Forecasting the Post-Socialist Future: Prognostika in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia, 1970–1989
Abstract
In the late 1980s, the Czechoslovak public was enthralled by prognostika.
Scholars and experts, mainly economists who were involved in the forecasting
project of the Academy of Sciences (CSAS) Forecasting Institute (Prognostický
ústav) and in other more informal expert activities, constituted an
important part of the newborn critically minded intelligentsia, which was
composed of professionals increasingly dissatisfied with growing economic
and political malaise; their field of inquiry became a political phenomenon
of Czechoslovak perestroika.