Getting It Wrong Is Part of the Futurological Job Description

In a post entitled Triumph of the Stupidly Optimistic Paul Kedrosky asks the question: "How many jobs are there where being wrongly optimistic for ages gets you promoted? I offer you ... equity analysts, who have, on average, overestimated S&P 500 earnings by 2x for a generation."

Needless to say, I would point to the relentless delusive hyperbole of the Futurological Congress, who predict the arrival of artificial super-intelligence, super-longevity medicine breakthroughs, space hotels, energy too cheap to meter, robot slaves and so on every year on the year for generation after generation without ever arriving either at The Future they promise so breathlessly nor at the moment of modest re-assessment their serial failures would otherwise prompt in the sane.

Of course, compared to Kurzweilian graphs of progress rocketing upward literally into transcendence, even the fraudulent boosterism of financial analysts comes to seem comparatively humble. But the similarities between these pseudo-professions are hard to miss, and not only the non-coincidence that they both literally like to gab about "Futures": there is the same relentless aggressive can-do optimism, the same cantilevering of fudged facts and rosy projections one after the other treated as sound data, the same obfuscating squid ink-cloud of terminological chaff and charts connecting to no actual professions or credible sources and yet treated as signs of technical or scientific expertise, the same neologistic repackaging of stale notions and commonplace capacities as exciting novelties and a rocketship ride to future wealth and happiness beyond measure…

What I want to emphasize is that this is not an incidental resemblance between two cohorts of pseudo-professionals who happen to fail upward every time they get wrong the subject of their presumed expertise. Financial boosters and futurologists are not incompetent when they are handwaving hyperbolically, they are doing their jobs, they are doing what they are paid to do.

Stupidly optimistic financial analysts and futurological hucksters are engaging in a particularly egregiously hyperbolic mode of advertising discourse. They are ginning up enthusiasm for corporate-militarist aspirations, they are investing the agendas of incumbent interests in the present with the coloration of future emancipation for all, they are seducing the rubes into enthusiastic collaboration and identification with their exploiters.

Both are rewarded not despite their endless mistakes but precisely because of their willingness to shill (or, for those who are not only deceivers but deceived themselves, the fundamentalist Randroids and Robot Cultists, for their highly useful idiocy in this regard). Telling people what they want to hear, especially people who are willing to pay for the privilege, is a sure way to make a quick buck or draw edifying attention to yourself. There's a sucker born every minute, after all: ask any self-help guru or authoritarian priest, they know the score. But don't expect respect from anybody with the least bit of sense or decency, they know the score, too.