Reading Tea Leaves

Or a glass ball. Or any other tool of forecasting the future. No one can do this. Not even a genie if such were real.

No. the future will be what it will be. Yes, we can affect the future’s shape and speed of change, but not much else. We cannot foretell the future. We can consider what will happen if we do or do not do something; some action that would be good or bad, and what effect it would involve if we did one or the other option. Even then, we are not foretelling the future. We are only estimating what might affect future events.

Those estimations are valuable. They inform us of what affects we are capable of. Not control. Only wiggle some change or other.

Examples of this include our belief in the effect of public education. Our investment in the future through our young people is based on the belief that a good grounding in thinking, facts and social conditioning will produce a public that will manage its collective life better. Much research has proved this true. Some research indicates how our hopes have been an over estimation of the desired effect, however!

The same is true elsewhere. Look at driver education programs and the belief that safer drivers will result in lower severity of crashes and death rates. Statistics show our hopes were realistic. Crashes still occur, but at lesser severity and frequency. The result? Traffic fatalities have dropped and remain lower than they once did, even with a huge growth in population, number of drivers, number of cars and the resulting congestion. Cars are better made with safety in mind. Roadways are engineered to a safer standard. Public education helps, but it doesn’t account for all the results.

Other public issues are discussed in public. News organizations push the importance of some of these issues and the affect they will have on future events. Public discourse includes these inputs and discussions are enriched. Legislative bodies may also take on those same issues and create public policy and laws that will have some effect on the issue’s ramifications.

Reading the tea leaves – current events and issues – for the value they portend in the future, is a national pastime. It has even grown into a national industry. We track all sorts of data, research them and prognosticate what it all means. The variables are many and the permutations of outcomes mind blithering. All the better for the ‘industry’ to prosper.

The intellectual challenges are fun and sometimes productive. However, tea leaf reading also tends to take our minds off of the more basic issues we ought to pay attention to. The distraction value of reading the future carries a cost. Best we pay attention to the basics before abandoning them for the fun of guessing the future.

January 26, 2024

 

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