Planning

If one wants to make predictions, the likely reason is to be able to plan. The two don’t always work well together, though. The French predicted correctly that there would be another invasion from the northeast, eventually. Their plans didn’t anticipate correctly how it would work, and the Maginot line has become equivalent to “well-planned failure.” 

And the same could happen here. The Next War could begin with pre-positioned nuclear warheads taking out the hearts of a dozen cities. Or with a massive cyberattack eliminating technological support and lines of communication. Or with a direct and deadly attack with a strategic impact that is actually quite limited - but which steels everyone’s resolve. Any of those could happen with any of the predictions posted. 

If you were a civilian in the United States during World War 2, you were probably never in any direct danger from the combat and bombings happening around the world. If you were in the North during the Civil War, your eventual victory was all but assured - the Union was rich enough to start work on the Transcontinental Railroad, a significant long-term investment, while the war was still raging. There’s no guarantee, though, that those minimally affected in these last two Crises will again be the lucky ones. To start, it depends on how you define the intersection of those two sets. Non-Southern Americans? Nuclear attacks might disproportionately target the North. Affluent non-farmers? Cities are the expected target in the first case above, and are going to be more affected than rural areas by the second. It’s easy to discuss the possibilities dispassionately if you don’t expect to be affected, based on previous cycles, but it’s important to remember that the hardest part of predictions is, always, the future.

I’m reminded, in fact, of The Planning Fallacy - that people can’t actually plan well at all. The usual cases cited are for the expected completion date and (where applicable) cost of completing a given project. Estimators will tend to be optimistic, expecting that everything will go as well as it possibly can. “As well as possible” is at the end of the standard distribution, of course, not in the center, so the usual result is cost and time overruns - compared to the estimate, anyway. Here, the variable isn’t time or cost (per se) but some variant of “how likely is it that you will be one of the minimally impacted?” For my plans, I’m assuming that’s close to 100% - maybe some wartime inconveniences but no battles in my backyard. Which is hopelessly optimistic for anyone who does believe the Crisis is inevitable.