John Robson: My New Millennium Predictions 25 Years On

The New York Times Square Ball sits atop 1 Times Square in New York ahead of the 2000 New Year’s Eve celebration, on Dec. 30, 1999. Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

We are famously warned that “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” Attributing quotations afterward is hard too; this one’s been ascribed to Niels Bohr, Yogi Berra, and more. But if you’re in the pundit trade, politics, business, or just alive, you must try to form some kind of judgment about what’s coming. So as a historian, I’d like to make some forecasts.

The reason I say everyone must make predictions, despite the odds, is that if for instance you’re considering buying a house, you want to be fairly sure it won’t promptly be swallowed by a sinkhole or blown up in a war. And yes, we are often wrong, including on such calculations. But normal human frailty is nothing to that of the chattering classes, who with astounding confidence and frequency foretell things that don’t happen.

It’s a mug’s game to predict specifics. As my dissertation adviser Robert Divine observed about Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories, if Japan had sneak-attacked the Panama Canal instead, there’d have been plenty of evidence after the fact that it was going to. And if I could foresee details, I’d be getting richer than Croesus in the stock market, not flogging my wisdom for newspaper freelance fees.

One advantage of being a historian is I get the result of World War II right every time. But it doesn’t help much because we study the past to get a sense, necessarily hazy, of what kinds of things are likely to happen, including Imperial Japan striking at U.S. naval assets, and what capacities would help us respond… besides luck.

So here are some forecasts I call good value for money speaking as a historian, since they ran in the Ottawa Citizen a quarter-century back (verbatim minus various semi-attributions, from Mao, Hazlitt, Chesterton, and Marcus Aurelius to Michel Tournier) for the then-new millennium. And with a rock-solid attribution: they’re from me.

Let others peddling guidance professionally do likewise, and we’ll see who rusts first.

1. If you want peace, prepare for war.
2. The only effective trade policy is unilateral free trade.
3. Socialism causes bad weather, and then the harvest fails.
4. Secure property rights are, through some unexplained coincidence, always found where there is prosperity.
5. Every government not shrinking dramatically is growing inexorably.
6. Nations that claim to be your enemies are absolutely serious.
7. Nations that claim to be your friends are really only kidding.
8. Every society not in upheaval is quietly decaying.
9. Culture matters.
10. Culture persists.
11. If governments set prices too low, scarcity results.
12. If governments set prices too high, a glut and a crash result.
13. Governments never set prices at the right level.
14. Promiscuity is dangerous.
15. Everything falls apart.
16. The king is a fink.
17. When men cease to be religious, they do not believe nothing, they believe anything.
18. Disaster is right around the corner.
19. The pessimists are optimists.
20. It’s worse than you think.
21. It’s worse than I think.
22. They are not kidding.
23. Poets are dangerous.
24. History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as worse tragedy.
25. No one ever obtained at the negotiating table what he had not won on the battlefield.
26. Treaties are just scraps of paper.
27. Non-commissioned officers win wars.
28. The lessons of the past are reliable but discouraging.
29. Politicians mean what they say.
30. Politicians aren’t going to get any smarter.
31. Politicians aren’t going to get any nicer.
32. There are no effective official conspiracies. Could the people who are supposed to be in charge and are doing such a transparently terrible job really manage to do things right and keep them secret?
33. When foreign governments seem to be conspiring, it is only because people ignore the fact that their plans are not secret.
34. Human nature does not change.
35. There is nothing less surprising than a boorish person behaving boorishly.
36. Today is the tomorrow the bad economist told us to ignore yesterday.
37. The only thing worse than too much government is not enough government.
38. Democracy lasts only until constituents discover that their vote is the key to the public treasury.
39. When all the politicians agree, they are wrong.
40. When the politicians do not agree, they are still wrong.
41. Ten percent of income is a historically reasonable and stable tax rate.
42. Things that can’t continue, don’t.
43. History is made by idealists, so flames consume everything and blood flows in torrents.
44. Any government with “People’s” in the title is bad.
45. The barbarians are at the gates.
46. The tax man cometh.
47. If you build it, they will come.
48. Progress is an illusion.

Told you so.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.