Predictions

This is something that I've attempted numerous times.  In the eighties, I wrote some software that I hoped would help predict the outcome of football games.  In the nineties, I wrote some software that I hoped would help me predict how the stock market would behave.  Neither of these worked to my satisfaction.  There was some limited utility to these programs, but weren't marketable.

Nevertheless, the idea of predicting the future course of events has remained an attraction for me.  This blog is supposed to be something like that, but there hasn't always been a focus on that.

There may have been predictions here, but they haven't been catalogued and thus be easily referenced to see if the predictions came true or not.  If you can't measure it, you can't evaluate it.

There was one near the beginning of this year in which I predicted that we will find out if the GOP intends to be a me-too party or an opposition party.  The results are now coming in with respect to the immigration bill being considered in Congress.  They will be a me-too party, but they will try not to appear to be blatantly so.  They have to keep up appearances.

The rest of those predictions linked above also seem to be accurate.  At least for the moment.

Sometimes I forget what the focus of this blog should be.  It should be about the future and predictions fit into that theme.

If there's anything that I would add to those predictions at the beginning of the year it would be this:

Things are not getting better.  Things are getting worse.  There's no reason to believe that things will get better.

How do you measure this prediction?  After all, there could be some dispute over the economy.  Some seem to think the economy is getting better.  But that is a delusion.

Perhaps you could use some objective standard instead of a subjective one.  An objective one would be the statistics, but there's some controversy about that too.  Unemployment going down?  Not really.  No inflation?  Not really.  Budget deficit getting smaller?  Not really.

Here's something that's pretty objective: quantitative easing.  The Fed is doing it or they aren't.  Interest rates--- they are going up or going down.  Stock market too.  Gold prices.

I will rephrase the "getting worse" prediction as follows:  the Fed won't be able to stop quantitative easing.  I think that is a bad thing.

Thus, the subjective things are getting worse.  For other folks, they may appear to be getting better.  Not very useful for predictions.  The goal will be to be as objective as possible.  Memo to self: remember that.

This will be a new category called predictions.  It will also be filed in the history of the blog.