they reserved them only for some activities. When they went after the plentiful fish in a sheltered lagoon, for example, they didn't use magic, but when they fished in the open sea, they did. That might have suggested it was the presence of danger that settled whether they used magic or not, but that explanation didn't fit other observations. The islanders used magic to keep insects from devouring their crops, for example, but they didn't in gardening generally. Malinowski realized that what made the difference was control. When the islanders felt their own work and skill would determine success or failure, they did not resort to magic; when the outcome involved chance or other factors outside their control, they did.

Expanding on Malinowski's insight, psychologists have demonstrated that resort to superst.i.tion rises and falls in tandem with stress and uncertainty. In a study conducted during the Gulf War, when Iraq was firing missiles at Israel, psychologist Giora Keinan found Israelis living in areas at risk were more likely to indulge in "magical thinking" than those who did not. In a later study, Keinan asked students to answer questions like "How is your health?" and "Has anyone in your immediate family suffered from lung cancer?" Students who were experiencing the stress of an impending examination were more likely to "knock on wood" after mentioning their good fortune than were students who were not under the gun. Researchers have even demonstrated that people who feel they lack control are more likely to see patterns that don't exist.

These are natural impulses, and they are automatic. Even someone who is fully aware of them, and knows how irrational they are, will feel the itch. "While I appreciate that carrying the same amount of tees in my pocket will not help me play a round [of golf] any better, or the action of always marking my ball on the green with a coin placed 'heads up' will not influence the outcome," noted British psychologist David Lavallee, who specializes in sports psychology, "I will probably continue to resort to such behaviors." Of course, the little superst.i.tions of weekend golfers are trivial compared to the elaborate rituals professional athletes follow, which is precisely what we would expect to see: As the uncertainty and stress rise, so will the superst.i.tious behavior. Researchers have even found that among elite professional athletes, superst.i.tion rises more prior to matches with higher stakes and more uncertain outcomes.

If this is a universal human tendency, there should be evidence at the level of societies and nations that when uncertainty increases-when economies turn sour, governments fail, wars loom-so does superst.i.tion. And there is. In a 1973 paper, Stephen Sales of Carnegie Mellon University examined data comparing the 1920s and the 1930s in the United States. Those decades were chosen because they were polar opposites: The first was a "low-threat environment" in which the economy experienced an unprecedented boom and the political scene was relatively calm; following that, however, was a "high-threat" decade featuring the Great Depression, frightening political turmoil, and a looming world war. As psychologists would expect, Sales found that interest in astrology was substantially higher in the 1930s. Sales then looked at the periods 1959 to 1964 and 1967 to 1970. The contrast between these two eras wasn't as sharp as that between the Roaring Twenties and the Depression-era thirties, Sales admitted-the earlier period had some frightening events and the latter wasn't so bad in many ways. But economic figures, opinion polls, and other data supported the conclusion that the earlier period was relatively low-threat compared to the turmoil at the end of the 1960s. And here again Sales found interest in astrology went up as times got scarier. Researchers who examined data from German archives covering 1918 to 1940-from the end of the First World War to the beginning of the Second-got the same results.

More controversially, Sales also looked at how uncertain times affect church memberships. Some churches strictly enforce a clearly defined moral and spiritual dogma, he noted: They insist there is only one truth and they know what it is. But others are more liberal: They tolerate a wide range of beliefs and behaviors. If people seek out sources of certainty in uncertain times, does membership in the more dogmatic churches go up at the expense of the more liberal churches? Comparing the 1920s and 1930s, Sales found they did. Later research covering more time periods got the same result.

It's too bad Sales did his research in 1973, and not a decade later, because his own time provided plenty of evidence on the subject. "Astrology is having the greatest boom in its history," wrote Hal Lindsey in The Late Great Planet Earth. That's a touch hyperbolic, but Lindsey had a point. Throughout the 1970s, interest in mysticism and spiritualism mushroomed. "Although it possessed earlier antecedents," wrote historian Bruce Schulman, "the New Age emerged circa 1971." Along with gurus like Baba Ram Da.s.s, psychics like Jeane Dixon enjoyed rapidly growing audiences-including, in Jeane Dixon's case, President Richard Nixon. The prophecies of Edgar Cayce-dead since 1945-found millions of readers, and Nostradamus returned to fashion yet again. Hal Lindsey was sure he knew why. "In talking with thousands of persons, particularly college students, from every background and religious or irreligious upbringing, this writer found that most people want rea.s.surance about the future. For many of them, their hopes, ambitions, and plans are permeated with the subconscious fear that perhaps there will be no future at all for mankind."

Of course, for Lindsey, searching for answers in astrology and New Age mumbo jumbo was terribly misguided, as the only reliable prophecies came from the Bible. A huge and growing number of Americans agreed. After many years of decline, religion surged in the 1970s, although the aggregate numbers obscured dramatic disparities in the pews: Membership in Evangelical Christian churches exploded; Roman Catholic numbers held steady; but the liberal Protestant churches-Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Methodist-lost as much as 15 percent of their members in ten years. These trends are an exact fit with Sales's research.

Along with superst.i.tion and dogmatic religion, a third source of certainty, the conspiracy theory, flourished in the 1970s. "To the orderly mind of the conspiracy theorist, there is no such thing as randomness," wrote George Johnson, science writer and author of Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics. In the 1970s, bug-eyed fantasists like Lyndon LaRouche developed substantial followings by a.s.suring the dazed and confused that it all made sense. "Every coincidence, every accident, is meaningful. History is a war between good and evil in which everything unfolds according to plan."

Expert predictions were a fourth source of certainty, and they did as well, and for the same reasons, as horoscopes, line-by-line a.n.a.lysis of the Book of Revelation, and urgent revelations about who really killed the Kennedys. Predictions did away with complexity, incomprehension, and uncertainty. In their place was the gentle buzz of knowing. All one needed to do was to pick an expert and listen carefully. Maybe it was Howard Ruff, Paul Ehrlich, or any one of the others who were sure they knew what was coming. They all had compelling stories to tell and they told them well. And they had credentials-Ph.D.'s, posts in universities, or praise from important people. Anyone with a trace of rational skepticism wouldn't trust astrology or other flaky superst.i.tions. For many, the same is true of religion, or at least the sort of dogmatic, literalist religion that claims to see tomorrow's headlines in the Bible. But expert predictions are different. Experts are smart, informed people. Treating their predictions as gospel seems perfectly rational, at least in a superficial sense, and when there is a psychological craving to be satisfied, a superficial appearance of rationality will do. The alternative, after all, is to reject expert prediction as a source of certainty. And if you do that-and you can't accept superst.i.tion, religion, or conspiracy theories-what are you left with? Nothing. And that's frightening.

"An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait," wrote psychologist Daniel Gilbert. The "unhappy present" Gilbert was referring to was the depths of the recession following the crash of 2008, but it could well have been the 1970s or any other particularly unsettled and uncertain time. In that environment, we want to know what will happen, even if what will happen is awful. Researchers found that people who received colostomies they knew would be permanent were actually happier six months after surgery than those whose colostomies might or might not be permanent, Gilbert noted. "People feel worse when something bad might occur than when something bad will occur." Anyone who has waited to hear if they have cancer or not, and experienced a strange sort of relief when their worst fear was confirmed, knows exactly what he means.

Our profound aversion to uncertainty helps explain what would otherwise be a riddle: Why do people pay so much attention to dark and scary predictions? Why do gloomy forecasts so often outnumber optimistic predictions, take up more media s.p.a.ce, and sell more books?

Part of this predilection for gloom is simply an outgrowth of what is sometimes called "negativity bias": Our attention is drawn more swiftly by bad news or images, and we are more likely to remember them than cheery information. "The greater impact of bad than good is extremely pervasive," concluded a review of the extensive research. And for good reason. If your ancestor was picking berries on the African savannah a hundred thousand years ago and someone shouted, "Lion!"-bad news, indeed-he had to drop the berries and run, but if someone mentioned that lions hadn't been seen for days, he could shrug and keep working. "Survival requires urgent attention to possible bad outcomes," the review noted, "but it is less urgent with regard to good ones." People whose brains gave priority to bad news were much less likely to be eaten by lions or die some other unpleasant and untimely death than those whose brains did not, and so "negativity bias" became a universal human trait.

But uncertainty is the bigger force at work for the simple reason that it is usually when things are going wrong that we are most likely to worry, peer into the future, and be spooked by all that swirling uncertainty. In such times, optimistic forecasts are likely to feel wrong. Remember the availability heuristic and the human tendency to project today into tomorrow: When the economy tanks, or stocks crash, or terrorists attack, we intuitively conclude that the economy will slump further, stocks will slide deeper, or terrorists will strike again. At that time, the expert who predicts a sunny future is battling against people's intuitive judgments. And when those judgments are strengthened by confirmation bias, and the intuitive judgments of friends and neighbors, and the opinions of experts who see nothing but gloom ahead, that's not a fight the optimist will win. In contrast, the gloom-mongers have it easy. Their predictions are supported by our intuitive pessimism, so they feel right to us. And that conclusion is bolstered by our attraction to certainty. As strange as it sounds, we want to believe the expert predicting a dark future is exactly right, because knowing that the future will be dark is less tormenting than suspecting it. Certainty is always preferable to uncertainty, even when what's certain is disaster.

Of course, this suggests that all experts offer certainty. But many do not. Some experts routinely talk of possibilities and probabilities. They say things like "It may happen," "It's more likely than not," "There are several possible outcomes," and "Large uncertainties remain." These tend to be the foxes. Hedgehogs find such talk distasteful. To them, it sounds like hedging, maybe even cowardice. Hedgehogs value decisiveness. They are far more likely than foxes to flatly say, "It will happen," or "It won't." The words inevitable and impossible seldom pa.s.s the lips of foxes, but hedgehogs spray them like bullets from a machine gun.

It's not hard to guess which type of expert is more likely to draw an audience. People want certainty. It's the psychological payoff of expert predictions. But foxes seldom deliver it. They may narrow the number of possible futures and-cautiously-attach probabilities to each outcome, but that only reduces uncertainty. It doesn't dispel it. Hedgehogs, however, can be counted on to give people what they crave. They all but ooze certainty. And so, as we will see in the next chapter, hedgehogs dominate airwaves, best-seller lists, and public discussion.

Unfortunately, as Philip Tetlock proved and long experience shows, confidence doesn't make hedgehogs better able to predict the future. It makes them worse.

Whether it's Paul and William Paddock declaring ma.s.s starvation "foredoomed," Paul Ehrlich p.r.o.nouncing the inevitable collapse of India and the American way of life, or Howard Ruff forecasting "an international monetary holocaust which will sweep all paper currencies down the drain and turn the world upside down"-and countless others in between-the 1970s were one long parade of pessimistic predictions. Most came from hedgehogs. And most were very, very wrong. Inflation didn't soar out of control, the economy didn't spiral downward, an age of scarcity did not begin, billions of people did not starve, the United States did not fade, civilization did not end, and Jesus Christ did not found G.o.d's kingdom on earth. And all those survivalists sitting in wilderness cabins watched their stockpiled food rot as the world went on without them.

It's easy to make fun of those whose prophecies came to naught. But to be fair, it's important to remember that many of the awful things predicted in the 1970s could have happened. They did not because, as always, history is contingent: The particular choices that were made, and the accidents that happened, took us in different directions. But they were real possibilities. What they were not was inevitable. It's also reasonable to conclude they were not nearly as probable as they seemed. Had the hedgehogs who predicted them thought more like foxes-beginning with the fact that the only certainty is uncertainty-their forecasts might have been at least a little more accurate. Of course, toning down the confidence of their predictions likely would have meant foregoing the pleasure of being treated like gurus and prophets with best-selling books. But at least their work wouldn't be embarra.s.sing in hindsight.

"For the better part of the past two years n.o.body has been safe from the divinations of the new decade," wrote the essayist Lewis Lapham in 1979. "Almost without exception, the seers who look into the abyss of the 1980s predict catastrophes appropriate to the fears of the audience they have been paid to inform and alarm." And almost without exception, the seers were wrong. Still, it made no difference to the business of prediction. Even as the forecasts of the 1970s were going down in flames, experts declared it absurd to think the Soviet Union was on the verge of internal crisis (Arthur Schlesinger Jr., 1982), inevitable that the United States would plunge into another Great Depression (Ravi Batra, 1987), certain that j.a.pan would be the next world-dominating superpower (Jacques Attali, 1991), and many more sure bets.

As always, people listened and put their money down.

6.

Everyone Loves a Hedgehog.

He is "often wrong but he's never in doubt."

-BRITISH POLITICIAN NORMAN LAMONT EXPLAINS WHY A PUNDIT IS A FAVORITE OF HIS.

A recession is coming and it will be bad. The man on television is dead sure of that. "The basic problem of the American economy is that we have too much consumption and borrowing and not enough production and savings," he says. "And what's going to happen is the American consumer is basically going to stop consuming and start rebuilding his savings, especially when he sees his home equity evaporate." And since consumption makes up 70 percent of the economy, that means hard times are coming fast.

The man is Peter Schiff, an investment adviser and frequent commenter in the business media. The date is August 28, 2006. After years of dramatic increases, housing prices have flattened out. Four months later, they will start to nosedive. At the end of 2007, the American economy will slip into recession and home values will plunge. The American consumer will stop consuming and start rebuilding his savings. The economy will crumple.

Peter Schiff was right. He called it.

Schiff's famous prediction is immortalized on YouTube, along with similar calls he made prior to the disaster of 2008, in a tightly edited sequence of video clips. Released as the economy was crashing, the video spread like a California wildfire in an abandoned housing development. Some who watched were Schiff's fans. But for most people, what made the video so delicious was the humiliation it inflicted on a parade of arrogant pundits.

"I don't believe any of it, whatsoever," Arthur Laffer says in response to Schiff's 2006 prediction. In the clip, Laffer, an economist and investment adviser, has the bemused look of a scientist responding to a kook who thinks the earth is flat. "Savings are way down but wealth has risen dramatically. The United States economy has never been in better shape. There is no tax increase coming in the next couple of years. Monetary policy is spectacular. We have freer trade than ever before," Laffer says. "I think Peter is just totally off base. I don't know where he's getting his stuff."

"It's not wealth that's increased in the last few years," Schiff fires back. "We haven't increased our productive capacity. All that's increased are the paper values of our stocks and real estate. But that's not real wealth. When you see the stock market come down and the real estate bubble burst, all that phony wealth is going to evaporate and all that's going to be left is all the debt that we acc.u.mulated to foreigners."

"You're just way off base," Laffer scoffs. "There is nothing out there. We're going to have a nice slowdown but it's not going to be a crash." Ouch. The poor, pompous fool.

The clip that follows aired December 31, 2006, on Fox News. "Will homes be worth more or less in 2007?" the host asks.

"Prices will go up about ten percent," says a real estate agent named Tom Adions, a beefy man with long hair and a striking resemblance to the model Fabio. "And here's why. You're coming into a regular, normal market and in a regular, normal market that's about what you get."

Peter Schiff, what do you say? "Today's home prices are completely unsustainable. . . . [In 2007], you're going to start to see both the government and the lenders reimposing lending standards and tightening up on credit and you're going to see a lot of the speculative buyers turn into sellers and these sky-high real estate prices are going to come crashing back down to earth."

Over to Mike Norman, a Biz Radio host. "I agree with Tom," Norman says. "They're probably going to be up about ten percent." With slicked-back hair, dark suit, and gold tie, Norman is the panel's Gordon Gekko. He turns on Schiff with a cutting smirk. "I have no idea what Peter Schiff is talking about."

"Most of the profits that people have in real estate are going to vanish just like the profit in the dot-coms in 1999-2000," Schiff responds. The other pundits can be heard giggling. In split screen, Norman appears alongside Schiff, eyes rolling.

Next up is a clip from August 18, 2007. Like the tremors before a volcano explodes, the first rumblings of the subprime mortgage crisis were being felt. The stock markets were suffering, financial stocks in particular. So Fox News host Neil Cavuto asks Ben Stein, actor and business commentator, if people should be worried about those subterranean vibrations.

"The credit crunch is way overblown," Stein says. "The subprime problem is a problem but it's a tiny problem in the context of this economy. The storm is a problem but it's a tiny problem. Meanwhile, it's as if nuclear war had struck the financials and really struck the whole market. It's a buying opportunity, especially for the financials, maybe like I've never seen before in my entire life."

Peter Schiff appears. "This is just getting started. It's not just subprime. This is a problem for the entire mortgage industry. It's not just people with bad credit that committed to mortgages they can't afford. It's not just people with bad credit who are going to see their home equity vanish. And it's not limited to mortgage credit. Americans are going to have a difficult time borrowing money to buy cars, to buy furniture, to buy appliances. Foreigners around the world have been lending money to us for years. They're now finding out that we can't afford to repay. This is going to be an enormous credit crunch. The party is over for the United States. We cannot continue to borrow beyond our means and consume foreign products."

Stein and Schiff lock horns. "Subprime is tiny. Subprime is a tiny, tiny blip," Stein insists.

"It's not tiny and it's not just subprime. It's the entire mortgage market."

"Well, you're simply wrong about that."

"No, I'm not."

Cavuto moves the panel along. Has the trouble peaked?

First up is Charles Payne, the author of Be Smart, Act Fast, Get Rich. "I think the worst is over," Payne says casually. Ben Stein agrees. "I think stocks will be a heck of a lot higher a year from now than they are now." Two other panelists say the same.

But then Cavuto returns to the skunk at the garden party. "The worst is yet to come," Schiff declares. "The fundamentals are not sound. They're awful. If the fundamentals were sound we wouldn't be having these problems." A panelist gasps in amazement.

On to stock picks, Cavuto says, "Ben, what do you like?"

"The financials, as I keep saying, are just super bargains," says Ben Stein. "I particularly like Merrill Lynch, which is an astonishingly well-run company."

"I like the financials too," says Payne. "Merrill isn't my top pick in the group. I think Bear is probably the cheapest, although the riskiest, and some of the others are better. But the financials are a great place, absolutely." The other panelists chime in with the same advice: People should load up on financials.

Again, Schiff appears on-screen to ruin the consensus. "Stay away from the financials. They're toxic. They're not cheap. They're expensive." Another incredulous gasp is heard. "There's a lot of losses coming up in the future. These financials are going to get hit and they're going to get hit hard. Don't believe what these forecasts are for future earnings."

Stein and Schiff bark at each other until Cavuto interrupts to say the show is over. "All right, Peter, I wish we had more time with you. I know you want to continue that expose on Santa Claus."

In the final clip, it's late December 2007. The American economy is clearly hurting. Schiff warns that things will get much, much worse. But an expensively suited a.n.a.lyst disagrees. The first six months of the year will be a little ugly but then things will bounce back nicely, he says calmly. The Dow will break through 16,000.

Needless to say, the Dow did not break through 16,000 in 2008. In March of that year, the investment bank Bear Stearns collapsed. In September, the rest of the financial system melted down. More firms went under. Merrill Lynch-the "astonishingly well-run company" that Ben Stein recommended-was sold at a bargain price, like used furniture. The global credit system froze, stocks collapsed, and economies tumbled.

Peter Schiff was right. He called it.

But leave aside who called what for a moment and focus on what is true of every person in these clips, Schiff included. Without exception, they are confident. The message they give to audiences is that they know what will happen; they are sure of it. Not one of them offers a probabilistic forecast like "It's more likely than not" or "It's very probable but not certain." Not one of them acknowledges that these sorts of forecasts have a terrible track record. Not one of them mentions that if they were as accurate as they are confident, they would be billionaires-and billionaires don't do talk shows.

This is all too typical. The media superstars who tell us what will and won't happen are an overwhelmingly confident bunch. Talking heads on business shows are particularly c.o.c.ksure but the other pundits who engage in prognostication-whether futurists, newspaper columnists, or the sages on television who tell us the fate of politicians and nations-share the same fundamental characteristics. They are articulate, enthusiastic, and authoritative. Often, they are charming and funny. Their appearance commonly matches the role they play, whether it's a Wall Street sharpie or a foreign affairs maven. They commonly see things through a single a.n.a.lytical lens, which helps them come up with simple, clear, conclusive, and compelling explanations for what is happening and what will happen.

They do not suffer doubts. They do not acknowledge mistakes. And they never say, "I don't know."