My predictions for 2023

My predictions for 2023

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 8 minutes

My predictions for 2023

I may be totally full of shit, but at least you can call me out

My two least-favorite moments in the 2022 discourse were 1) left-wing people confidently asserting that Joe Manchin’s objections to Build Back Better were offered in bad faith due to his fealty to the coal industry and 2) right-wing people confidently asserting that Sam Bankman-Fried would be immune from legal consequences due to his campaign contributions to Democratic Party elected officials.

Those assertions rankled in my view not because being wrong is such a terrible sin, but because when those assertions were proven wrong, I saw almost no effort by the people who’d made them to grapple with their own wrongness. In the case of SBF, a few even insisted that their own complaining was the only reason Bankman-Fried was held to account, so they were in a sense vindicated. I think that’s wrong, factually, as an assessment of what happened, but even if it were correct, it wouldn’t vindicate the incorrect forecast.

This tweet is not Elon Musk urging his followers to put pressure on the SEC, CFTC, and Department of Justice to investigate FTX’s collapse — it’s him asserting, totally unconditionally, that the Democratic Party is so corrupt there would be no investigation, even though press reports of an investigation were published a couple of days before Musk’s tweet and it later came to light that the Southern District of New York was looking at FTX over the summer before the whole thing fell apart.

Similarly, once the Inflation Reduction Act finally came together, activists on the left claimed credit for the bill. And while it’s genuinely good that they decided they liked it, the fact is that if Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Ron Wyden had listened to progressive activists’ diagnosis of the situation, they would have pulled the plug on talks prematurely and there would have been neither an IRA nor a bipartisan infrastructure bill. The legacy of the 117th Congress would instead have been a bunch of tweets about politically destructive efforts to kneecap U.S. energy production via executive order.

The point of an annual predictions exercise isn’t really the exercise itself — it’s a training ground to try to be less full of shit. When you write predictions down in precise terms using exact probability estimates and then check back in later to assess yourself, you find that predicting the future is very hard. I got a bit better at it the second year I tried it. But making regular and precise predictions doesn’t mean that you magically become prescient, it means that you get better at saying precisely what you mean and acknowledging uncertainties about the future. Whatever their opinion of Manchin’s politics, why were people so sure he was acting in “bad faith” when we all know we can’t read minds? Why did people who’ve never covered the DOJ or financial regulatory agencies and who’ve never paid attention to intra-Dem factional politics feel so sure about SBF?

One of my goals for this year was to write down a larger number of predictions in hopes of gaining more insight into how well-calibrated any of this actually is. I also decided to separate the look back at my 2022 predictions from my predictions for 2023, which follow.

Ten predictions on foreign elections

I think it’s generally going to be a rough year for incumbents because the only real source of growth globally will be supply-side reforms that are inherently politically controversial. We don’t have a lot of major national elections on the schedule for this year, so I had to reach for some kind of obscure races to fill out the list.

New Democracy will be the largest party after the Greek parliamentary election (80%)

Alberto Fernández not re-elected as President of Argentina (70%)

Pedro Sánchez out as Prime Minister of Spain (70%)

Sanna Marin out as Prime Minister of Finland (70%)

Kaja Kallas re-elected as Prime Minister of Estonia (70%)

In Poland, Law and Justice will lose its majority in the Sejm (60%)

Danuše Nerudová elected President of Czechia (60%)

No federal election in Canada (80%)

Rachel Notley becomes premier of Alberta (70%)

Red-Red-Green coalition is reelected in Berlin (70%)

Two of these ten sports things will happen

I wanted to build some sports predictions into the list this year. It was challenging, though, because if you think about a question like “who’s going to win the Super Bowl?” there’s no team whose odds are over 50 percent. To say that the Eagles have a 20 percent chance of winning is to say the Eagles are very good. But if you want to know whether low-odds predictions like that are any good, you need a bunch of them.

So I came up with 10 specific sports predictions, each of which I think has a roughly 20 percent chance of coming true. So if one or three of these things happen, that’s pretty good. If zero or four (or more!) of them happen, I was off the mark.

Celtics win finals (20%)

Grizzlies win finals (20%)

Bucks make finals (20%)

Bruins win Stanley Cup (20%)

Avalanche win Stanley Cup (20%)

Bills win Super Bowl (20%)

Eagles win Super Bowl (20%)

Chiefs win Super Bowl (20%)

Bayern Munich win Champions League (20%)

Manchester City win Champions League (20%)

The economy in 2023

I think the discourse on the economy has become too negativity-inflected, and the most likely scenario is one in which inflation falls (while remaining high) and there’s no recession or huge increase in the unemployment rate. But I also think the Fed continues to lowball its own interest rate increases. Americans still have a big savings buffer from the pandemic year, so the quest to bring spending back down to trend will continue.

Inflation below 6 (80%)

Inflation below 5 (60%)

Inflation above 4 (80%)

Unemployment rate below 5 (80%)

Unemployment rate below 4 (60%)

Stock market down on the year (60%)

Core inflation higher than headline (60%)

Fed raises rates by more than 0.75 points (60%)

No recession in 2023 (70%)

Prime age employment-population ratio rises over the year (70%)

American politics!

This is what we cover here, mostly. It’s a bit of a dead year for American elections, though, so I need to dig into some weird stuff. My basic bet is that this ends up being a pretty dull year, with House Republicans struggling to execute on strategies and Senate Democrats basically churning through judicial confirmations. At this point, I think liberals may be underestimating Ron DeSantis’ odds to beat Trump — he’s assembled some pretty impressive advantages.

Hakeem Jeffries ends the year as Minority Leader (90%)

No change in Supreme Court lineup (90%)

The statutory debt ceiling is raised (90%)

No legislative changes to Social Security (90%)

Joe Biden announces re-election bid (90%)

At least one cabinet-rank official leaves the Biden administration (80%)

Joe Biden is not impeached (80%)

At least two bills pass that violate the “Hastert Rule”/majority-of-the-majority principle (80%)

Democrats retain their trifecta in New Jersey (80%)

Kevin McCarthy ends the year as Speaker of the House (70%)

Joe Biden’s approval rating remains underwater on December 1 (70%)

No immigration legislation passes (70%)

Ron DeSantis leads year-end polling averages for the GOP nomination (70%)

Dianne Feinstein is still in office at year’s end (70%)

Democrats overperform the 2020 election results baseline in House special elections (70%)

Hunter Biden indicted on federal charges (60%)

Donald Trump indicted on federal charges (60%)

Democrats retain their majority in the Virginia Senate (60%)

Republicans retain their majority in the Virginia House of Delegates (60%)

Mike Pence runs for president (60%)

Life in America

I think 2023 is basically regressing to the mean as American society continues to slowly normalize after the upheavals of 2020.

Fewer Covid-19 deaths in 2023 than in 2022 (80%)

More murders in big cities in 2023 than in 2019, as indicated by Jeff Asher’s data (80%)

Twitter continues to have more users than Mastodon, Post, and other competitors (80%)

Covid-19 continues to be the #3 cause of death (70%)

Fewer murders in big cities in 2023 than in 2022, as indicated by Jeff Asher’s data (70%)

2023 is highest ever year for American oil production (70%)

Atlanta MSA overtakes Philadelphia MSA as America’s seventh-largest (70%)

Avatar: The Way of Water cracks $2 billion in the global box office (70%)

The increase in car crash deaths continues, as of the most-updated NHTSA data (60%)

Slow Boring subscriber growth outpaces inflation (60%)

International affairs

I don’t see anything too dramatic happening here, which doesn’t mean nothing dramatic will happen. But the “drama risk” results from the fact that the total number of very-unlikely-but-it-could-happen events in the international domain is always very high. I am going to stubbornly re-up my prior failed predictions of breakthroughs in Saudi-Israeli relations and in the U.S.-Canada softwood lumber dispute because it would make sense for the countries involved to have breakthroughs. Be more reasonable, everyone!

No Chinese attack on Taiwan (90%)

No new countries join the European Union (90%)

No countries leave the European Union (90%)

No nuclear weapon use (90%)

No peace deal in the Russia-Ukraine war (80%)

Turkey and Hungary approve the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO (70%)

This year Israel and Saudi Arabia really do normalize relations! (60%)

Biden visits Vietnam (60%)

Some further easing of sanctions on Venezuela (60%)

The U.S. and Canada really do reach a deal on the softwood lumber dispute (60%)

A very dull year

This one I’m not putting a number on, but my overall forecast for 2023 is that this is going to be one of the most boring years for American politics in memory. Which doesn’t mean it will be inconsequential.

The last time politics got really tedious was in 2013-2014, which was also when the media went really crazy with Upworthy and Buzzfeed rocketing up the charts and everyone going viral with stories about how all your beloved TV shows are racist. At the end of the day, people need to do something with their time, and if political affairs don’t keep them entertained some other kind of shit will inevitably be stirred up. When the content mines don’t have any rich veins of virality to tap, people have to keep digging harder and harder in search of engagement. So if I’m right and things slow down, try hard to stay sane out there as people try to bait you into paying attention.

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