A01=Jamie L. Pietruska
Author_Jamie L. Pietruska
Category=JBFZ
Category=KCJ
Category=NHK
crop forecasting
economic forecasting
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
forecasting
fortune-telling
future
knowledge production
prediction
risk management
uncertainty
weather forecasting
Product details
- ISBN 9780226475004
- Weight: 539g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 08 Dec 2017
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In the decades after the Civil War, the world experienced monumental changes in industry, trade, and governance. As Americans faced this uncertain future, public debate sprang up over the accuracy and value of predictions, asking whether it was possible to look into the future with any degree of certainty. In Looking Forward, Jamie L. Pietruska uncovers a culture of prediction in the modern era, where forecasts became commonplace as crop forecasters, "weather prophets," business forecasters, utopian novelists, and fortune-tellers produced and sold their visions of the future. Private and government forecasters competed for authority as well as for an audience and a single prediction could make or break a forecaster's reputation. Pietruska argues that this late nineteenth-century quest for future certainty had an especially ironic consequence: it led Americans to accept uncertainty as an inescapable part of both forecasting and twentieth-century economic and cultural life.
Drawing together histories of science, technology, capitalism, environment, and culture, Looking Forward explores how forecasts functioned as new forms of knowledge and risk management tools that sometimes mitigated, but at other times exacerbated, the very uncertainties they were designed to conquer. Ultimately Pietruska shows how Americans came to understand the future itself as predictable, yet still uncertain.
Jamie L. Pietruska is assistant professor of history at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
