Predictions: Looking Back to 2019 and Forward to 2020
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At the beginning of 2017 I made some predictions. These were not predictions just for the coming year, but rather predictions for the next 100 years. A list of black swans that I thought either would or would not come to pass. (War? Yes. AI Singularity? No.) Two years later I haven’t been wrong or right yet about any of them, but that’s what I expected, they are black swans after all. But I still feel the need, on the occasion of the new year, to comment on the future, which means that in the absence of anything new to say about my 100 year predictions, I’ve had to turn to more specific predictions. Which is what I did last year. And like everyone else (myself included) you’re probably wondering how I did.
I started off by predicting: All of my long-standing predictions continue to hold up, with some getting a little more likely and some a little less, but none in serious danger.
After doing my annual review of them (something I would recommend, particularly if you weren’t around when I initially made those predictions) this continues to be true. As one example, I predicted that immortality would never be achieved. My impression has always been that transhumanists considered this one of the easier goals to accomplish, and yet we’ve actually been going the opposite direction for several years, with life expectancy falling year after year, including the most recent numbers.
As I was writing this, the news about GPT-2s ability to play chess came out. Which, I’ll have to admit, does appear to be a major step towards falsifying my long term prediction that we will never have a general AI that can do everything a human can do, but I still think we’ve got a long way to go, farther than most people think.
I went on to predict: Populism will be the dominant force in the West for the foreseeable future. Globalism is on the decline if not effectively dead already.
I will confess that I’m not entirely sure why I limited it to “the West”. Surely this was and is true. The historic general election win by the Tories to finally push Brexit through, the not quite dead Yellow Vests Movement in France and the popularity of Sanders, Warren and Trump in the run up to the election are all examples of this. But it’s really outside of the West where populism made itself felt in 2019. One example of that, of course, are the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, as well as protests in such diverse places as Columbia, Sudan and Iran. But it’s the protests in Chile and India that I want to focus on.
The fascinating thing about the Chilean protests is that Chile was one of the wealthiest countries in South America, and seemed to be doing great, at least from a globalist perspective. But then, because of a 4% rate increase in public transportation fees in the capital of Santiago, mass protests broke out, encompassing over a million people and involving demands for a new constitution. I used the term “globalist perspective” just now, which felt kind of clunky, but it also gets at what I mean. From the perspective of the free flow of capital and metrics like GDP and trade, Chile was doing great. Beyond that Chile was ranked 28th out of 162 countries on the freedom index, so it had good institutions as well. But for some reason, even with all that, there was another level on which it’s citizens felt things were going horribly. It’s an interesting question to consider if things are actually going horribly, or if the modern world has created unrealistic expectations, but neither is particularly encouraging, and of the two, unrealistic expectations may be worse.
Turning to India, I ended last year’s post by quoting from Tyler Cowen, “Hindu nationalism [is] on the rise, [but] India seems to be evolving intellectually in a multiplicity of directions, few of them familiar to most Americans.” I think he was correct, but also “Hindu nationalism” is a very close cousin, or even a sibling to Hindu populism, and, as is so often the case, an increase in one kind of populism has led to increases in other sorts of populism. In India’s case to increased expressions of Muslim populism. Which has resulted in huge rallies taking place in the major cities over the last few weeks in protest of an immigration law.
Speaking more generally, my sense is that these populist uprisings come in waves. There was the Arab Spring. (Apparently Chile is part of the Latin America Spring.) There was the whole wave of governments changing immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, which included Tiananmen Square. (Which unfortunately did not result in a change of government.) In 1968 there were worldwide protests and if you want to go really far back there were the revolutions of 1848. It seems clear that we’re currently seeing another wave. (Are they coming more frequently?) And the big question is whether or not this wave has crested yet. My prediction is that it hasn’t, that 2020 will see a spreading and intensification of such protests.
My next prediction concerned the fight against global warming, and I predicted: Carbon taxes are going to be difficult to implement, and will not see widespread adoption.
Like many of my predictions this is more long term, but still accurate. To the best of my knowledge while there was lots of sturm und drang about climate change, mostly involving Greta Thunberg, I don’t recall major climate change related policies being implemented by any government, and certainly not by the US and China, the two biggest emitters. Of course, looking back this prediction once again relates back to populism, in particular the Yellow Vest Movement, who demanded that the government not go ahead with the scheduled 2019 increase to the carbon tax, which is in fact exactly what happened. Also Alberta repealed its carbon tax in 2019. On further reflection, this particular prediction seems too specific to be something I add to the list of things I continue to track, but it does seem largely correct.
From there I went on to predict: Social media will continue to change politics rapidly and in unforeseen ways.
When people talk about the protests mentioned above social media always comes into play. And in fact it’s difficult to imagine that the Hong Kong protests could have lasted as long as they have without the presence of social platforms like Telegram and the like. And it’s difficult to imagine how the Chilean protests could have formed so quickly and over something which otherwise seems so minor in the absence of social media.
But of course the true test will be the 2020 election. And this is where I continue to maintain that we can’t yet predict how social media will impact things. I would be surprised if some of the avenues for abuse which existed in 2016 hadn’t been closed down, but I would be equally surprised if new avenues of abuse don’t open up.
My next prediction was perhaps my most specific: There will be a US recession before the next election. It will make things worse.
Despite its specificity, I could have done better. What I was getting at is that a softening economy will be a factor in the next election. This might take the form of a formal recession (that is negative GDP growth for two successive quarters) or it might be a more general loss of consumer confidence without being a formal recession. In particular I could see a recession starting before the election, but not having the time to wrack up the full two quarters of negative growth before the election actually takes place.
In any event I stand by this prediction, though I continue to be surprised by the growth of the economy. As you may have heard the US is currently in the longest economic expansion in history. And if I’m wrong, and the economy continues to grow up through the election, then I’ll make a further prediction, Trump will be re-elected. The Economist agrees with me, in their capsule review of the coming year:
Having survived the impeachment process, Donald Trump will be re-elected president if the American economy remains strong and the opposition Democrats nominate a candidate who is perceived to be too far to the left. The economy is, however, weakening, and a slump of some kind in 2020 is all but certain, lengthening Mr Trump’s odds.
As long as we’re on the subject of the economy, I came across something else that was very alarming the other day.
Waves of debt accumulation have been a recurrent feature of the global economy over the past fifty years. In emerging and developing countries, there have been four major debt waves since 1970. The first three waves ended in financial crises—the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, the Asia financial crisis of the late 1990s, and the global financial crisis of 2007-2009.
A fourth wave of debt began in 2010 and debt has reached $55 trillion in 2018, making it the largest, broadest and fastest growing of the four. While debt financing can help meet urgent development needs such as basic infrastructure, much of the current debt wave is taking riskier forms. Low-income countries are increasingly borrowing from creditors outside the traditional Paris Club lenders, notably from China. Some of these lenders impose non-disclosure clauses and collateral requirements that obscure the scale and nature of debt loads. There are concerns that governments are not as effective as they need to be in investing the loans in physical and human capital. In fact, in many developing countries, public investment has been falling even as debt burdens rise.
That’s from a World Bank Report. Make of it what you will, but the current conditions certainly sounds like previous conditions which ended in crisis and catastrophe, and if the report is to be believed conditions are much worse now than on the previous three occasions. I understand that if it does happen there’s some chance it won’t affect the US, but given how interconnected the world economy is, that doesn’t seem particularly likely. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
I should mention that one of my long term predictions is that: The US government’s debt will eventually be the source of a gigantic global meltdown. And while the debt mentioned in the report is mostly in countries outside of the US, it is in the same ballpark.
Moving on, my next prediction was: Authoritarianism is on the rise elsewhere, particularly in Russia and China.
I would think that the Hong Kong protests are definitive proof of rising authoritarianism in China or at least continuing authoritarianism. But on top of that 2019 saw an increase in the repression of the Uyghurs, most notably their internment in re-education camps, and this in spite of the greater visibility and condemnation these camps have collected. But what about Russia? Here things seem to have been quieter than I expected, and I will admit that I was too pessimistic when it came to Russia. Though they are still plenty authoritarian, and it will be interesting to see what happens as it gets closer to the end of Putin’s term in 2024.
Those two countries aside, I actually argued that authoritarianism is on the rise generally, and this seems to be confirmed by Freedom House, which said that in 2018 that freedom declined in 68 countries while only increasing in 50, and that this continues 13 consecutive years of decline. You did read that correctly, I gave the numbers for 2018, because those are the most recent numbers available, but I’m predicting that when the 2019 numbers come in, that they’ll also show a net decline in freedom.
My final specific prediction from last year was: The jockeying for regional power in the Middle East will intensify.
Well, if this didn’t happen in 2019 (and I think it did) then it certainly happened in 2020 when the US killed Qasem Soleimani. Though to be fair, while the killing definitely checks the “intensify” box, it’s not quite as good at checking the “regional power” box. Though any move that knocks Iran down a peg has to be good news for at least one of the other powers in the region, which creates a strong suspicion that the US’s increasing aggressiveness towards Iran might be on behalf of one or more of those other powers.
Still, it was the US who did it, and it’s really in that context that it’s the most interesting. What does the Soleimani killing say about ongoing American hegemony? First, it’s hard, but not impossible to imagine any president other than Trump ordering the strike. (Apparently the Pentagon was “stunned” when he chose that option.) Second and more speculatively, I would argue this illustrates that, while the ability of the US military to project force wherever it wants is still alive and well, such force projection is going to become increasingly complicated and precarious.
At this point it’s tempting to go on a tangent and discuss the wisdom or foolishness of killing Soleimani, though I don’t know that it’s really clearly one or the other. He was clearly a bad guy, and the type of warfare he specialized in was particularly loathsome. That said does killing any one person, regardless of how important, really do much to slow things down?
Perhaps the biggest argument for it being foolish would have to be the precedent it sets. Adding the option of using drones to surgically kill foreign leaders you don’t like, seems both dangerous and destabilizing, but is it also inevitable? Probably, though I am sympathetic to the idea that Trump set the precedent and opened the gates earlier than Clinton (or any of a hundred other presidential candidates you might imagine.)
That covers all of my previous predictions to one degree or another, along with adding a few more and now you probably want some new predictions. In particular, everyone wants to know who’s going to win the 2020 presidential election, so I guess I’ll start with that. To begin with I’m predicting that the Democrats are going to end up having a brokered convention. Okay, not actually, but I really hope it happens, I have long thought that it would be the most interesting thing that could happen for a political junkie like me. But it hasn’t happened since 1952, and since then both parties have put a lot of things in place to keep them from happening, because brokered conventions look bad for the party. That said, some of these things, like superdelegates, have been recently been weakened. Also Democrats allocate delegates proportionally rather than winner take all like the Republicans. Finally, it does seem that recently we’ve been getting closer. Certainly there was talk of it when Obama secured the nomination in 2008, and then again in 2016 when they were trying to figure out how to stop Trump.. So fingers crossed for 2020.
If it’s not going to be a brokered convention, then the candidate will have to come out of the primaries, which may be even harder to predict than who would emerge from a convention fight. Which is to say I honestly have no idea who’s going to end up as the Democratic candidate. Which makes it difficult to predict the winner in November. Since I basically agree with The Economist quote above, there is a real danger of Trump winning if they nominate Sanders or Warren. I know the last election felt chaotic, but I think 2020 will be more chaotic by a significant margin.
All that said, gun to my head, I think Biden will squeak into being the Democratic nominee and then beat Trump when the economy softens just before the election. And I hope that this will bring a measure of calm to the country, but also I have serious doubts about Biden (my favorite recent description of him is confused old man) and I know that a lot of people really think he’s going to collapse during the election and hand it to Trump. Which, if you’re one of the Democrats voting in the primary, would be a bad thing.
A lot hinges on whether Bloomberg is going to make a dent in the race. I kind of like Bloomberg. I think technocrats are overrated in general, but given the alternative, a competent technocrat could be very refreshing, and I can see why he entered the race. With Biden’s many gaffes there does seem to be a definite dearth of candidates in that category. Unfortunately, despite dropping a truly staggering amount of money he’s still polling fifth. In any case, there’s a lot of moving parts, and any number of things can happen, still, on top of my prediction that Biden will squeak in as the Democratic nominee, I’m predicting that even if he doesn’t a Democrat will win the 2020 election. But I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
In summary, I’m predicting:
Everything I predicted in 2017.
A continuation of my predictions from last year with some pivots:
More populism, less globalism. Specifically that protests will get worse in 2020.
No significant reduction in global CO2 emissions (a drop of greater than 5%)
Social media will continue to have an unpredictable effect on politics, but the effect will be negative.
That the US economy will soften enough to cause Trump to lose.
That the newest wave of debt accumulation will cause enormous problems (at least as bad as the other three waves) by the end of the decade.
Authoritarianism will continue to increase and liberal democracy will continue its retreat.
The Middle East will get worse.
Biden will squeak into the Democractic nomination.
The Democrats will win in 2020.
As long as we’re talking about the election and conditions this time next year, I should interject a quick tangent. I was out to lunch with a friend of mine the other day and he predicted that Trump will lose the election, but that in between the election and the inauguration Russia will convince North Korea to use one of their nukes to create a high altitude EMP which will take out most of the electronics in the US, resulting in a nationwide descent into chaos. This will allow Trump to declare martial law, suspending the results of the election and the inauguration of the new president. And then, to cap it all off, Trump will use the crisis as an excuse to invite in Russian troops as peacekeepers. After hearing this I offered him 1000-1 odds that this specific scenario would not happen. He decided to put down $10, so at this point next year, I’ll either be $10 richer, or I’ll have to scrounge up the equivalent of $10,000 in gold while dealing with the collapse of America and a very weird real-life version of Red Dawn.
I will say though, as someone with a passion for catastrophe, I give his prediction for 2020 full marks for effort. It is certainly far and away the most vivid scenario for the 2020 election that I have heard. And, speaking of vivid catastrophes. With my new focus on eschatology, one imagines that I should make some eschatological predictions as well. But of course I can’t. And that’s kind of the whole point. If I was able to predict massive catastrophes in advance then presumably lots of people could do it, and some of those people would be in a position to stop those catastrophes. Meaning that true catastrophes are only what can’t be predicted, or what can’t be stopped even if someone could predict them. That may in fact be fundamental to the definition of eschatology no matter how you slice it, going all the way back to the New Testament:
Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh.
This injunction applies not only to the Son of Man but also to giant asteroids, terrorist nukes and even the election of Donald Trump, and it’s going to be the subject of my next post.
I have one final prediction, that my monthly patreon donations will be higher at the end of 2020 than at the start. I know what you’re thinking, why that snarky, arrogant… In fact saying it makes you not want to donate, but then everyone has to feel the same way, which ends up being a large coordination problem. On the other hand it just takes one person to make the prediction true, and that person could be you!