My Mom, the Psychic

When I tell people about my parents, they never believe me. But the truth is, my father really is the world’s foremost medical expert on intestinal gas, and my mom really is a psychic.
I’ve blogged enough in the past to make the case that my father really is the King of Farts.
But I have never given my mom any airtime on the blog. I’m rectifying that today.
She just released a new book entitled Soul Talks: In the Future, Reincarnation, What is Karma? The Truth about UFO’s.
As a graduate student at MIT, I put a prediction in one of my early papers. My mentor Jim Poterba made me take it out. “Nothing good ever comes of predictions,” he said. “Don’t go on record saying things that will turn out to be wrong.” So I took my prediction out of that published paper, and I have been very cautious about ever making a prediction in an academic paper or anywhere else ever since then. (As it happens, the prediction in that paper, written in 1992 – that the Republicans would take control of the House of Representatives for the first time in decades in 1994 – seemed crazy at the time but actually came true!)
My mom, unlike me, is full of bold predictions in her book. And forget about trying to predict election results two years ahead of time, she’s got views about what life will be like as much as 3000 years into the future. A few of her predictions that I found most interesting:

• In the 21st century she sees, among other things, less work and more pets, less sex and more love. She also sees the Bible losing stature and relevance.
• In the longer term, she predicts a human-induced ice age driven by an overly zealous reaction to global warming. (The cause of such an ice age would likely be mismanaged geoengineering – so it looks like my own mom doesn’t even like our chapter on climate change in SuperFreakonomics! For what it’s worth, although I’ve never asked them, I think the scientists would say that it is easier to cool the earth quickly than it is to heat the earth quickly, making my mom’s prediction seem plausible.)
• A thousand years from now, she sees world government and round houses.

To get the rest of the predictions, you’ll have to buy the book.