2024 predictions (with bets!)

And predictions about 2024 from 100 years ago

A new year and the newsletter has a new name, The Time Capsule, and a new About page.

What happened last year?

I’m a sucker for the second draft of history, the year-end roundup. The New York Times’ Year in Pictures was like visiting a museum. I loved the print version of the WSJ’s Year in Review. The Financial Times has a scrolling timeline of photos, videos, and notable headlines from the year. And Vox did it again with another snappy, funny, and unapologetically progressive video collage, 2023, in 7 minutes.

What did our ancestors expect from 2024?

I’m also a sucker for predictions from the past. The NYTimes published a fun list of what previous writers got wrong with links to the original articles. Mark Price collected 100-year predictions from 1924, including that:

• Jazz is not destructive, and “in 100 years will be accepted as classical”

• Horses will exist only in zoos: “Daily the tractor and the automobile are taking the place of the horse in rural life. As the usefulness of the horse passes, so will the necessity for his existence.¹

• Women take charge: “As women will occupy all the highest positions, naturally men will be compelled to do all the labor; those who are not physically fit for such arduous jobs will have to stay home and wait on the babies (or mind the pets).”²

• “The average expectation of life would be at least 100 years old, and a person at 75 would be a comparatively young man.”³

• “At the present rate, the world will be decidedly overpopulated 100 years from today. Births will have to be limited in some manner for the earth cannot supply food for an excess population.”⁴

What might happen next year?

Around this time next year, I’ll check back on 2024 predictions from the Financial Times, Vox, Hard Fork, Matt Yglesias, Noah Smith, and Scott Galloway.⁵ Here are my predictions (and confidence intervals) with links to my bets on the quirky prediction platform, Manifold:

1. Biden will win the popular vote (65%)

2. Biden will win the electoral vote (55%)

3. Republicans will win the Senate (80%)

4. Democrats keep the House (60%)

   

5. Inflation will be under 3% (70%)

6. But above 2.5% (disagreeing with Galloway’s prediction)

7. The US will not enter a recession in 2024 (60%)

8. There will be no government shutdown in 2024 (50%)

9. Bitcoin’s price will not reach an all-time high by EOY (60%)

   

10. Claudia Sheinbaum will become Mexico’s first woman president. (80%)

11. 2024 will have a cooler global average temperature than 2023 (20%)

12. But 2025 will have a hotter global average temperature than 2023 (30%)

    

13. China will not invade or blockade Taiwan (70%)

14. The ICJ will rule in South Africa’s favor that Israel committed genocide (40%)

15. Argentina will not dollarize its economy (60%)

16. The Shanghai Stock Exchange Index outperforms the S&P 500 in 2024 (40%)

    

17. Apple Vision Pro will sell out in first 24 hours (30%)

18. Apple, not Microsoft, will be the most valuable company (30%)

19. Threads will not overtake X in daily active users (60%)

20. TikTok will not be banned in the US (70%)

21. TikTok will be banned in at least three more countries (40%)

22. X will have more ad revenue in 2024 than 2023 (20%) (against most predictions)

23. OpenAI releases ChatGPT-5 (40%)

24. The New York Times loses its copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI & Microsoft (20%)

25. US suicide rates will start to drop in 2024 after reaching their peak.

Other expectations:

1. AI advancements will supercharge privacy concerns, including recent research that AI can detect a photo’s location by analyzing its background, or accurately diagnose autism by scanning photos of an eyeball.

2. There will be a lot of fake videos, images, and misinformation around the 2024 elections. The vast majority of people won’t fall for it, but we’ll all become more distrustful about everything.

3. Layoffs continue in the tech and content sectors while white-collar workers unionize against AI job displacement.

4. Researchers at National Ignition Facility continue to make advancements in nuclear fusion.

5. A new, rowdy AI chatbot with few limits and rules will gain popularity and cause moral panic in the media without concrete examples of harm. More people will use chatbots for therapy. And more people will seek human therapists because they are falling in love with chatbots.

Whew! That’s a lot of predictions. I’m sure I’ll get many of them wrong, and that the year will bring surprises I had never considered, including in my own life. Hopefully, I’ll keep this up as an annual tradition and next year will include some bets/predictions for the world 10 & 20 years into the future. What about you? What are your predictions for the year? And let me know if you join Manifold, so that I can follow your bets.

1. The US horse population reached its low point in 1974 and has more than doubled since.

2. I never would have expected that Mexico will elect a women president before the US. Even as young women are more likely to have a college degree than men, they’re still doing more unpaid work at home.

3. Projected life expectancy is still below 80 years in the US, but I recently read a fascinating piece about how projections began to vastly underestimate starting in 1900.

4. Now the world’s population may decline in our lifetime — certainly in this century. Kevin Kelly is so worried about population decline that he proposes paying families $8 million over 21 years to raise children. Meanwhile, global agriculture continues its impressive productivity growth and John Deere pledges to "build a world of fully autonomous farming by 2030.”

5. Why are they nearly all men? I searched for more 2024 predictions from women writers but couldn’t find any, which seems strange. Please point me in the right direction.