Ellsworth Huntington Quotes

I'm an economist, I do a lot of forecasting, and I'm probably one of the most successful forecasters in terms of very specific kinds of forecasts.

You don't want to influence the same system you are trying to forecast.

Most of us who work as professional futurists never really stop gathering information - you never know when a provocative, potentially disruptive new development might appear.

The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.

Every part of your business will change based on what I consider predictive analytics of the future.

The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.

I'm merely trying to be something akin to a nice, kind, good actress.

I try to get a vision of the future, and then I try to figure out where the discontinuities are.

I'm a lousy predictor of the future.

Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next 10.

If I want to speculate wildly about the future, I have my science fiction. Anybody who tells you they can predict the future is either crazy or lying.

I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity. Its record for being accurately predictive is really, really poor! If you look at the whole history of science fiction, what people have said is going to happen, what writers have said is going to happen, and what actually happened - it's terrible.

Future forecasting is all about testing strategies - it's like a wind tunnel.

Predicting the future is very difficult. As a historian I have trouble trying to predict the past.

If we're going to forecast the business cycle, surely it is a good idea to know the business cycle. Sounds reasonable, but it's not that easy.

Trying to predict the future is a loser's game.

People often say that it is easier to predict the way things are going to be 10 to 20 years in the future than to predict how it is going to be 3 years from now.

All depends really on what kinds of assumptions you make. When you're forecasting things that will be happening 50 to 100 years in the future, it's really hard to predict what's going to happen that far out, so you have to make a bunch of assumptions.

I never quite trust futurists because I think they're kind of telling us what they think our future should be.

We need to stop, and admit it: we have a prediction problem. We love to predict things—and we aren’t very good at it.

Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones.

Preemption is a kind of pre-deterrence that stops the threat at an earlier, safer stage.

Lots of people make the stage and it can seem very violent and over the top, but it's not really. It's always a kind of gentle ballet.

People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten.