If columnists don't make predictions at the start of the year they won't have to apologize for being wrong at the end
Maybe we should blend the two genres into a Here's-What-I-Expect-to-Get-Wrong column.
We’ve entered the season of predictions. In the New York Times, Kara Swisher predicts that Donald Trump will get kicked off Twitter soon after January 20 and that film companies’ shift toward streaming will continue after Covid. In the Washington Post, Steven Pearlstein predicts that commercial real estate won’t get too beat up by the pandemic and that the business lobby will break with the GOP. In The Week, Noah Millman predicts that Congress will become “surprisingly productive” and that the economy will rebound briskly “sometime between June and October.”
Perhaps you’re wondering why otherwise intelligent people would begin the new year pretending to see into the future. Columnists are notoriously bad about predicting the future for the simple reason that the future is hard to predict. That is so manifestly true that “my predictions for this year” columns typically begin with the caveat that predictions are usually wrong. Pearlstein’s prediction that commercial real estate won’t take much of a hit from Covid, for instance, reverses (Pearlstein notes) his prediction in September that commercial real estate will take a big hit from Covid, which didn’t happen.
If columnists know that the future is unknowable and that their predictions won’t likely be correct, why do they make them? Partly because it’s an easy column you can file early so you can take off the last week in December. Partly because reader surveys continually show that news consumers want to be told what’s going to happen, even if it’s wrong. Partly, too, it’s because it creates an opportunity for the same columnist to write an end-of-the-year “What I Got Wrong” column and harvest accolades for humility and accountability.
I dislike prediction columns, but not nearly so much as I dislike What-I-Got-Wrong columns.
“Each December,” wrote the Boston Globe’s Michael A. Cohen last week, “I brew a large cup of coffee, sit down in a comfortable chair, and engage in an annual exercise of self-flagellation. I read every column I wrote the previous 12 months and review all I got wrong.” One feels that one is expected to thank him. Certainly I wouldn’t relish brewing a large cup of coffee and reading every column Michael A. Cohen wrote last year. (That isn’t a knock on Cohen, just on the idea that newspaper columns have a long shelf life; most don’t.)
But why must anyone perform this dreary task? Creative artists aren’t asked to apologize for their inferior work. Nobody ever demanded that Martin Scorsese apologize for Bringing Out The Dead, or that Bruce Springsteen issue a public apology for “Queen of the Supermarket.” Anybody can have a bad day, or even a bad couple of years. What makes Rick Newman of Yahoo! Finance think we care that he predicted Joe Biden would trounce Trump when Biden merely defeated Trump by a solid but non-historic 74 electoral votes? The What-I-Got-Wrong form wraps preening in an unpersuasive cloak of remorse.
These mea culpas seem especially superfluous for 2020, a year almost entirely defined by a pandemic that no one saw coming at the start of the year. (The World Health Organization first announced on January 9 that some sort of weird pneumonia had infected 59 people in Wuhan. Even infectious disease experts couldn’t yet gauge how much of a threat it posed.) Yet Julie Liesse of Ad Age would like you to know how sorry she is for suggesting that advertising was headed for a banner year. She ought to have intuited that Covid would put the economy in a recession!
CNN Business goes Liesse one further, apologizing not for predictions it made that turned out to be wrong, but for predictions it quoted others making in other publications that turned out to be wrong. A British futurologist named Ian Pearson told the Observer in 2005 that by 2020 computers would have consciousness and emotions. This whole futurology thing is a bit of a racket, but I don’t especially feel like pillorying Pearson for predicting something that most people agree is likely to happen some time or another—much less pillorying the Observer, and still less pillorying CNN. If CNN wants to apologize for something, it can apologize for hiring Jason Miller and Corey Lewandowski as commentators. Granted, neither lasted very long, and it was a long time ago. If my mentioning these hires from Trumpworld in 2021 caused you to think they were made in 2020, I hereby fall your feet in abject apology.
Perhaps we should merge the beginning-of-the-year predictions column with the end-of-the-year What-I-Got-Wrong column. At the start of every year columnists could inform their readers what they expect during the next 12 months and why that expectation is probably erroneous. “I think Congress will pass another multi-trillion stimulus bill,” a columnist could write, “but mostly I think that because I would like to see it happen.” Or, alternatively, “I think Congress will never pass another stimulus bill, but mostly that’s because I think that would be inflationary.”
“I think America is poised for renewal,” a columnist could predict, “because I know that’s what readers like to hear, and especially it’s what our advertisers like to hear.” Or, alternatively, “I think America’s best years are behind it, because I’ve soured on this job, which I’ve held onto a good 10 years longer than I should have.”
Another way to go would be to eliminate predictions and apologies from the columnist’s repertoire, rechanneling these energies into helping readers better understand what’s happening in the present. I predict that this recommendation will go unheeded. I base this prediction at least in part on my desire to wring another column out of this sometime in the future when it’s a slow news day.
The illustration, above, is the logo of a pizzeria in Dubrovnik. I’ve never been there, but I think it’s just about the greatest name for an Italian restaurant that I’ve ever heard.