How we did with last year’s predictions

ECONOMISTS, AS THE old joke goes, have successfully predicted nine of the last five recessions. The main thing we got wrong in The World Ahead 2023 was being too gloomy about Western economies, predicting a brief recession in America, a deep one in the EU and a long one in Britain during 2023. But a mild winter in Europe (which softened the economic blow of high energy prices) and the strength of the labour market in America meant we were wrong. Recessions could still happen in 2024, of course, but that is the point of the joke: any prediction of a recession will come true eventually. Timing matters.

China’s abrupt dropping of its zero-covid rules in December 2022 also caught us out. We had expected some loosening during 2023, but not a total reversal of the policy (though we did suggest it as a wild-card “What If?” item). Nor did we predict October’s surprise attack on Israel by Hamas.

We did better elsewhere. The war in Ukraine did indeed become a grinding stalemate, with Russia trying to string out the conflict in the hope that Western support would crumble. The war accelerated adoption of renewable energy, hastening the clean-energy transition by five to ten years. There was much talk of “Peak China”, American politics settled into a Biden-Trump rematch, the BRICS signed up new members, arguments over “ESG” investments intensified and YIMBYs gained ground, all as we expected. (Acronyms!)

When it came to elections, we said Recep Tayyip Erdogan would probably win in Turkey, and Peter Obi would probably lose in Nigeria, much as we might wish otherwise. Sadly we were right on both counts. We noted that tensions between Sudan’s president and vice-president “could spell trouble”—and in fact a civil war broke out in April. In Argentina, we suggested keeping an eye on Javier Milei, who who is indeed in a run-off for president in November.

In technology, as anticipated, Apple revealed its mixed-reality headset, the Vision Pro—but did not use the word “metaverse”, instead preferring the term “spatial computing”. We did not, however, foresee the “iPhone moment” for artificial intelligence (AI), namely the launch of ChatGPT in late November 2022, which abruptly catapulted AI into the cultural mainstream.

So have we asked a chatbot for its predictions for 2024? No, because we think human expertise has the edge over machine learning, for now at least. But who knows what might happen in future?■

Tom Standage, Editor, The World Ahead 2024