![]() ![]() 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) - RIGHTĪccording to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate in November was 3.7 percent. Why did we all get it wrong? It’s complicated but I tried to explain in this piece from April. 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. 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 also pledged to consider the average of the first three quarters of 2022, as the data from the final quarter is not available yet. This measure, known as “core PCE,” is the one preferred by the Federal Reserve, and thus the one most relevant for public policy. 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. Dylan Matthews Inflation in the US will average under 3 percent (80 percent) - WRONG Results depend as much on which states happen to have elections as on the national mood. 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. Ninety-five percent was probably the right odds for that prediction: It would’ve taken a truly dramatic upset for Dems to hold it. The House really is pretty predictable, and despite Democrats doing much better than expected, they still lost that body. In particular, I was much too cocky about the Senate. I was not just wrong but wildly overconfident in my wrongness - and I feel worse about the overconfidence. 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. My reasoning was simple: The party out of power almost always gains seats in midterms. Like most election forecasters, I anticipated that Republicans would make major gains in the 2022 midterms and retake both houses of Congress. (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 ![]() So here’s what we got right and wrong about the year 2022. It’s an epistemic habit the rest of the journalism world might want to consider. Wade, that Emmanuel Macron would be re-elected in France, and that AI would make its presence felt in drug discovery.Īs 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. (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. 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. And some of our swings-and-misses were real whiffs. 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. 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. Of the 22 predictions we made, 12 were judged to be definitely correct, while another two were at least partially right. Good news: our prognostication improved slightly from the year before. It’s something we do annually to test out our forecasting abilities. 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. ![]()
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