A Reply To The Comments: The Millennium Survey Again

FREDERIC L. PRYOR [*] ABSTRACT. Professor Frederic L. Pryor responds to his critics, Professors Patrick McGuire, Joan Huber, Paul M. Hirsch, Jonathon Mote, David Jaffee, Arthur L. Stinchcombe, Dennis Wrong, Judith Treas, Patrick Baert, Olav Velthuis, and John B. Davis. These comments are in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, this issue, pp. 35-78. Trying to forecast the far future is a problematic exercise-too many variables are changing at the same time; isolating the key causal changes is difficult; and determining how future populations will respond to particular economic challenges is hazardous. Nevertheless, in the spirit of fun I wanted to see how my fellow economists speculated about what the future economy might look like, bearing in mind Cicero's comment that "[ldots] no soothsayer should be able to look at another without laughing." In asking the editor of the AJES to solicit comments from other social scientists about these results, I did make one prediction about the future that was amply fulfilled: This study would meet with a barrage of criticism about the hubris of economists, our dismal record as forecasters, our methodological inadequacies, and the narrowness of our scientific vision. Such observations are, of course, true and we economists often deserve such a back-of-the-hand treatment, even by sinners and reprobates from other social science disciplines. But I believed that the future is too important to leave to futurists (or to sociologists) and plunged ahead. I began with the assumptions that my fellow economists have some special knowledge about the economy (which was challenged by Olav Velthuis), but are not prophets. Rather, they deal with the future as all of us do--in terms of what we know about the present and our evaluation of whether the current situation will continue. I posed questions to them in terms of deviations from current trends so as to focus particular attention on this question of permanence of current conditions. The eleven comments on the Millennium Survey that I received contain many thoughtful observations and I am grateful to all who took the time to reply. Rather than respond to some of the comments I consider to be mistaken, I would like to synthesize these remarks in terms of what type of research on the future might be carried out in the coming years. More specifically, three major sets of issues require attention: methodologies for intelligently discussing the future, the implications of these survey results on the way economics and other social sciences are currently practiced, and the substance of the forecasts. A. Methodology The most fundamental question is, of course, whether such an exercise is worth carrying out. Patrick Baert, Joan Huber, and Jonathan Mote argue that such results have little informational value about the future. According to Baert the future is contingent on what we learn from day to day, and we can't predict what we don't know will happen. If I understand him correctly, he believes that the working out of a set of full-scale scenarios (a trendy alternative term for his "utopian thinking") would shed more light on present conditions and, at the same time, outline the possibilities of our future policy choices better than any blanket statements that a particular set of events might occur. I would agree that such an exercise provides many insights. [1] But when more than one scenario is made, we are required to attach probability statements to each scenario or we would be swamped with stories. Many of the insights--but not the consistency or richness--of such scenarios can be gained if we simply interpret the r esults of the Millennium Survey in terms of probability statements about the most likely outcomes, assuming that large-scale exogenous events such as all-out wars or dramatic changes in the configuration of political forces that permit institutions and basic laws to be changed do not occur. …