Jens Beckert

So you might reasonably wonder whether any of this matters, since our future visions fail all the time, we're terrible at predictions.

But I want to bring to the conversation, as I'm wrapping up, the work of the sociologist Jens Beckert, who gives us a useful way for thinking about the relationships between futures and markets.

Anyone who puts money into something new, Beckert points out, faces a basic problem.

the outcome of that investment can't be known in advance, right? So you can't, the spreadsheet, even if it's well-stimulated, well-modeled, can't tell you whether or not a product or a technology is going to pay off in 10 years.