It was either the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr or Hall of Fame New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra (or, quite possibly, neither of them) who coined the phrase: “Predictions are hard to make, especially about the future.”
Nonetheless, for the fifth year in a row, the staff of Future Perfect will venture its best estimations of what major news events will or won’t take place in 2024. Will Donald Trump return to the White House? Will OpenAI release ChatGPT-5? Will antibiotic sales for farmed animals increase? Will inflation continue to moderate? Will Oppenheimer win Best Picture? (It would have Bohr’s vote, if he were a member of the Academy and if he were alive.)
But we don’t just make blind predictions. In keeping with the best practices of forecasters, we attach probabilities to each of our predictions. Pay attention to the probabilities! 80 percent, or even 90 percent, does not mean we are certain an event will definitely happen. (If we were, we would say 100 percent.) Rather, it means that if we made five predictions or 10 predictions, we’d expect four or nine of them to come true, respectively.
And as we have every year, we’ll be keeping track of how we do in 2024 and letting you know our performance. (You can check out how we did in 2023 here.) —Bryan Walsh
The United States
Donald Trump will return to the White House (55 percent)
Predicting a presidential race a year out is tough. As political scientists Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien have noted, “polls from the beginning of the election year have virtually no predictive power” when it comes to calling presidential races. People still respond to the state of the economy the year the election is held and the new facts they learn about the candidates as campaigns progress.
A better approach than using polling is to reference some of the forecasting models political scientists have developed for predicting elections in advance. But many of these rely on data…
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