Will do.
Happy New Year!

I’ve been giving public talks about this idea to every type of audience imaginable for over 10 years, so I’m used to getting questions about the forecasting technique. Sometimes people compare it to something they think failed, like you did above.

However, my forecasting technique is exceptionally robust because it’s almost entirely empirical. Over the last 200 years, the Great Explorations, MEPs, and major wars all line up near the large, twice-per-century economic booms. As I discovered last summer — shortly after the financial panic started — even the financial panics and recessions line up in a repetitive way relative to the Maslow Windows. Because most of us are drenched continuously by the media and others in short-term thinking, it naturally appears amazing that such long-term relations exist, but they do.

About the only part of this model that’s theoretical is the relation of society-wide affluence to ebullience and elevated Maslow states, that explains why space adventures achieve such broad support among the population, if only fleetingly. And the historical accounts of the times support even this.

But remember this blog’s forecasts do not specify what you will have for breakfast on June 14, 2018. They are more like envelopes within which certain types of events are quite likely to occur and others are less probable. For example, President Kennedy had an excellent shot at making Apollo happen during the 1960s, but President Reagan had almost none at a space station in the 1980s. And likewise, based again on the macroeconomic data and historical trends of the last 200 years, if you have your heart set on starting a program of human missions to Mars much after 2025, you can expect to be disappointed.

So the only real question is: Will the economy continue to operate — in a macro-sense — for at least the next 15 to 20 years the way it has over the last 200? Alan Greenspan, in his recent book, says it should, as do many other authors. If so, and assuming that basic human nature doesn’t change over the next 2 decades (!), the forecasts in this blog seem realistic.