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| Forecast about energy consumption |
The media, and
sometimes even serious publications, often mistake the use of the three terms
in the title of this post. In his book Small
is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973) E.F.Schumacher explains
their differences:
We talk happily about estimating,
planning, forecasting, budgeting, about surveys, programmes, targets, and so
forth, and we tend to use these terms as if they were freely interchangeable
and as if everybody would automatically know what was meant. The result is a
great deal of confusion, because it is in fact necessary to make a number of
fundamental distinctions. The terms we use may refer to the past or to the
future; they may refer to acts or to events: and they may signify certainty or
uncertainty.
According
to Schumacher, combining the three different binary components (act-event;
past-future;
certain-uncertain)
we have 8 possibilities:
