In the beginning of 2023, I published several predictions about the year. 2023 is over, so how’d I do? Let’s find out (in order of highest to lowest confidence) with pass/fail scoring…
- Biden officially announces his re-election campaign (90%): Pass.
- Donald Trump doesn’t spend any time in jail, house arrest etc. He lives the year free. (90%): Pass.
- Congress passes no significant legislation about immigration (90%): Pass. Sadly, the GOP strategy is now to score political points by yelling about the broken system and the consequences while refusing to do anything to fix it.
- Muttroxia will not have any months with over ten posts after January. (80%): Pass. Not even close.
- The NBA MVP will be Jokic or Giannis (80%) if the Celtics don’t win the championship.: Fail, the MVP was Embid. However, after the finals, Jokic was generally accepted as the best player in the league and has maintained that status into this season. Although I did get this one wrong in letter, I got it right in spirit. I’m giving myself a half pass point.
- Donald Trump doesn’t have any final civil judgements found against him personally (that is, no fines or consequences) (70%): Fail. Trump was found guilty in the sexual abuse of E Jean Carroll. He is appealing, so technically the prediction is still true (I said “final”), but the spirit of the prediction was clearly wrong.
- Inflation is below 4% by the end of 2023 (70%): Pass. Wish I had given an official definition for this since there are different ways of measuring inflation. Fortunately, they all give the same answer. Inflation started declining in the beginning of the year, and is now quickly approaching the point where we start panicking about the debt or something else instead. The consumer price index is at 3.4%. Core inflation is 3.8%.
- Average Gas Price ends the year below $2.50. (70%): Fail. It’s been up and down, and appears to be declining, but is around $3.20. Dang, I really thought I had this one.
- The Justice Department does not charge Donald Trump personally for anything related to Jan 6th. (70%): Fail. In August, Jack Smith brought charges against Donald Trump personally. I’m glad to be wrong on this one!
- Celtics make it to the Eastern Conference finals (70%): Pass. The Celtics went to the Eastern Conference Finals and choked to the Heat. You can bet my 2024 will be more optimistic.
- Electric car sales top 10% in the USA. (70%) Fail. Q4 was 8.1%. While this was big growth over 2022, it wasn’t what I expected with the ongoing trends and massive government subsidies. While the manufacturers pivoted hard to electric, consumer interest seemed to top off.
- UGA will repeat as college football champs. (60%): Pass. Remember this is for 2023, and they sure did repeat. They got pretty close to getting three in a row actually.
- Generally there won’t be a massive rollback of abortion rights. (60%, but don’t know how to measure this.): Fail. It wasn’t as bad as some feared, but it’s been bad enough and Texas be so crazy.
- Joe Biden is not impeached (60%): Pass.
- By the end of 2023, I’ll forgot I made this post and need a reminder (80%). Fail. This was a lot of fun. Predicting is hard!
Scores:
- 90%ers: 3 out of 3
- 80%ers: 1.5 out of 2
- 70%ers: 2 out of 6
- 60%ers: 2 out of 4
Total: 8.5 out of 15. That seems pretty good for my first try at this. Almost all the 80% and up predictions came in.