Sociology and Social Forecasting

Prediction, from prophecy to forecasting, has a venerable history in sociology, beginning with the very prophets of Paris (Manuel 1962) from whom the discipline was first conceived and extending through the "great men" of the field's classical period, virtualy all of whom tried to forecast at one time or another. In the 20th century, S.C. Gilfillan and W.F. Ogburn produced major sociological forecasts in the 1930s, and major sociological attempts to predict individual behavior (marriage stability and parole violation, to mention two) persisted well into the 1950s. Despite such efforts, prediction is in ill repute in many quarters within sociology today. The arguments against sociological prediction are of three principal sorts. (a) The debunking argument. Sociology is not really a science and should drop scientistic pretentions like forecasting. This argument fits the dominant mood in sociology today; by some it is accepted as a truism. For various counterarguments see Henshel (1971). (b) The practical argument: catalogs of predictive failures. One of the latest compilations of social forecasting disasters appears in Chapter 1 of Lipset's Third Century (1979). In addition to familiar targets in sociology (demographic errors, "the end of ideology") Lipset reviews economic forecasts that failed to anticipate the Great Depression and later economic forecasts that learned the lesson too well by anticipating a post-World War II depression and vast technological unemployment; Lipset concludes that "economists, like the rest of us, are good historians" (1979:6). For every failure, however, one can list a success: Cartter predicted