Ike, Paul and Hari

I loved Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy when I read it as a teen. It had a scope you didn't often see in science fiction.  Asimov decided to do something based on the rise and fall of a civilization, after all.  Looking back, the overall story is done in a pretty haphazard fashion.  It's a collection of shorter pieces written at separate times, and one can see Asimov pulling plot points out of nowhere to keep things moving.

I may have outgrown the series.  I can't be sure since I haven't read it since, but I know I didn't like Asimov's post-trilogy Foundation books--though admittedly he wrote them decades later.  In any case, good or bad, the central premise--that a guy named Hari Seldon develops "psychohistory" into a science, and can predict precisely what will happen, and what needs to happen, centuries into the future--is absurd.  It's an exciting sf sort of idea, but in the real world it seems ridiculous that anyone could make useful predictions beyond the most general that go beyond a decade or so. (Not that they don't try, but history laughs at them, when it isn't horrified.)

Turns out Paul Krugman loved the trilogy, too. And why not--a world controlled to the nth degree by technocrats is right up his alley.  Krugman apparently sees himself as a mini-Seldon, claiming to have predicted what's going on these days while others were way off.  Good for him, except every pundit claims to have a great track record.  So please Paul, make a list of ten very specific, anti-intuitive predictions that will come true in the next decade, and then we can judge.  And if you're wrong, you've got your own foundation for a great science fiction series.