I pulled a fact out of a recent article in Rolling Stone magazine, by Tim Dickinson (How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich).

It was a good article. Long but providing an accurate summary of all the Republicans who raised taxes, all the Democrats who lowered them, and how incorrect the theory of trickle-down economics always was. Almost buried near the bottom of a page not the first was this little gem:

Assuming the economy continued to grow as it had under Clinton, the Congressional Budget Office forecast a federal surplus of $5.6 trillion by 2011.

Got that? That’s how far off the CBO was capable of being, in 2001, looking ahead 10 years. We don’t have a $5.6 trillion surplus. We have no surplus at all. Isn’t the debt like $14 trillion? Wasn’t that forecast off by such an astronomically large number that it makes the act of forecasting full of folly?

The article wasn’t about forecast inaccuracy. But I want to focus on it for a minute. It strikes me that our species is very good at looking forward and rather uninterested in casting the vision backward to ascertain the accuracy of that forward look. It’s like the forward feels so good we want to keep looking there no matter what.

I never hear of anyone reviewing the astrology chart that was produced a decade ago, to see how much of it was accurate. We seldom get a report summarizing the precision of theater reviewers’ predictions. We joke about how the meteorologists get paid whether they predict the weather right or not, but none of us charts their reports for accuracy.

No one lists the UFO or ghosts sightings that weren’t.

I don’t hear anyone admit that the Cold War was just an excuse to jack up the military business.

Most market analysts are not correct, but we continue to listen to them.

Over and over again we grant credit where it’s not due. Go figure (‘cause we sure aren’t).