Captain Hindsight

One of my favourite characters from the long-running and very rude “South Park” animated cartoon series is Captain Hindsight. For those of you not familiar with the programme, he is a superhero who arrives at the scene of a disaster and subjects everyone present to a lecture about the precautions that they could have taken to avoid the calamity occurring. He then flies off again. The people cheer and thank him for this service, although he never actually rescues anyone or saves the day in any way.

Perhaps we should bear his example in mind when we are looking ahead to a new year and entertaining the illusion that we can have some influence over our future. January is the month when economists in the City issue their outlooks for the year. The predictions they make invariably turn out to be wrong and by December they are usually hoping that their clients will have forgotten what they said at the start of the year. They’re the opposite of Cassandra in Greek mythology. She was doomed to make prophesies that were correct, but never believed, whereas economists are esteemed and highly-remunerated authorities, whose prognoses are almost invariably wide of the mark. They have a particularly bad record of predicting recessions (something that investors might benefit from having some foreknowledge of): either not predicting them at all, predicting them too early, or too late. Of course predicting something too late (ie when it has already happened) isn’t really predicting it at all. But there is now a word for this skill - “postdiction” - which is an ingenious way of dressing up ignorance and incompetence as a professional attribute, which someone deserves to be paid a large salary for possessing.