I'm reading a book of short stories by the Australian sci-fi author Greg Egan. One of the stories, titled "The hundred light year diary," describes a future in which, due to a time fluke in a far-flung galaxy, humans gain the ability to write and send messages back to their future selves. However, Egan's world isn't one where the future can be changed - the message that is sent will always be sent and (if the message describes events accurately) those events will always happen.
One might think that perfect knowledge of the events of the next hundred years might induce a severe contraction in the market for macroeconomic analysis. Not so fast:
The causes of that impending recession were still being debated by economists; most claimed it was an 'essential precursor' of the prosperity of the nineties, and that the market, in its infinite, time-spanning wisdom, would choose/had chosen the best of all possible futures. Personally, I suspect it simply proved that even foresight was no cure for incompetence.Unfortunately, knowing the future just increases our sample size - it doesn't fix our identification issues.