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…