Don't predict the future. You'll just look silly.

I saw this on twitter: Paul Krugman predicts the future from the distant past of 1997.  The tweet kind of had the feeling of "what a dumbass for under-predicting the success of the internet."  However, Paul Krugman isn't really who I would go to for tech predictions.  That's not really his job.  Besides, not predicting the internet is kind of a running theme.

So let's go through the predictions:

• Productivity will drop sharply this year. Nineteen ninety-seven, which was a very good year for worker productivity, has led many pundits to conclude that the great technology-led boom has begun. They are wrong. Last year will prove to have been a blip, just like 1992.

Fred doesn't seem to have a "productivity" dataset.  Instead I used GDP vs. potential GDP:

Ok, not a great start.  1997 was good, but 1998 and 1999 were better.  However, 2000 shows a turnover, and then started significantly underperforming the potential GDP in 2001.  Not quite a blip, but not a missed boom either.

• Inflation will be back. Wages are rising at almost 5 percent annually, and the underlying growth of productivity is probably only 1.5 percent or less. Sooner or later, companies will have to start raising prices. In 1999 inflation will probably be more than 3 percent; with only moderate bad luck--say, a drop in the dollar--it could easily top 4 percent. Sell bonds!

Fred does have inflation:

Inflation in 1999 was 2%.  Again, not a clear cut miss.  Inflation a year later? 3%. Average over the following decade? About 3%.  That's not too bad.

• Within two or three years, the current mood of American triumphalism--our belief that we have pulled economically and technologically ahead of the rest of the world--will evaporate. All it will take is a few technological setbacks or a mild recession here while Europe or Japan recovers a bit.

Well, within two or three years, terrorism jumped up to the top of the concern pile, and then we dicked around in poorly planned wars while other countries developed infrastructure.  Europe has its own problems now, and Japan never did really recover.  I'd buy this one.

• The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law"--which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants--becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.

The internet prediction.  A definite miss.

• As the rate of technological change in computing slows, the number of jobs for IT specialists will decelerate, then actually turn down; ten years from now, the phrase information economy will sound silly.

"Ten years from now" sets the prediction point at 2007, just before the economy crapped itself.  Still, it looks like the values at 1997 and 2007 are basically the same.  This might be debatable if you just had those points, but that spike in the middle, the fallback, and then the flattening seems to match the prediction.

• Sometime in the next 20 years, maybe sooner, there will be another '70s-style raw-material crunch: a disruption of oil supplies, a sharp run-up in agricultural prices, or both. And suddenly people will remember that we are still living in the material world and that natural resources matter.

Rare earth metals.  That ignores the perpetual oil/environment struggle.

• Implicit prediction that all webpages will always look great with a fixed width set at 600 pixels?

Yeah.