Tyler Cowen mentions that they are now asking people what their most surprising prediction is instead of their most absurd belief. In many ways these are the same thing, except now the belief has to a prediction of the future.
His prediction is something that I thought wasn't that surprising, a lot of people think that real wages are going to stagnate in the non-resource rich developed world over the next ten years due to the failure of innovation to keep up with factor price equalization with the developing world. It's mostly interesting because right leaning economists usually like talking about how important it is to understand the consequences of long run compounding economic growth (This is a TED talk by his coblogger/coauthor Alex Taborrok).
Tyler Cowen did write a book about how there isn't enough innovation. My takeaway from it was that the economy as a percent of GDP is consisting more of in health care, government spending and education and these are areas where innovation is stalled for reasons relating to either government regulation, signaling constraints on new competitors (I may have gotten this part more from the GMU related economist blog posts than the book) or some combination of the two. It's nice to see him giving some weight to factor price equalization in his latest prediction, because in his book he pretended that real median wage was measuring technological progress uninfluenced by the relative advancements of the developing world.
So what would my surprising prediction be?
The internet is going to become more closed and regulated over the next 10 years.
The problem is I'm not sure that this is very surprising either. It's just a combination of a few facts:
1. The US government as it is currently run is not very good at saying "no" to copyright holders. The failure their lobbyists to pass SOPA shows how much needs to be done just to halt the expansion of their control.
2. People are spending more of their time on controlled networks like Facebook already so they are slowly becoming more comfortable with the idea of a controlled internet.
3. As shown by California finally taking steps towards collecting sales tax from Amazon, people aren't as worried about the government regulating activity on the internet.
4. In the past few years there have been an increasing amount of high profile cases of foreign hackers. Steps will be taken to stop them, these steps might not work, but they will be used to justify more controls.
I hope that I'm wrong.