Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America by Jamie L. Pietruska

Abstract

Reviewed by: Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America by Jamie L. Pietruska Joy Rohde (bio) Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America. By Jamie L. Pietruska. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. 288. Hardcover $45. Looking Forward is a creative, original, and deeply-researched monograph. It offers a lively and compelling account of the ways that technical experts, government officials, and everyday Americans wrestled with the uncertainties associated with modern capitalist society between the 1860s and the 1920s. Historians have argued that the turn of the twentieth century was a period marked by the search for order. But Pietruska complicates that narrative. Government experts sought technoscientific knowledge that could [End Page 922] produce order. But they were hampered on two fronts. Commercial forecasters and skeptical publics challenged their claims to authority. And their own predictions fell far short of their expectations. Rather than being fulfilled, by 1920 the pursuit of certainty morphed into an uncomfortable acceptance of uncertainty as a fact of the modern condition. Instead of grasping for certainty, producers and users of foreknowledge embraced the provisional, yet scientific, status of expertise about the future. Pietruska makes her case by following expert, policy, and public debates in four well-chosen areas—crop estimates, weather forecasting, economic prediction, and fortune-telling. She traces the efforts of U.S. Department of Agriculture officials who sought to produce accurate estimates of cotton yield rooted in observational evidence and sound statistics. Despite fielding a network of trained crop surveyors, government estimators failed to produce accurate estimates. In some cases, they performed worse than commercial forecasters, amplifying the erratic nature of the trans-Atlantic cotton markets that they had hoped to tame. Not surprisingly, Americans were skeptical of government experts' claims that they could reliably predict the future. Yet, they were also adamant that such expertise be shared with them. This was especially the case when it came to the weather. Even as they derided the contents of the daily "Synopsis and Probabilities"—short-term weather forecasts thought to be particularly useful for agriculture—farmers in remote regions demanded timely access to them. They also sought long-range weather forecasts, which Weather Bureau officials initially insisted could not be produced to reasonable standards of scientific validity. But by 1906, they gave in to public demands and persistent private meteorological research. Here, Pietruska argues, government officials replaced their desire for scientific certainty with an acceptance that foreknowledge could be scientific, yet still uncertain. Despite—or perhaps because of—its failure to produce certainty, prediction gained the patina of science. Pietruska traces legal debates over fortune-telling to demonstrate Americans' embrace of the culture and science of prediction. Tracking court cases and newspaper accounts, she shows that fortune-tellers successfully claimed the mantle of science to protect themselves against criminal and civil charges. If palmistry and character reading were scientific, then their practitioners were not violating laws proscribing people from pretending to tell the future. Looking Forward is thoughtfully embedded in a variety of literatures, including the history of science and technology, the history of capitalism, and policy history. Pietruska places technoscientific experts and government elites alongside farmers and palm-readers to great effect. Her account demonstrates that non-experts—and especially rural Americans—were at the center of the era's new culture of scientific prediction. They challenged meteorologists, economists, statisticians, and other technical experts to [End Page 923] revise their own perceptions of scientific certainty. But the book's lessons are not limited to historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Looking Forward also shows that narratives that root the origins of expertise about the future in the Cold War are flawed. While pervasive anxieties about nuclear destruction and the growth of computation nurtured new forms of expertise after World War II, Americans generations before them cultivated a science and culture of prediction that has shaped modern life. Joy Rohde Joy Rohde is associate professor of public policy and history at the University of Michigan and the author of Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013). Her current book project examines the history of algorithmic and big data...