In Future Babble, award-winning journalist Dan Gardner presents landmark research debunking the whole expert prediction industry and explores our obsession with the future.

In 2008, as the price of oil surged above $140 a barrel, experts said it would soon hit $200; it then plunged to $30. In 1967, they said the USSR would be the world's fastest-growing economy by 2000; by 2000, the USSR no longer existed. In 1911, it was pronounced that there would be no more wars in Europe-we all know how that turned out. The truth is that experts are about as accurate as dart-throwing monkeys. And yet, every day we ask them to predict the future-everything from the weather to the likelihood of a catastrophic terrorist attack.

Here is the first book to examine this phenomenon, showing why our brains yearn for certainty about the future, why we are attracted to those who predict it confidently, and why it's so easy for us to ignore the trail of outrageously wrong forecasts. How good you are at predi