Forecasted Future

As economies contract due to COVID-19 containment efforts, economists continue to offer competing forecasts for the coming months. Will economic doldrums linger after the virus's threat passes? Or will our efforts efforts to flatten the infection curve enable rapid economic rejuvenation? None of these forecasts could anticipate the uprisings in defence of Black lives. It would be unfair to expect that they should. They are not designed or intended to offer such predictions.

But the impossibility of such insight tells us much about the limits of economic forecasting and their effects on the future. These limits emerge out of the very epistemology and ontology of economics—namely, their reductive conception of the selfish, hedonistic, atomistic individual as the basic unit of society—which also ground the ethics of economists. In economic thinking, radical, wholesale, collective social transformation is foreclosed. In the metaphysics of economists, such change can only be destructive. As such, the metaphysics of economists is implicated in the COVID-19 recession and the conditions of racial injustice that provoked Black Lives Matter.

Is a forecast a subjective account, or an attempt to make an objective claim about the future? A forecast is what Michel Serres would call a “quasi-object”—not wholly natural and not wholly cultural. Forecasts are always based on something—they are constructed of objects and subjects in relation. They are an apparatus.11Gilles Deleuze, 'What is a Dispositif?' in Michel Foucault Philosopher, trans. Timothy J. Armstrong (New York: Routledge, 1992): 159-168. The quasi-objectivity of the forecast is not just in its construction, but also in its circulation.

Where it circulates will partially determine the scale and scope of its effects. Consider competing forecasts about how Canada will recover from the COVID-19 induced recession: those forecasts might land on the desk of a bureaucrat in the finance ministry, or be shared with a deputy minister. The deputy minister might, for a wide variety of reasons, bring just one of the forecasts to the minister. The minister, convinced by the forecast, might shed the paralysis of uncertainty and act decisively. The minister might work to bolster or forestall the forecasted outcome. Perhaps a program will be cancelled or created, funding cut or redirected. These decisions can have widespread consequences for those who use the old and new programs. In this way, the forecast could be subverted or affirmed.

It is never so simple, however. The real relays are orders of magnitude more complex: the bureaucrat’s writing skills; global financial markets; the deputy minister’s concentration; the Prime Minister’s ideology; the finance minister’s commitments; the program’s efficiency… All of these factors (and more) affect the forecast’s translation into social transformations. Forecasts are conduits that relay the past into the present, where they participate in making the future. In other words, forecasting is not only a calculative representation of the future, it is a metaphysical intervention: an experiment on reality based on responses to careful and constrained predictions.

The point of a forecast is not how well it holds up as an artifact of prediction. The point is what effect a forecast has in its present.

The tools of economics allow for the construction of complex models with many variables that bear on or relate to a variable of concern. Surmising the trajectories of all the independent variables, model users can suggest the future value of the dependent variable. However, when outcomes deviate from prediction, model-making becomes a domain rife with excuse-making. A modicum of creativity enters into both model-making and excuse-making, but disciplinarity strongly constrains the lines of creativity. The language and technical practices of economics—especially its pretense to being the most scientific of the social sciences—discipline model-makers to remain within the boundaries of peer acceptance. That is key to being accepted in government and corporate offices where others trained in economic model-making confer status and rewards.

The future does not just await us. We make the future. We make it with and against others. Some among us have larger networks and command more resources—greater force in making the future. But wealth and status are not synonymous with future-making capacity. Peasants, suffragettes, workers, and racialized peoples have also made the future. The effect of their activism and organizing in the present transforms the landscape of the possible. It is from this constantly shifting virtual landscape of the future that the present is actualized.

Economists are particularly potent future-makers, partially because they deny this. They demure, claiming to be mere observers. Yet, they proclaim the right to channel the will of homo economicus. As theorized, sovereign individuals relate via the market to maximize utility, generating an efficient outcome. Of course, the pure and universal market imagined by marginalist economics does not exist. So, economists can only declare what outcomes would emerge if the pure market did exist. Beyond just identifying optimal outcomes, economists design mechanisms and objects of economic relation.22See Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu, eds., Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). In other words, economists make markets that prescribe social activities, thereby making and constraining the future.

Economists largely use their future-making capacity to uphold existing power structures—further limiting future possibilities. Part of economists’ defence of the status quo is liberal risk-aversion, which makes them wary that radical social change could leave people worse off. Indeed, as Deleuze and Guattari warned, we must not wantonly “deterritorialize” society, for the inevitable reterritorialization may be more brutal and more unjust.33Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). However, the calculative mindset of liberal economism precludes any radical change at all. Even economists that do not naturalize the purely selfish individual and market exchange largely defend the status quo. As their forecasting models predict a future based on data from the past, they prohibit the kind of radical change necessary to end the systemic oppression of racialized peoples, as well as deal with the economic fallout of the global pandemic.

Economists’ reinforcement of the status quo upholds racialized social hierarchies. It is well documented that Black income and Black wealth are both significantly lower than white income and wealth. According to mainstream economic theory, an individual’s income is determined by their marginal productivity—in other words, we get what we deserve. While few economists will explicitly claim that racial differences in income are indications of white superiority, neither will they take persistent racial differences as evidence that their theory has nothing to do with actual economies. If marginal productivity theory is undone, the entire edifice of mainstream economic theory collapses, along with its justification for the institutions and outcomes of the status quo.44Steve Keen, Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? (London: Zed Books, 2011).

Think of the forecast as a sort of blueprint for the future. Economists’ forecasts are the most banal: rather than look forward, they look backwards—modelled after data from the past. A pattern from the past is assumed to operate in the present, ensuring a predictable future. But in the process, economists end up reinforcing the social structures of the present.

What will become of us as we actualize the COVID-19 recession and recovery, and heed the movement to address racial injustice? Trapped in an uncertain present, we try to make sense of what is to come. Economists have developed tools intended to do just that. However, those tools are ill-suited to forecast what comes next. They certainly cannot help us decide what should come next. Worse, those tools are part of an implicit metaphysics that hampers the insurgency of people demanding both a better future and more say in that future.