Our New Year’s predictions and how they fared in 2022

As we’ve done in the past, the Future Perfect team sat down last year to try to predict what was to come in 2022. It’s something we do annually to test out our forecasting abilities.

Good news: our prognostication improved slightly from the year before. Of the 22 predictions we made, 12 were judged to be definitely correct, while another two were at least partially right. That adds up to a batting average of .636, which, if we were playing in the major leagues, would earn us a contract even richer than the one the Yankees just gave Aaron Judge.

Sadly, society does not put the same monetary value on accurate punditry that it does on the ability to hit baseballs halfway to the moon. And some of our swings-and-misses were real whiffs. Among our six wrong predictions, we failed to foresee that the Democrats would keep control of the US Senate, or that inflation would rise well above the 3 percent we predicted, or that the World Health Organization (WHO) would not designate a new Covid variant of concern. (Omicron, which was just intensifying as we made our predictions last year, isn’t going anywhere.) But we did successfully predict that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade, that Emmanuel Macron would be re-elected in France, and that AI would make its presence felt in drug discovery.

As my colleague Dylan Matthews wrote last year, “Predicting the future is a skill at which some people are dramatically better than others, and practicing is one of the best ways to improve at it.” And part of practicing it is holding ourselves accountable for what we get wrong, as well as what we get right. It’s an epistemic habit the rest of the journalism world might want to consider.

So here’s what we got right and wrong about the year 2022. (And check back in January when we reveal our predictions for 2023.) —Bryan Walsh

The United States

Democrats will lose their majorities in the US House and Senate (95 percent) — WRONG

Like most election forecasters, I anticipated that Republicans would make major gains in the 2022 midterms and retake both houses of Congress. My reasoning was simple: The party out of power almost always gains seats in midterms. That’s why I so confidently predicted that Republicans would take the House and Senate this year — plus, the Democratic margin in the Senate was razor-thin, so it wouldn’t take much to knock over.

I was not just wrong but wildly overconfident in my wrongness — and I feel worse about the overconfidence. In particular, I was much too cocky about the Senate. The House really is pretty predictable, and despite Democrats doing much better than expected, they still lost that body. Ninety-five percent was probably the right odds for that prediction: It would’ve taken a truly dramatic upset for Dems to hold it. But I should’ve remembered that as recently as 2018, the party out of power retook the House while losing seats in the Senate, because the Senate, with its different electoral map and six-year terms, is an odd institution. Results depend as much on which states happen to have elections as on the national mood. —Dylan Matthews

Inflation in the US will average under 3 percent (80 percent) — WRONG

The definition of “inflation” I was using here was annualized rate of growth in the personal consumption expenditure (PCE) price index, excluding food and energy. This measure, known as “core PCE,” is the one preferred by the Federal Reserve, and thus the one most relevant for public policy. I also pledged to consider the average of the first three quarters of 2022, as the data from the final quarter is not available yet.

Taking that all into account, the real average for the first three quarters of 2022 was 4.97 percent, which discerning readers will note is higher than 3 percent. I was in good company in missing the mark here: The Fed predicted core PCE inflation of 2.7 percent in 2022; the Congressional Budget Office predicted 2 percent; professional private-sector forecasters predicted 2.5 percent in quarter one and 2.3 percent in quarter three.

Why did we all get it wrong? It’s complicated but I tried to explain in this piece from April. As I wrote then, “I unfairly dismissed the most boring, Econ 101 explanation for why inflation happens: that there was too much money sloshing around for the amount of stuff the economy was able to produce — meaning the price of that stuff went up.” —DM

Unemployment in the US will fall below 4 percent by November (80 percent) — RIGHT

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate in November was 3.7 percent.

That’s about where it was right before Covid struck — unemployment in February 2020 was 3.5 percent, which immediately spiked when the virus and attendant lockdowns and business closures hit.

For predictions about economic indicators like this one, I tend to just look at the behavior of the relevant statistic over the last several years, to get a sense of how often a prediction like this would be right just by chance. Then I adjust a bit for the specific circumstances. But sometimes it’s tricky to figure out what class you’re comparing to — unemployment rates over the last 20 years, which have rarely been below 4 percent? Unemployment rates over the last five years, which were generally below 4 percent until Covid struck?

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By the end of 2021, when I made this prediction, it looked to me like we were already moving toward the pre-Covid unemployment rates, with unemployment back down to around 4 percent, so I went with the latter as the point of comparison. This prediction was just that unemployment would fall a little farther in 2022, which it did. —Kelsey Piper

The Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade (65 percent) — RIGHT

I predicted that the Supreme Court would use the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn Roe, and further that it would do so with the votes of all conservatives but John Roberts. That was the impression I got from court observers like my colleague Ian Millhiser and the prediction market at FantasyScotus, following oral arguments.

Given how badly I miffed the midterm and inflation predictions, I’m somewhat relieved that I got this one right in every particular. Roberts joined in the decision but not in Samuel Alito’s opinion overruling Roe. It’s not the outcome I wanted, but it was easily foreseeable ahead of time. —DM

Stephen Breyer will retire from the Supreme Court (55 percent) — RIGHT

I predicted that Breyer, partly reacting to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s arrogant insistence on staying on the Supreme Court during the Obama administration (which directly contributed to the Dobbs ruling), would retire while he was still confident Joe Biden had a Democratic Senate to confirm his replacement. That is indeed what Breyer did, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson now holds that seat.

If anything, I was underconfident. I probably could have put higher odds on a Breyer retirement, given what a plain disaster Ginsburg’s decision was proven to be for the causes she and Breyer care(d) about. —DM

The world

Emmanuel Macron will be reelected as president of France (65 percent) — RIGHT

My reasoning here was that Macron was solidly ahead of both far-right candidates in polling (Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen) and that for him to have a real fight, he’d have to face Gaullist center-right contender Valérie Pécresse in the runoff election.

But the electorate seemed to shift leftward in the early months of 2022. Both Zemmour and Pécresse saw their support fall off a cliff, with the latter doing worse than Le Pen in head-to-head polls against Macron. Meanwhile, far-left contender Jean-Luc Mélenchon saw a late surge in polling and came a close third, almost making the runoff against Macron. Ultimately, though, as most people suspected, the runoff was a rerun of 2017, with Macron and Le Pen facing off, and the latter, dogged by her longstanding support of Vladimir Putin in a campaign happening in the wake of the Ukraine invasion, lost by about 10 points.

I might have underestimated Macron here, or perhaps overestimated his opponents. But 65 percent made sense a year ago and I think it’s a defensible number now. —DM

Jair Bolsonaro will be reelected as president of Brazil (55 percent) — WRONG

This is what you get for defying the polls! Far-right death squad aficionado Bolsonaro was, at the time I wrote this prediction, behind leftist former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in public polling. But I thought the incumbency advantage for South American presidents and the history of polling misses in past Brazilian presidential races gave Bolsonaro a slight advantage anyway.

I was wrong, and Lula won narrowly in the runoff. On a personal level I’m happy; I certainly prefer Lula’s politics. But this was a tough miss on a prediction level. —DM

Bongbong Marcos will be elected as president of the Philippines (55 percent) — RIGHT

Polling in the Philippine election was sparse going into 2022, so I didn’t want to be overly confident. That said, Bongbong Marcos, the son of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, was always the obvious frontrunner, and so I felt confident that he had the best odds of anybody, even if he wasn’t the overwhelming favorite.

I was underconfident. Marcos did not merely win but demolished the opposition, beating his nearest opponent by over 30 points. He’s been less authoritarian as president than I had feared, if still not ideal, but he certainly won by more than I expected. —DM

Rebels will NOT capture the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa (55 percent) — RIGHT

This was an odd prediction: Initially I had thought that the Tigray…