Kiplingers Looking Ahead 70 Years of Forecasts from the Kiplinger Washington Letter
by By Shay, Susan Ten Abby
Category: Reference , General

Stock market crashes in '29 and '87. World war in Europe and Asia. The Baby Boom. Television. Office computers. Automated manufacturing. Migration to the Sun Belt. The economic rise of Japan. VCRs. Booming world trade and investment. ATMs. Environmental activism. Fax machines. Stock market surge in the '80s. Soaring budget deficits. Equal-opportunity revolution. Corporate downsizing. Collapse of the Soviet empire.Before these events, inventions and trends - so familiar to us today - became history, they were the future. No one was fully prepared for them, but regular readers of The Kiplinger Washington Letter were less surprised than most people. That's because all these developments, and dozens more of similar significance, were foreshadowed in weekly issues of the Kiplinger Letter, the oldest and most widely read forecasting publication in the world.Kiplinger's Looking Ahead presents a compilation of hundreds of excerpted forecasts from 70 years of the Letter. In these pages, you'll find example after example of bold, informed predictions made months and even years ahead of the final outcome. Of course, no forecaster has a flawless record, so you'll find a fair number of miscalls, too, ranging from the election of Thomas Dewey in '48 to periodic predictions of Fidel Castro's imminent overthrow.Kiplinger's Looking Ahead is much more than a collection of forecasts and judgments. It's also a unique journey through the last seven decades, a period of accelerating change in America and the world. In its pages you'll witness the gradual transformation of an insular America into the greatest superpower of a global economy.There's much truth in the saying "the more things change, the more they remain the same," so there will be a familiar ring to many items from earlier times - discussions of an overly complex tax code in the 1920s, fear of soaring imports from Japan in the '30s and '50s and the tendency of democracies to habitually exceed government budgets.To appreciate accurate forecasting in decades past, you'll need to recall what actually happened, and when. To refresh your memory, each decade chapter of Kiplinger's Looking Ahead opens with a lively narrative highlighting major events and trends. Timelines mark some of the cultural and social milestones that paralleled the economic trends tracked by Kiplinger.Hundreds of photographs and political cartoons truly bring the text selections to life, illustrating what Americans experienced and what they - and the general media - through about events as they happened.Every issue of The Kiplinger Washington Letter focuses on the future, so this book wouldn't be an accurate representation if it pointed the telescope only backward. The last chapter of the book, highlighting Letter excerpts from the first years of the '90s, offers many intriguing Kiplinger forecasts of what to expect between now and the year 2000.