Histories of Things That Never Happened

In a world of breathless predictions, the most valuable tool might be Google Archive, which allows you to go back in time and see how old prophecies fared. We don't do this enough. The ultimate value of any forecast isn't whether it sounded nice. It's whether it eventually becomes correct. Spend some time in Google Archive, and you can't help but notice that the vast majority of forecasts about the economy or the stock market are utterly wrong in hindsight.