The world in 2050

Man’s ingenuity will prove soothsayer pessimists wrong about our future resources, writes Matt Ridley

THE most unwittingly profound things that have been said about predicting the future were said by two sportsmen, neither renowned for his conventional intellect. The American baseball player Yogi Berra said “I never make predictions, especially about the future”; the English footballer Paul Gascoigne went one better: “I never make predictions and I never will.”

Prediction is a mug’s game. Everybody who has ever done it has proved to be terrible at it — and always will be. Yes, even the ones with reputations as great seers were hopeless most of the time. Arthur C Clarke saw geostationary satellites coming, but also said (in 1962) that hovercraft were going to dominate land transport to the point that by the 1990s a common sign would read “No wheeled vehicles on this highway”.