“I don’t know of many people anymore whose day-to-day pursuit is the academic study of the future,” said Amy Webb, a futurist who founded the Future Today Institute.

Image Stuart Goldenberg Credit... Stuart Goldenberg

It didn’t have to come to this. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, as the American government began to spend huge sums in the Cold War, futurists became the high priests of the coming age. Forecasting became institutionalized; research institutes like RAND, SRI and MITRE worked on long-range projections about technology, global politics and weaponry, and world leaders and businesses took their forecasts as seriously as news of the present day.

In 1972, the federal government even blessed the emerging field of futurism with a new research agency, the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, which reviewed proposed legislation for its long-term effects. Futurists were optimistic about lawmakers’ new interest in the long term.

“Congressmen and their staffs are searching for ways to make government more anticipatory,” Edward Cornish, president of the World Future Society, said in 1978. “They’re beginning to realize that legislation will remain on the books for 25 or 50 years before it’s reviewed, and they want to be sure that what they do now won’t have an adverse impact years from today.”

But since the 1980s, futurism has fallen from grace. For one thing, it was taken over by marketers.

“‘Futurist’ always sounded like this weird, made-up, science-fiction term,’” Ms. Webb said, even though in its early years, people were doing deep, nuanced research on how various tech and social movements would shape the world.

Futurism’s reputation for hucksterism became self-fulfilling as people who called themselves futurists made and sold predictions about products, and went on the conference circuit to push them. Long-term thinking became associated with the sort of new-agey “thinkfluencers” who hung out at TED and Davos, and who went by names like Shingy and Faith Popcorn. Futurism became a joke, not a science.

The end of the Cold War and a rise in partisan political interests also changed how lawmakers saw the utility of looking at the future. In the Reagan years, many on the right began to see the government as the cause of most of the nation’s ills. The idea that the government could do something as difficult as predict the future came to be considered a ridiculous waste of money.