Roger Cass, The Last Optimist

It is a lesson that Cass learned from the writings of a French historian named Fernand Braudel, who conceived the notion of projective history: an oxymoronic way to discern the future by studying the past. According to Braudel, you can learn only so much from change -- from the movements of great men, wars, and treaties, from CEO hirings and firings, or from the rise and fall of big companies. The future can't be found on the front page of today's newspapers. Rather, the future can be found by looking at what doesn't change. By studying the eternal truths of history, you can see what has to come next.

Cass, like Braudel, works at a level where things don't change. He studies in detail the small, permanent features of the economy: interest rates, housing, loans, money, taxes, energy consumption. These things are immortal in economies. They have been around ever since the time of Hammurabi, and they are still around today. Trade is as old as the sea itself. Consumer confidence is an eternal condition. Technology has always existed. Trace the deepest movements of economies, and they will tell the story of how change actually occurs in the economy. The message that economies carry is that change is very rarely new. Instead, it unfolds in clear patterns. It unfolds in waves.

Wave theory is the oldest science of change. It is as old as the ancient Mayan belief that catastrophe occurs every 52 years or so. Can you even call it change when it happens that slowly? It turns out that the Mayans were right. Their 52-year cycles were driven by crops and by climate.

"The Mayans had bad cycles every 52 years because the weather turned bad, which made the crops fail," Tulloch says. Mayan culture was agrarian. Crop output was driven by the sun. The more dependent the economy was on crops, the more money farmers had. The more goods they had, the more liquid they were and the more they saved, which meant that banks could lend more easily. This cycle resulted in economic growth and good times. Of course, ours is a service economy, but the waves still hold. You could even say that liquidity in the economy is still based on sunspots -- that the sun still drives our economic well-being.

The future has to start somewhere. What better place than in the past? History tends to be right in a way that reports of the moment never are. "People fall for the conventional wisdom every time," Cass says, "which, by definition, is always wrong. They are always optimistic at the top. Japan was supposed to be the great economic power. But since the late 1980s, I've been predicting that the Japanese market was going to collapse. The conventional wisdom of the 1980s was that America was in decline. People were saying that the United States was in a debt crisis and that it would have an extended recession or even a depression. I totally disagreed with that sentiment. The conventional wisdom is always the obverse of what actually happens. You have to look backward to see ahead."

Here's Cass's take on change: If you focus on what doesn't change, you can see what is genuinely important. The future is already written. Now it's just a matter of reading it.

How does the economy look to an ant?

One of Cass's clients, Pierre Wack, the legendary Royal Dutch/Shell forecaster and the father of scenario planning, used to point out that in Sanskrit, the word for "wise man" is rishi -- directly translated as "seer." Wack taught that the work you do should be a test of your perceptiveness. All great work becomes the art of seeing. And how do you perfect this ability to see? Consider a pile of dust, Wack would say. "If you could transform yourself into an ant, you would see that pile of dust as large black-and-white stones." A true rishi would first see the world through the eyes of an ant, and then through the eyes of a human.

In the afternoon, when the tide is low, Cass becomes an ant. It is then that he studies the boulders of data that roll in from international agencies: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and others. "I input it all into my database myself," Cass says. "I believe that if you work granularly, you can get a perception of things that isn't available from the written analysis. Data can tell you a lot. Opinions without data are severely risky."

What kind of data does a futurist assemble? To arrive at his reading of the waves, Cass collects an odd assortment: He adds up passenger fares, the costs of wireless calls, the export of automotive parts, consumer-confidence ratings, everything oil related, Internet-connection speeds, inflation rates, debt, bonds, loans, equities, claims, trade prices, liquidity growth, exports, demand, consumption. The list of factors that he considers goes on and on -- data from every corner of the world, from 163 countries. Cass is an ant lifting crumbs the size of boulders. The numbers in his reports are like the dots in a pointillist painting: Individually, they are tiny flicks of color. Taken together, they create a brilliant big picture.