Predicting the future … how enticing a prospect. Predicting the future has become a business for many. We can find, with only a little effort, fortune-tellers, clairvoyants, palm readers, astrologers, mystics, seers, psychics, and many others who will gladly reveal the future, for a price. But we all should be more than a little skeptical that any of these occult practitioners have special access to the future. Even economists and professionals who use less mystical tools – climatologists, actuaries and pension fund managers – find the distant future obscure and the pathway to it full of potholes. A principal theme of this chapter is that the future is a moving target, that divining its characteristics is always tough, and that it gets tougher the further ahead one tries to see. My philosophy for dealing with such uncertainty is to develop a long-term vision and make plans to move ahead – but to be prepared for many course corrections along the way, as the future unfolds quite differently than you have anticipated.

We all have heard that the only things certain about the future are death and taxes. This favorite adage surely captures the truism that most of the future is filled with uncertainty. The uncertainty is not uniform, however, and some aspects of the future are clearer than others.