One common use of these terms is budget policy in the United States,[1] although it also occurs in many other statistical disputes.
Starting with Thomas Malthus at the end of the 18th century, various commentators have projected some short-term population growth trend for years into the future, resulting in the prediction that there would be disastrous overpopulation within a generation or two.
Malthus himself essentially claimed that British society would collapse under the weight of overpopulation by 1850, while during the 1960s the book The Population Bomb made similar dire predictions for the US by the 1980s.
For economic policy discussions, predictions that assume no significant change of behavior in response to change in incentives are often termed static projection (and in the US Congressional Budget Office, "static scoring").
[citation needed] However, when applied to dynamically responsive systems, static analysis improperly extrapolated tends to produce results that are not only incorrect but opposite in direction to what was predicted, as shown in the following applications.