Soviet apparatchiks spent more than seven decades creating five-year plans based on their predictions about the most microscopic details of the communist USSR’s economy. And every five years, Soviet apologists would trot out a thousand excuses other than the actual reason for the continuous failures of those plans.

The failures were inevitable, of course, because the utter inability of government bureaucrats to predict much of anything about a national economy. So the plans were never more than official fantasies. America has its own apparatchiks and official fantasies, thanks to prophets laboring in the Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy. The EIA’s record on predicting the price of a barrel of oil over the years has been about as reliable as Soviet crop projections.