In 2007 a man published a book about the future. He held no chair in futurology, ran no consultancy, and had no institutional reason to be believed. He looked at the world, concluded that he could see where it was heading, and printed his conclusions with his name and the year on the cover, which is more than most forecasters have the nerve to do.

Eighteen years later the book sits on his son's desk.

Some of what it promised arrived. Some of it went emphatically the other way. And a surprising share of it is still in motion, which turns out to be the most interesting category of all.

The Future Is Older Than You Think takes one dated, checkable, thoroughly human forecast and treats it the way an engineer treats a failure report—not hunting for the fool, but for the mechanism. Then it goes looking for the same mechanism across two centuries of confident prophecy, from Malthus and the electric utopias to the metals that were supposed to run out in 1987 and the office that has been going paperless since before most of us were born.

What emerges is not a catalogue of human stupidity. It is a pattern with a shape, an explanation for why forecasting fails in the specific ways it does, and an uncomfortable account of why the predictions that succeed are the ones nobody remembers.

The author ends by doing the only honest thing available to anyone who writes a book like this: putting his own predictions on the record, with dates attached, for somebody else to grade.