Abstract
Planning without prior knowledge or reasonable expectations is a risky business. In an attempt to minimise the risk element in planning, then, limited cognisance of future estimates is often relied upon. However reliance upon ‘future estimates’ is itself a risky business. We merely, therefore, replace one form of risk-taking for another. The extent to which such associative risk can be minimised is dependent upon several major resources: time, effort, expertise, comprehension, theory development and methodological sophistication—as applied to population forecasting. A critical failure in any one of these resources may ensure a gross error or distortion in any attempt at ‘future prediction’. And always one is faced with the dilemma that modelling of dynamic processes centred on past or present events may be of only very limited application to the future. People’s attitudes (and actions) change. This being so, then the ‘honest forecaster’ — viewed here as one who openly ‘qualifies’ his estimates according to the limitations of his own assumptions — is more desirable than the forecaster who distorts by selection without explicit presentation.
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© 1979 Science Policy Research Unit, Sussex
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Whiston, T. (1979). Population Forecasting: Social and Educational Policy. In: Whiston, T. (eds) The Uses and Abuses of Forecasting. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04486-3_8
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