Demographic Forecasting Stock Market and Housing Trends in Japan and the United States Over the Past 50 Years and a Forecast for the Next 20 Years

Abstract

Our ability to forecast degrades rapidly the further out we predict. Even if we do manage to accurately forecast an event, the magnitude and consequences of that event usually astonish us. On the rare occasion where we manage to accurately forecast the event, its magnitude and consequences, our timing is invariably off - sometimes by many years. Yet we still seek the advice of economists, technicians and academics, knowing full well their documented inability to forecast with greater accuracy than chance would allow. There must be a better way to invest for the future. Forecasts usually fail because we try to guess the future path of prices and the economy by building fundamental and technical models whose inputs are historic prices, correlations, covariances, causations and a steady stream of the latest economic numbers. Those are all symptoms of the past, not predictors of the future.