Of course, those high prices would cause people to buy cars that used less gasoline, as well as to look at alternative energy sources. Isn't it reasonable to assume that many alternatives start to look attractive when oil prices are ten times as high? This too was ignored. In fact, in hindsight, the assumption in that "scientific" film that we would just keep using oil in the same way until one week it was gone - well, it seems almost silly now.

Many systems, whether economic, biological, psychological, political, or ecological, are self-correcting. That is, they have trends that look like they will continue to head in one direction, but there are other factors that will prevent this from going too far. Things won't always return to some norm, or in a statistician's terms, "revert to the mean." But at the very least, the interactions of the various factors are complex enough that predicting the future based on a chart or trend isn't too likely to succeed.

It would be nice if predicting the future was as simple as collecting data, charting it and assuming that any trends will continue in the same direction. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), real life is more complicated than straight-line projections can account for. So before you assume you can see where the data is leading, look at all the other things that might affect that trend line. In other words, think twice.

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