Your Assumptions About the Future are Wrong

Don't get angry about it.

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

When you get right down to it, our brains are pattern recognition machines. This has served us well as a species because, for the most part, we have lived in relatively stable surroundings. Sure, the occasional war, natural disaster, revolution, plague, or famine pops up from time to time to make history interesting. However, for much of human history, we could assume that our surroundings and the systems we depend on would only change slowly.

Not anymore.

The pattern recognition machines between our ears have developed biases based on the patterns we experience that lead us to assume we know about what the future holds.

Recency bias tricks us into assuming that future events will resemble recent experiences. It makes us think that if something happened recently it is likely to happen again. Status quo bias reflects a desire to keep things as they are. Not everyone suffers from these biases, but as a species many of us do. We don’t spend too much worrying about the future if we are relatively comfortable, as those of us in the rich world are. We assume things will be fine in the future because they have been fine for most of our lives.  

Check your assumptions at the door.

The world we inhabit is changing rapidly due to our actions. Our development, resource use, land use change, and pollution have changed and will continue to change the systems around us. One of the biggest of those systems is the global climate.

According to the 2016 study, Critical Insolation–CO₂ Relation for Diagnosing Past and Future Glacial Inception, the mild climate we have enjoyed for the past 10,000 years would have likely lasted another 50,000 years or so if we didn’t mess with it. But we did, so it won’t.

Not only that, according to the same study, we likely delayed the beginning of the next ice age (the paper used the phrase “glacial inception”) by about 100,000 years. We’ve messed things up really good.

Related to climate, is weather. Climate is the pattern of weather over a long period of time. Weather is what you see day to day. With climate change, we will have more intense weather events. Warm air holds more moisture, and the warmer waters of the ocean will lead to more destructive hurricanes and typhoons. Droughts will last longer.

Our assumptions about the daily weather that our pattern recognition machines have shown us are going to be wrong more in the future than we are used to seeing.

Throw those assumptions out. They won’t serve you well going forward.

Assume a much hotter future.

Let’s take one very specific example of heat.   

To better understand the future heating of our planet, let’s look at cities in the United States. In 2018, the New York Times published a simulator that let you enter any year and would let you know the number of days in that year that were over 90 degrees Fahrenheit. The data showed how many 90-degree days there were in 2017, and how many 90-degree days to expect in the distant future. I pulled up the website and looked at some of the largest cities in the US to see what we could expect.

Each column shows the number of days above 90 degrees Fahrenheit for that year in the past, and the expected number of above 90-degree days in the future. For 2050 and 2080, the simulator showed the expected number with a range extending both above and beyond that number. I have taken the median values for 2050 and 2080 for this table.

Number of 90-degree F days per year.

Source: New York Times

You can see how relatively mild the temperature is expected to be in the upper Midwest by looking at Minneapolis. But even that mild climate is likely to have more than twice the 90+ degree days by 2050 than they saw in 2017. Take a look at where the difference between 2050 and 2017 was the greatest. In just over 30 years, Atlanta is expected to gain about a month’s worth (27) of 90+ degree days. Geography plays a role as well. Columbus, OH, and Cleveland, OH aren’t that far apart, just about a two-hour drive on Highway I-71. But Columbus is likely to have about thirty-six 90+ degree days by 2050, while Cleveland, cooled by Lake Erie, is likely to have only about ten 90+ degree days by 2050. The unfortunate winner/loser in this contest is Phoenix. By 2050, about half of the year in Phoenix will be over 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

The assumption of the average person living in these areas is likely to be that the number of 90-degree days should be about what it was in the past. They will be wrong of course, and it is likely to cost them.

People assume. Actuaries don’t.

Insurance companies have started to not insure some places because they are in the business of making profits. They are not in the business of assuming.

In 2023 two large US insurance companies, State Farm and Allstate announced that they will no longer sell homeowner’s insurance in the state of California due to the increased risk of natural disasters, mainly wildfires. The list of companies that won’t insure in the American Southwest will only grow in the coming years, as will the number of states in which they refuse to cover homeowner’s insurance. Insurance is a business, and these businesses will increasingly refuse to insure homes in places in which the risk is too great. As it becomes more and more expensive to live in areas that become less and less safe, people will likely begin to leave. The question is just … when will that happen?

Assumptions that are proven wrong generally get people angry.

It's interesting to talk about how the assumptions we make will be wrong in the future because the world is changing faster than our assumptions can adapt. That's interesting, but it's also dangerous.

When people see that their assumptions can no longer hold, that what they thought they knew as reality isn't reality anymore, they don't tend to take it well.

Let's look at the not-at-all-divisive issue of race in America. About 50 years ago America was 90% white. I'm white. I'm just over 50 years old. I remember the world I grew up in the suburbs as a pretty lily-white existence. By 2044 America is expected to be a majority-minority country. What that means is that white people aren't going to be a majority anymore. This is already the case if you are part of GenZ in America, which is already less than 50% white.

This has been troubling to some people because they see the racial makeup of America changing when they assumed the racial makeup of where they lived was going to be how it always was. If you look at the demographics of the 377 people arrested for the January 6^th, 2022 insurrection in Washington D.C., they overwhelmingly came from counties in America that had seen the most racial change in their lifetime. These people were confronted with the reality they didn't like, and someone told them it wasn't their fault and that they should do something about it. So, they did. Or they tried to.

Race in America is just one issue.

People’s assumptions about their future are going to face a harsh reality in the coming years all over the world, not just in America. The world they assumed they knew isn’t going to exist anymore, and they won’t be happy to see that.

Think of all the assumptions people have built into their view of the future that will be changing radically in the coming years. A number of the things we assumed we could take for granted will change drastically in the coming years; things like water availability, food availability, heat stresses, storms, droughts increased migration, and increased inflation because it will be harder to produce everything.  For most of our lifetimes in the rich world, we could assume that children will have more economic security and longer lifespans than their parents. That is not likely to be the case for a child born today.

Beware of leaders offering simple solutions to complex problems.

There are so many assumptions that we have built up over our lives they are going to be grossly wrong in the coming years. People will be angry; they will look for someone to blame. We may be entering what historians may someday call the golden age of populism in the developed world. Because we are going to have a shit-ton of problems, and populists offer easy answers to complex problems.

These populists won't be right, but they will likely win more often than not, at least initially. This has already started you can see it in many countries mine included.

According to a recent study out of Cornell, democratic backsliding is occurring in an unprecedented number of wealthy countries. This was once thought to be unlikely in advanced democracies.

Anger and disappointment that our assumptions of the future don’t hold are only going to increase as environmental damage increases.

It’s something we don’t talk about. But we need to.

What assumptions have I missed that you see being a big problem in the coming years?