The Fortune Sellers: The Big Business of Buying and Selling Predictions

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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.An ambitious, intelligent, and very readable guide to understanding our present and our future."-Harry Beckwith, author of Selling the Invisible No one can foretell the future. Or can they? There are many who purport to-and they are making a fortune. From meteorologists to investment advisers, prognosticating professionals are part of a multibillion-dollar industry. No longer merely fortunetellers, they are fortune sellers, offering us a commodity we're more than eager to buy: the future. In this piercing and provocative expose, business consultant and forecasting expert William Sherden casts an unblinking eye on the booming business of predicting the future, separating fact from fallacy to show us not only how best to use the forecasts we're given, but how to "select the nuggets of valuable future advice from amongst the $200 billion worth of mostly erroneous future predictions put forth each year.