Governments are certainly not immune to the fallacy of extending current trends as a means of forecasting the future, while ignoring the history.
Rarely addressed in the context of climate change, future population trends could make the difference between success and failure in the long-term balance of human activities, atmosphere, and climate.
That is, the the model assumes the future is dominated by a continuation of the strongest current trends.
However, nowhere is the tendency to extend trends in a straight line into the future without expectations of reversals more prevalent than in the world of investing.
One of the primary entertainment trends of recent years -- and one with legs into the future -- can also be traced back 50 years.
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Only in this case, that man is Michael Ruppert, who also looks at the trends of the past few decades to predict the future.
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As human behavior and weather cycles have not changed much for hundreds of years, the odds of a continuation of past trends are a good, but not perfect, guide to the future.
They complain, for instance, that history is too much neglected in the consideration of future trends.
What do these trends tell us about the future of high-wage employment?
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Professor Lobell said the study only referred to past relationships, as extrapolating the findings to predict future trends would require a number of assumptions to be made.
For although the future path of technology can, to some extent, be extrapolated from existing trends, the social forces that help or hamper its adoption are far less predictable.
Richard Nicholls is media, technology and telecoms account director with the Future Foundation, which identifies and forecasts social and consumer trends and determines the extent of their impacts on markets, services, brands and products.
Therefore most of Wall Street predicts the future based upon past trends.
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The shift from responding to past events to preventing future harms is part of one of the most significant, but unnoticed, trends in the world today.
The main purpose of the seminar was to give an general idea of current state of ground water in Uzbekistan, scientific-educational activities and the area of usage of underground water and determination of future trends relating to improvement of research methods and educational approaches with development of practical recommendations.
In particular, behavioural economists have argued that human beings tend to be too confident of their own abilities and tend to extrapolate recent trends into the future, a combination that may contribute to bubbles.
But Mr Clark, a legend in Silicon Valley for his ability to spot trends in emerging technology, maintains that research using stem cells is vital to the future of medicine.
Prato still remains the world's fabric development leader - a sort of laboratory where future fabric trends are tested out.
Companies, like Apple and Google, that have clear views of the future, based upon careful analysis of what can be done and tracking market trends, create scenarios that allow them to break out of the pack.
With three decades at the cutting edge of popular music, Eno is more qualified than most to predict future trends.
And in May, a Pew Research Center poll showed that half of U.S. adults believe the current trends point toward their children's future being worse than their own present.
The truth is, no one can really guess the future or ''natural'' price of uranium using traditional forecasting methods anchored in historic trends.
"Robots that are currently 'luxury' according to price will be commoditized in the future and drop in price, very similar to the PC model, " predicts Dan Kara , president of Robotics Trends .
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