I'll add a caveat: doomsday/everything is going to hell theories have a much *worse* track record. Probably 99% wrong. Or more.
When really bad things happen, they tend to be things nobody predicted.
Investing optimistically is usually your best move.
-W
IDK... There certainly are a large number of people warning about potential problems, a tiny fraction of which ever come to fruition, but there are also credible experts who warn about problems long before they actually occur. Examples:
1) Engineers had been warning about New Orleans’ vulnerability to hurricanes for decades before 2005.
2) Investment analysts had warned that the tech bubble of 1995-2000 was unsustainable and based on impossible growth assumptions.
3) Economists expressed concerns about house price appreciation and loan underwriting standards prior to 2007.
4) Epidemiologists warned us to invest in public health for decades as we dodged bullets with SARS, swine flu, bird flu, MERS, and Ebola.
5) Counter-terrorism officials considered the risks of an airline being flown into a skyscraper prior to 9/11.
6) Some of the earliest, most rudimentary climate change models were put together in the late 1970’s and yet were eerily accurate in predicting the next few decades of data.
IMO, there are similarities between these people who foresaw the future and differences with run-of-the-mill doomsday predictors:
1) Successful predictors tend to be well-established, mainstream, practicing professionals, often with advanced degrees, rather than people who produce media for a living such as bloggers or authors.
2) They tend to have just enough influence to draw a limited amount of media/political attention, but not enough to change minds in time. They compete for attention with politicians and professional entertainers, and they just aren’t entertaining or telegenic.
3) They spend more time working on problems in their field than communicating about them. Their warnings often appear in academic journals or internal memos rather than popular news sources.
So if you bring me a non-expert with a cultivated social media presence who spends much of his/her time trying to get views, I can predict their predictions won’t come true. Gold bugs and conspiracy theorists fall into this camp. Bring me a professor who is concerned about a link between Roundup and pancreatic cancer, or a vulnerability in the internet’s architecture that could result in a worldwide outage, or the risks of counterparties trading derivatives on securitized mortgages and I’ll listen.