Rules for Using Forecasts and Forecasters

How to bridge the gap between the separate worlds of knowledge makers and policy makers is a problem at least as ancient as Plato, who sought to resolve it by integrating the two in a single individual: the philosopher-king. Yet even in the simpler and comparatively unchanging, hierarchical social order of the ancient Athenian city-state, Plato’s proposed solution represented a “utopia” in the modern sense of something naively unworkable as well as in the sense of an ideal in which he used the term. In our complex advanced industrial society, the problems of providing for knowledge makers, in sufficient number and with the necessary expertise and other prerequisites, as well as for appropriate articulation between knowledge makers and policy makers, are much more serious than those Plato faced, and more consequential as well.