“It’s
hard to make predictions, especially about the future.”
So said
the great Yogi Berra, and the events of the past twelve months have born him
out. To begin with, there was the Coronavirus, which was unforeseeable, except
in the statistical sense – that is to say, epidemiologists have always been
saying things like: “there’s a one to two percent chance that a global flu-like
pandemic will break out during the next year,” and over a long enough timescale,
they’ll be right.
But
non-virus related news can be even more strange and surprising. For example, I
very much doubt that, even a few years ago, anyone would have foreseen a
Russian state-owned news site running an opinion piece with the headline: “Don’t Dismiss US Coup.”
So if you
go back and read the introductory section of my annual predictions piece from a
year ago, it will probably leave you feeling wistful, as I talked long and loud
about how, unlike most people in the media, I was going to make my predictions
on the basis of steady trends, historical cycles, and the assumption that, on
the whole, the upcoming year was unlikely to be any more exciting than any
other year.
And because
of that, I insisted, my readers could rest assured that my predictions would be
more accurate than anything they got from rival websites, which tend to focus
on dramatic events that make good clickbait but don’t get around to happening
in the real world.
Well, I
still think I was right in principle – steady trends, historical cycles, and
the assumption that the upcoming year will be no more spectacular than the one
before it usually produce better predictions than any other method. But as it
turned out, 2020 was the wrong year to get into the prediction business using that
approach.
So before
making new forecasts for 2021, I should probably take a look at how my predictions
for 2020 fared.
My
election predictions were the worst of the set. I said that Joe Biden was going
to win the Democratic primary, as indeed he did, but I also predicted that
Biden would lose to Donald Trump in the general election, that the Republicans
would hold the Senate, and that they would most likely take back the House as
well.
Another
Trump victory seemed like a sound bet when I made it, since it’s very rare for
the White House to switch parties after just four years. In fact, it had
happened only once in previous century, with Carter’s loss in 1980, amid
circumstance that, so it seemed, had little in common with those facing Donald Trump in 2020.
To be
fair, once summer came along, with the Covid Recession and the George Floyd Riots
in full swing and Trump failing to show any apparent leadership, I admitted
that I didn’t feel sure about his upcoming victory anymore. And when he refused
to admit that he had lost in November and gave Democratic base a reason to
come out in force in the Georgia elections, instead of resting on its laurels
like a new President’s party usually does, I admitted that the Senate was up in
the air as well.
Still, at
the end of the day, my election forecasting record is one for four – I was
right about the primary, and wrong about all three components of the general
election. This is certainly not something that I would like to repeat.
Fortunately,
my non-election predictions fared better. In short, I had said that,
officially, the US economy would grow somewhat, but that the real economy would
continue to contract while the authorities kept gimmicking the inflation statistics to hide what was happening. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping would still be
the presidents of their respective countries at the year’s end, the United States
would avoid going to war with Russia, China, or Iran, and Iran would avoid war
with Israel.
The
protests in Hong Kong would be de-escalated peacefully, while China’s much
worse human rights abuses in Uyghuristan would continue to get little attention
from the West. Also, nothing significant would come of the US-China trade war,
and while the financial trends leading Eurasia to dedollarize would continue,
they wouldn’t be felt quickly enough to threaten global dollar dominance during
the year to come.
As it
turned out, neither Covid-19, the George Floyd riots, nor the “Stop-the-Steal”
lunacy got in the way of any of these things playing out the way that I said
they would. And that includes, bizarrely enough, my prediction that official
GDP would grow. Right now, the authorities are reporting a 33.4 percent gain
in third quarter GDP that more than makes up for the 31.4 percent loss in the
second quarter of 2020. Add in the 8.7 percent growth forecast by the Fed for
Q4 (which exceeds the 5.0 percent loss in Q1) and you are looking at a positive
net growth rate.
Obviously,
these numbers don’t reflect the situation on the ground for ordinary Americans;
the 100,000 or so small businesses that went under during the lockdowns are not,
for the most part, popping right back up. Nevertheless, when the official
figures are calculated, the collapse of real industry can easily end up being
overshadowed by financialization, i.e. by an increase in the American upper
classes’ supply of hallucinatory paper wealth.
Perhaps
you have wondered why America’s Big Three automakers – Ford, GM, and Chrysler – are together worth $144 billion, while the combined market capitalizations of NIO,
XPing, and Li Auto, a trio of Chinese electric car startups that have yet to
make a dime in profits, stands at $171 billion? Or why Tesla is now valued at
$809 billion, an amount of money it would take about 1,600 years to earn back at
its current sales rate?
This is
happening because, as I write this, the electric vehicle industry is going
through a speculatory bubble that makes pets.com look like a sound
investment. Eventually, the bubble will pop, as all bubbles do, but for now, this
illusory growth – along with a great many other forms of illusory growth – counts
for just as much in the official GDP numbers as any other economic activity.
When the people
in power say that the economy is doing well – which they will be saying a lot
more once Joe Biden is sworn in as President – you can rest assured that they
are blowing smoke.
And this
is a topic that leads nicely into my predictions for 2021. Fortunately, there
are no elections during the upcoming year, so I can start with economics
instead.
I expect
that the official economy will keep growing in 2021, and that the real economy will
keep contracting. Since phrases like “keep growing,” and “keep contracting,” are
by themselves rather vague, I’ll say up front that you can call me wrong if the
official GDP (as displayed here) is less than $22 trillion at the year’s end (it’s
currently $21.3 trillion), or if the real value of a dollar (as calculated by
my own method, described here) doesn’t fall by at least eleven percent during 2021.
I suspect
that the Democrats in Congress will spend liberally once Joe Biden is sworn in,
both because that’s their usual response to crisis, and also because having
their man in the White House means that they get to take credit for any
short-term economic gains this causes. The spending will probably start with ≥$2,000
payments to each citizen, plus fatter unemployment checks, but as usual most of
the money will end up going to special interests. Expect the national debt to
have exceeded $31.5 trillion by the last day of December, and the debt-to-GDP
ratio to have risen to at least 140 percent.
As for
other legislation, I expect that the House of Representatives will pass the DC
statehood bill again (and perhaps also a bill for Puerto Rico) but I don’t
think that either will get through the Senate, because the Democrats’ majority
there is just too thin. After all, they talked about admitting new states in
2009, when they had 60 seats, and didn’t get around to doing it, so I don’t
expect them to do it now. For the same reason, I’m confident that they won’t
add seats to the Supreme Court.
After
Biden’s inauguration, I expect a rapid diedown of the Democratic party’s enthusiasm
for maximal Covid lockdowns. The explanation here is as cynical as it is
obvious: once Democrats stand to benefit from a return to prosperity and
normalcy, they will become the party of prosperity and normalcy.
Big Tech
is going to crack down hard in the wake of Donald Trump’s riot/quarter-assed coup
attempt last Wednesday. Expect way more deplatformings in 2021 than in 2020. And
it won’t stop with just the QAnon people – anyone associated with any form of conservatism or Trumpistry is at risk of losing access to social media, web hosting, other online
services, publishers, banks, etc. Meanwhile, right-wingers will keep on losing
their jobs and professional standing for criticizing the BLM and LGBT movements.
Whether the
upcoming year will feature as many riots as the last one is a tricky question. Before
6 January – that is, when riots in America were exclusively the purview of the Left
– I expected the leftist troublemakers to get a lot calmer when their own guy
was in the White House and they no longer had a bright orange hate object on
which to focus their rage. But now that both sides are in on the rioting
business, we may well end up with back-and-forth street violence and low-level
thuggery all year long.
One thing
should be clear, though: none of the insurrectionary rhetoric will lead to the
fall of the government, or to a widespread breakdown of civil order. You may be
thinking: “What about the breakdown of civil order that we’ve been having since
last May?” But that, as I explained in this post back in August, was special
anarchy, not general anarchy.
General
anarchy means that chaos reigns because the laws, in general, aren’t being enforced.
Special anarchy, on the other hand, means that specific people, with the
support of elements within the government, can commit specific crimes against
specific other people without facing the usual consequences.
The
George Floyd riots were a case of special anarchy: perhaps you heard about the
man who got 100 hours of community service for toppling a Christopher Columbus
statue, even as most other statue topplers were never apprehended at all? Well,
that sort of thing doesn’t happen unless there are powerful elements within the
government that approve of statue toppling.
I suppose
that a lot of people might disagree with my assertion that violence on the part
of undisciplined street thugs, from either the Left or the Right, poses no real
threat to the government. Perhaps they will point to Weimar Germany as a
counterexample – after all, years of insufficiently-punished thuggery and
street violence by the Nazi Party’s paramilitary arm, the SA, did indeed end with the
establishment of a Nazi dictatorship. And this happened even though the typical
SA Mann was an undisciplined thug when compared with the regular German Army.
But the
comparison with our day still doesn’t hold. Next to BLM and the Stop-the-Steal
people, the SA is the frickin’ Delta Force. None of the actors in America's current brouhaha have the wherewithal to
pose a serious threat to the powers that be, and that isn’t going to change
anytime soon.
As for
the role of the Coronavirus in the coming year’s events, I honestly don’t have
all that much to say. I’m not going to try to predict its future
growth/dissipation in any detail; the only thing I’m fairly certain about is
that by the end of the year it will have mostly faded away, either through successful
vaccination, or else through the natural process of evolution into a less
deadly form.
I have no
idea how well any of the new vaccines will work. The fact that Covid-19 mutates
rapidly, and that other members of the coronavirus family have proven resistant
to vaccination in the past, certainly doesn’t bode well, and I have often
criticized the belief, rooted in what many thinkers call the Myth of Progress, that
every problem must have a technological solution if only somebody, somewhere
tries hard enough to find it.
At the
same time, I am not a Luddite, and I have nothing against innovation so long as
it’s done by clear-headed people who are aware of their limits and recognize that
success isn’t inevitable. I don’t believe that the Covid vaccines, or vaccines
in general, are part of a conspiracy to harm people, and I will probably get
vaccinated myself later this spring.
My
foreign policy predictions are largely identical to what they were last year.
The United States will not go to war with Russia, China, or Iran, and Iran will
not go to war with Israel. At the end of 2021, Vladimir Putin will still be the
President of Russia, and Xi Jinping will still be the President of China. Unless
he dies of old age, the Ayatollah will still be in power in Iran, and the same
goes for Joe Biden in the United States.
Come December 31, the dollar will still be the
global currency, and the American armed forces will still be occupying somewhere
near half of the world. But both the economic and military power of the United
States will be a bit more eroded than at the beginning of the year.
I realize that my predictions look too bleak for most Americans to take them seriously. But bleak doesn’t mean wrong. For example, to a patriotic citizen of the USSR living in 1975, an accurate description of what was going to happen to his country over the next two decades would have looked bleak, too.
The bright side of a future dominated by historical cycles – including the cycle of the decline and fall of empires – is that historical cycles don’t end in apocalypse. While the American Empire does not have a chance at a better future, the American people do.
I expect
many great civilizations to rise and fall on this continent while the human race
still walks the earth, and if we give up the delusion that ours is destined to
last forever – or that its institutions will always stand for liberty and
justice – then we just might find that we have what it takes to keep ourselves
and our families alive and in good spirits during the troublesome times ahead.
Another intelligent assay of American politics, a pleasure to read as usual. One thing about predictions: as acknowledged in this essay, 'statistical' predictions are usually pretty safe, so long as the data is sound. Bill Gates (and I) 'predicted' fifteen years ago, when Avian Flu was around, that this -- a pandemic-causing deadly virus emerging -- would happen again, and maybe worse. But neither of us predicted when, of course. ('Statistical' is perhaps not the best word here, since we can't assign a probability to the event. It's not like saying that the Queen of Spades has a 1/52 probability of being pulled from a randomly-shuffled full deck of cards. It's more like seeing a large jumble of several hundred cards, made up of many partial decks, but with at least one Queen of Spades in it. We don't know how many cards there are, or if there is more than one Queen of Spades ... but we know that if we keep pulling out a card, replacing it, and shuffling the deck ... eventually we will get the Queen of Spades.)
ReplyDeleteAnd it's these 'sort-of statistically predictable' events that mess up the other predictions: had there been no Covid, Trump would have won.
And ... there are genuine 'Black swans' as well. Real out-of-the-blue events.
One of them is the personality of people who can become, or are, leaders. I suppose if we knew enough about human genetics, and knew the personal genomes of everyone in a country, we could make a prediction about the likelihood of a Churchill, or a Lincoln, or an FDR, or a Trump arising. Someone whose personality can decisively alter history. (You sometimes here, "Cometh the hour, cometh the man." Sadly, it's not true.)
And here is what the Twilight Patriot should ponder on: sometimes we get lucky. Sometimes, a Lincoln appears, or a Churchill, and the circumstances allow him to lead his nation through a perilous situation. There is no reason that Black Swans should only bring misery.
Until this man does appear, the rest of us should prepare to support him. Why, why, why is there not a national organization of sane, reasonably intelligent, at least half-way well-read, patriots? Why are we dominated by a cacaphony of loons, conspiracy theorists, boneheads? Our national journals are excellent. Don't they have readers?
I think the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we remain underlings - almost invisible -- among patriots.
You might 'here' "Cometh the hour .." but you will probably "hear" it.
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