Author: carts

For the sixth year in a row, the staff of Future Perfect convened in December to make predictions about major events in the year to come. Will Congress pass a tariff bill that makes President-elect Donald Trump happy? Will the H5N1 bird flu become an honest-to-god pandemic? Will the war in Ukraine stop? Will a major sports figure get caught up in a gambling scandal?

It’s fun to make predictions about the future, which is part of the reason why we do it so often. But this isn’t just blind guessing. Each prediction comes with a probability attached to it. That gives you a sense of our confidence (high in the case of, say, Charli XCX’s Grammy chances, less so in the case of Iran’s nuclear plans). And don’t make the same mistake that people seem to make every presidential cycle. Even a probability as high as 75 percent or 80 percent doesn’t mean we’re sure something will happen. Rather, it means we think that if we made four or five predictions, we’d expect three or four of them to come true, respectively.

And as we have every year, we’ll be keeping track of how our predictions fared over the course of 2025, and report back to you at the end of December. You can check out how we did in 2024 here. And we’ve done something new this year in partnering with the prediction platform Metaculus. You can check it out here to see how the community there came down on a number of our predictions — and even compete in a prize pool — and click on the individual questions with links to go directly to them on Metaculus. We’ve also added the Metaculus community’s aggregated forecasts as of December 31 for the questions they’ve taken on. —Bryan Walsh

Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign was perhaps the most pro-tariff of any candidate since William McKinley: He promised 60 percent taxes on imports from China, and 10 percent on everywhere else.

In victory he’s only gotten bolder, calling for 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, in flagrant violation of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a free trade deal made by some past president named Donald Trump.

The bad news for consumers and the world economy is that Trump has substantial discretion to impose tariffs as president without consulting Congress. But that discretion isn’t unlimited, and probably doesn’t permit the kind of 10 percent across-the-board tariff Trump promised. Plus, Republicans want a revenue source to help offset the cost of making Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent before they expire at the end of next year. This raises the question: Will Congress pass a tariff measure on its own that not only implements Trump’s ideas, but lets them endure under future presidents?

My guess is no. There was a time in the distant past, let’s call it “2015,” when Republicans were the party of free markets and free trade, and some members of Congress haven’t forgotten that. Early reporting suggests that many GOP figures in the House and Senate are hostile to the idea of including tariffs in a tax package. Republicans can only lose three senators and two House members out of their caucus and still pass bills, which gives them very little margin for error, and makes it very difficult to pass legislation that splits the caucus like tariffs.

Two caveats, though. One, I’m predicting about a tariff bill and not new unilateral tariffs from Trump because I think the odds that Trump does new tariffs using presidential authority are nearly 100 percent. Two, the only reason my estimate isn’t lower is that there’s been some bipartisan interest in a “carbon border adjustment,” or a sort of carbon tax that only applies to imported goods. The idea has gotten Republican support because while it does acknowledge that global warming is real, it also sticks it to foreigners. That’s a tariff, and I think the likeliest kind to make it into a tax package (though I still bet against it). —Dylan Matthews

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 7 percent

Something I love and hate about American politics is that big weighty-seeming questions, like “Can Donald Trump fulfill his campaign promise to abolish the Department of Education?” turn out to hinge on much weirder and more technical questions, like “Will the Senate parliamentarian rule a departmental reorganization as ineligible for the reconciliation process under the Byrd rule?”

The Department of Education, whose main duties are administering student loans and financial aid for higher-ed institutions and distributing funds (around $39 billion in 2023) to local schools under programs like Title I (for poor districts) and IDEA (for disabled students), was created in a 1979 act of Congress. Passing a normal bill repealing that act would require 60 Senate votes to break a filibuster, which means winning over seven Democrats to the idea, which isn’t going to happen.

So legislation abolishing the department (already written by GOP Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota) would have to pass through budget reconciliation, which lets certain legislation pass with a mere majority in the Senate.

But reconciliation has strict requirements limiting the content of legislation that can be passed that way, and in particular provisions of bills that are only “incidentally” related to the overall level of spending or taxing tend to be struck down by the Senate parliamentarian as contrary to the Byrd rule, the main governing principle behind the reconciliation process.

Rounds’s bill, notably, doesn’t eliminate the Department of Education’s actual functions. It just moves them around. Student loans, for instance, would go to the Treasury Department, and the Department of Labor would get vocational programs. This strikes me as an archetypal example of a change that is merely incidental to the actual level of spending, and that can’t be done with reconciliation.

Will the Senate parliamentarian disagree with me? Possibly. But also, in part because this move is so much more about reorganization than the actual substance of the department’s programs, I am very skeptical that Republicans are going to go to the mat on this one. If they can only win so many fights with the parliamentarian, are they going to prioritize changing the mailing address of the student loan office? I doubt it. —DM

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 4 percent

From the moment the Affordable Care Act was signed into law on March 23, 2010, the Republican Party has been obsessed with repealing it. They even shut down the government over it. Then, in 2017, the dog finally caught the car: Republicans had both houses of Congress and the presidency, and in theory the opportunity to repeal the law.

Sure, the tax law that year eliminated the individual mandate to get health insurance, but that turned out to not be as important to getting people coverage as the ACA’s authors thought. The rest of the bill — its dramatic Medicaid expansions, rules protecting people with preexisting conditions and letting young adults stay on their parents’ insurance, subsidies for individuals to buy health insurance if their employer doesn’t provide it — remained intact.

Even “skinny repeal,” a bill that zeroed out only a handful of provisions of the law, failed to pass the Senate when John McCain made his famous thumbs-down gesture, but matters had only even gotten to that point because several other senators didn’t want to vote for sweeping Medicaid cuts, like those entailed by simply repealing the ACA in its entirety.

Will they try again in 2025? I’m skeptical. And here, by “repeal Obamacare,” I don’t even necessarily mean repealing all of it. To qualify as repeal, a bill has to do at least three of the following five things:

Yes, Trump’s budgets and those that his past and future budget chief Russ Vought prepared during the Biden years did propose undoing the ACA’s coverage expansions, and then cutting Medicaid still further. I anticipate they will continue to make these proposals. But I am doubtful that with a much narrower House majority than they had in 2017, and an equally narrow Senate majority, Republicans will be able to pass cuts on a scale that they couldn’t get off the ground eight years ago. —DM

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 10 percent

Here are the facts: Jerome Powell’s term as chair of the Federal Reserve expires on May 15, 2026. He has pledged to stay on as chair until that time, though not necessarily to remain as a member of the Board of Governors until his term there expires in 2028. Donald Trump has said he does not plan to fire Powell before that time. Powell has insisted that the president does not legally have the power to fire him before his term is up, and that he will refuse to obey such an order.

In many ways, 90 percent seems too low, because the odds that a 71-year-old man dies in the next year are only 2.9 percent, and I have an easier time envisioning Powell dying in office than acquiescing to a firing.

But I should also fess up to a personal bias here. Jay Powell is, by a wide margin, the greatest chair of the Federal Reserve that the institution has ever had, and perhaps the greatest central banker in any nation of modern times. He prevented Covid from spiraling into a global financial crisis, oversaw an astonishingly rapid recovery of employment and economic growth in the pandemic’s aftermath, and managed a “soft landing” that ended an inflationary episode without having to spark a recession. He is a miraculous figure who we do not deserve, and for my own sanity I need him to stick around. —DM

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 8 percent

Americans have a charming habit of deciding to like the newly elected president as soon as the election’s over, and Donald Trump’s favorability rating has gone from 8.6 points underwater on Election Day to only 1.9 points negative on December 19. (By “favorability rating,” I mean the difference between the share of voters saying they view him favorably minus the share saying they view him unfavorably. Once he’s president, I’ll count this prediction as resolving to “true” if either his favorability or job approval ratings are positive; while similar, these aren’t exactly the same question.)

But how long do presidential “honeymoon” periods last? Not very long, as it turns out. Back in 2022, FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley and Jean Yi crunched the data and found that Obama, Trump I, and Biden alike all saw their approval ratings dip below 50 percent by the end of the first year (Trump was never even above 50 when he started!):

The two exceptions on the chart are Bill Clinton, who saw a curious fall and then recovery over 1993 that I don’t really understand, and George W. Bush, whose first year included 9/11. I think the odds of another 9/11 are mercifully low, and the trend appears to be toward lower approval for presidents in their first year in recent times.

Moreover, Trump is unusually loathed by a huge segment of the population and is promising massive tariffs that I suspect will prove unpopular once they start raising the prices of everyday household items. So I feel pretty good predicting Trump will be below water at year’s end. —DM

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 17 percent

“Still friends” is obviously a subjective category but I like the prediction markets guru Nathan Young’s proposed definition: if one or the other publicly and unambiguously disparages his counterpart at least three times. Luckily for us, Trump and Musk are not subtle or taciturn men, and when they dislike someone they have a tendency to scream that loudly many, many times, so I don’t anticipate it being hard to decide where they stand at the end of 2025.

The list of one-time Trump allies who eventually came to denounce him is too long to include in full here, but let us briefly remember, say, 10: Anthony Scaramucci; Mike Pence; John Kelly; John Bolton; HR McMaster; Stephanie Grisham; Alyssa Farah Griffin; Betsy DeVos; and of course Michael Cohen.

It does not seem like an ambitious prediction that Musk will eventually join their ranks. His role as the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency seems guaranteed to put him on a collision course with Trump’s Cabinet officials and with congressional Republicans, and probably also with his cochair Vivek Ramaswamy. Trump might side with Musk each time — but he’s always been more pragmatic about spending policy than the cut-happy Musk seems, and there are ripe opportunities for conflict.

What if Musk wants to slash Medicare and Social Security, which Trump has promised to defend? What if he wants defense cuts and Trump wants a tougher posture toward China? What if Musk pushes for reconciliation with China, with whose government he is extremely close (Ramaswamy once called Musk “a circus monkey” working for Xi Jinping)?

I won’t predict the exact inciting episode that causes Trump and Musk to fall out. But I feel like I know how these guys operate, and I think it’s more likely than not that they will fall out. —DM

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 35 percent

Last year, I correctly predicted that more than 40,000 Americans would be killed by cars in 2023 (according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s estimates, which are released with a lag the following year). Since the 1960s, the US has seen rapid, dramatic progress in cutting its car fatality rate, and 2007 was the last year that over 40,000 Americans were killed by our car-dependent transportation system — until the Covid-19 pandemic.

You would think that fewer people driving would mean fewer car crash deaths, but not so in America, where our dangerously designed roads lead to more speeding and death when there’s less traffic. Ever since, America’s rate of death by cars has sat at levels that should honestly be humiliating for such a rich country.

These numbers are slowly starting to come back down. NHTSA recently estimated that for the first half of 2024, car crash deaths were down 3.2 percent from 2023. If the same trend from 2023 carries over to the second half of 2024, total 2024 car fatalities will come in at a hair under 40,000. It’s far from guaranteed, because car crash patterns vary significantly across different seasons. And that number would still be nothing to write home about — but in a country so thoroughly built around automobiles, getting deaths back under 40,000 would be a milestone worth celebrating. —Marina Bolotnikova

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 81 percent

What a difference a year makes. In December 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was incredibly unpopular, his image severely damaged by his government’s total failure to anticipate the deadly October 7 attacks by Hamas. Polls indicated his Likud party might win only 17 of 120 seats in Israel’s Knesset. Israel was on its way to becoming an international pariah because of the destructive way it was waging its war in Gaza, and Israelis were furious about the government’s failure to rescue the hostages held by Hamas, even after a November 2023 deal to bring some home. Oh, and Netanyahu was only a few months removed from massive street protests and was facing corruption charges.

Fast-forward to December 2024, and polls suggest Netanyahu’s Likud party would win 25 seats if elections were held today, more than any other party. Israel has all but destroyed Hezbollah, by far its most capable opponent, and has isolated Iran, arguably its most existential threat. After the sudden fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Israel has even captured territory formerly under the Syrian government’s control. And President Joe Biden, who at least occasionally pushed back against Netanyahu, is about to be replaced by President-elect Donald Trump, who has signaled that he will happily give Israel a freer hand in Gaza.

Netanyahu has been prime minister of Israel for roughly 17 of the past 28 years. Every time it seems like he’s in an unwinnable position, he seems to find a way to wriggle out of it. I have every expectation that will continue in 2025. —BW

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 75 percent

Americans got pretty upset about inflation in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, but we’ve got nothing on our Argentinian friends:

Here in the US, we’re such babies that we’ll complain about 6 percent to 7 percent inflation. In Argentina, double-digit annual inflation rates were normal even before the pandemic. Annual inflation hit triple digits and started what looked like an exponential climb, still ongoing when left-wing Peronist Alberto Fernández left office.

Javier Milei, a chainsaw-wielding self-described anarcho-capitalist who named his dogs after the libertarian economists Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, and Robert Lucas, initiated shock therapy upon taking office this year, eliminating price controls and subsidies for things like fuel and food, as well as massively devaluing the peso. That made prices surge even more massively at first (which you can see in the chart above). But since then they’ve been subsiding. The price surge had the salutary effect of easing the government’s debt burden, and the nation’s budget went into surplus for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis.

This has come at a considerable cost, with poverty and unemployment spiking, and the economy as a whole in recession for much of the year. But now that the recession is over and the country is seeing both cooling inflation and a growing economy, a sadly unusual combo down in Buenos Aires.

That said, I don’t think we’re going to see the country get down to a 30 percent annual inflation rate in 2024. The 12-month inflation rate in November 2024 was 166 percent, down 27 points from the month before. If the rate keeps falling at that pace, the country will hit the 30 percent mark in five months. But I think progress against inflation will slow as the initial shock of Milei’s policies subsides and pressure for wage hikes intensifies in a country that’s finally growing again. The IMF anticipates annual inflation hitting a low of 45 percent next year, and I think that’s a reasonable guess. —DM

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 55 percent

The war in Ukraine is just short of its third anniversary. The very fact that Ukraine has continued to fight this long defies most early prognosticators, many of whom expected the government in Kyiv to collapse not long after the Russians invaded. (An exception there, as Future Perfect readers know, is the State Department’s perspicacious Bureau of Intelligence and Research.) But the longer the war goes on, the more Russia’s sheer size and willingness to sacrifice unbelievable numbers of soldiers has outweighed Ukraine’s ability to fight back, even with the material support of the US and European allies.

President Biden has mostly been a steadfast ally, but he’ll be leaving office on January 20, replaced by Donald Trump, who has made no secret of the fact that he has little interest in continuing to support Ukraine. Both sides are still fighting hard to gain and protect territory, but it seems clear that’s being done by both Ukraine and Russia to put themselves in the best possible position before expected peace talks. Exactly what form that will take is difficult to predict, and a ceasefire doesn’t mean a permanent peace. But I would be shocked to not see a durable pause in the fighting some time in 2025. —BW

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 44 percent

For the purposes of this prediction, “getting nuclear weapons” means producing enough fissile material to fuel a nuclear weapon. Actually producing a usable nuclear weapon — including miniaturizing a warhead enough to fit on a missile — might take another several months to a year or more, and thus probably falls outside the 2025 time frame.

Iran is already on the brink of sufficient enrichment — estimates are that it would only take about a week for Iran to enrich enough uranium for five fission weapons. So the question here is primarily one of international politics. Iran had a terrible 2024. It directly attacked Israel with missiles twice, only to see both salvos largely neutralized by missile defense systems, while Israel’s own retaliatory attack on Iran was far more successful. The Lebanese militia Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful proxy, was all but annihilated by Israel, which continues to operate in parts of southern Lebanon. And the return of Donald Trump brings a president into office whom Iran has been accused of trying to assassinate.

Put that all together, and the Iranian regime finds itself in a very insecure place, and may look to nuclear weapons as a way to level the playing field. At the same time, relatively new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has made overtures to the West and seems to understand that the only path to economic relief for his country is a new deal that limits the nuclear program in exchange for easing economic sanctions.

The Iranian regime’s number one priority is its own survival, and my best guess is that they will decide that the risk of going full speed on a nuclear program isn’t worth it, at least for another year. (There’s also the possibility that accelerating its nuclear work could lead to a military intervention by Israel or the US that would stop the program in its tracks.) So I think on balance that Iran won’t join the nuclear club in 2025 — though it’s not a prediction I make with a great deal of certainty. —BW

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 8 percent

First off, some math. While it may feel as if infectious disease pandemics have become a regular occurrence, they still remain highly rare. Since 1918, there have been five influenza pandemics: the Spanish flu of that year, the 1957 Asian flu, the 1968 Hong Kong flu, the 1977 Russian flu, and the 2009 swine flu. That gives a naive percentage of about 5 percent for any given year.

But there’s evidence that outbreaks of new infectious diseases are increasing, as the Covid pandemic amply demonstrated. And the H5N1 avian flu has been infecting a growing variety and number of animals, and more recently, people. On December 18, California, where 34 human cases of the virus have been detected, became the first state to institute a state of emergency over bird flu. New research suggests just a single mutation could be enough to potentially increase the virus’s ability to spread from person to person, which would be a prerequisite to becoming a pandemic. (Right now, H5N1 only rarely seems to be able to spread between people, and only in very limited fashion.)

So why am I mostly pessimistic about H5N1’s ability to truly break out, which for the purposes of this prediction would mean the WHO officially declaring it a pandemic, which would require sustained human transmission over multiple regions? Not because we’re doing a great job containing it — we definitely are not. Rather, it’s personal experience.

I’ve been covering H5N1 since it began really spilling over in Southeast Asia in 2004. I’ve been to backyard chicken farms in Indonesia and virology labs in Hong Kong. I’ve watched this virus as closely as any other subject I’ve covered in nearly a quarter-century as a professional journalist, and I just don’t think H5N1 has it. Call it a hunch, and one I hope will hold true. —BW

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 26 percent

For precision, let me clarify that by “major lab” I mean any of the following companies:

This is a purposefully broad list and includes companies that haven’t made it a priority to be on the bleeding edge of deep learning (like Netflix) and ones whose primary business isn’t in developing their own models so much as hosting or enabling models that others create (like Scale or Hugging Face). But, you know, I thought Nvidia wasn’t in this race until it dropped a massive model in October with impressive benchmarks, so a lot of things can change quickly in the world of AI.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a vague term, and there is a large and growing literature in which AI researchers seek merely to define it, let alone to predict what it would look like or mean. That said, most definitions rely on an analogy to humans: an AI will be generally intelligent if it can do everything a human being can do, as well as a human being can, including meta-tasks like learning to complete new tasks.

This idea itself has holes in it. Different human beings can do different things — I cannot do everything, say, Katie Ledecky can do.

Luckily for us, the prediction here doesn’t require us to know what AGI means. It just requires a major firm to claim to have achieved it, accurately or not. One OpenAI staffer took to X this past year to claim that the firm’s models had already gotten there (though, importantly, the company itself has not made claims that grand).

So if the bar is that low, why do I think we’ll make it through the year without a company making this claim? Mostly because a) this is a young field where firm reputation matters a ton and being discredited by a premature AGI announcement might make the difference between a company ending up like Apple and ending up like Atari, and b) this is the kind of technology where premature claims can be discredited really, really fast.

If a nuclear fusion company claims to have achieved net energy gain, it is very difficult for me, a non-nuclear physicist, to tell if they’re bluffing. It’s not like I can use the nuclear reactor. But an AGI would presumably come with text, video, audio, and other interfaces that average consumers could try out and use, and it’d be immediately clear if some AI firm claimed to have gotten there when they hadn’t. —DM

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 20 percent

I’m not really a fan of private cars (see my other car-related prediction above), and I wish our solution to climate change was to just have fewer of them. But this is America, so we have to work within the maddeningly car-dependent cage of our own creation. Electric cars are obviously better for society in most respects (though not all — their heavy weight means they’re more dangerous to pedestrians, cyclists, and anyone outside the vehicle), so I grudgingly have to welcome the EV transition that’s finally picking up.

By the third quarter of 2024, EVs made up 8.9 percent of new car sales in the US, according to an analysis by Kelley Blue Book. There’ve been reports that electric car sales are slowing, but given their consistent past growth rates, plus the fact that interest rates are coming down, I think we’ll hit 10 percent by the same time this year without much trouble. Donald Trump’s promise to do sweeping tariffs could throw a wrench in all that, but given my colleague Dylan Matthews’s prediction about the unlikelihood of that happening, I won’t calibrate my prediction around it too much. —MB

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 67 percent

The digital gold rush probably still hasn’t reached full frenzy, believe it or not. Bitcoin recently topped $100,000 in value for the first time, but we are going to have to think bigger. I think it’s going to double its value in the next 12 months — and I’m not the only one.

This is not an endorsement, to be clear; I own no bitcoin. When I read Warren Buffett still believes Bitcoin is a fad, that people do “stupid things” and this will be the latest trend in fiscal speculation to end in failure, I take it seriously. The case for bitcoin remains muddied, at least to me.

But Buffett has also compared bitcoin to gambling and, well, the gambling business is booming. Even if Bitcoin is a questionable long-term investment — don’t forget it dropped below $20,000 in late 2022 — people can still get a kick out of the continued accumulation of value, and that’s the basis of any bubble. It helps that Donald Trump and the crew he’s bringing back to Washington have gone all in on the crypto craze; they are likely to do whatever they can to stoke the speculation further.

Bitcoin just saw its value more than double over the course of 2024. I think it’s more likely than not it’ll repeat the feat with those winds at its back. —Dylan Scott

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 20 percent

My source here is the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Since the 2012 inception of the Bloomberg list, the occupant of the top spot has changed five times. In 2013, surging Microsoft shares enabled Bill Gates to beat out Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim, who led the list at its outset. In 2017, Amazon shares put Jeff Bezos ahead of Gates. The massive rally around Tesla led in January 2021 to Elon Musk deposing Bezos. But Louis Vuitton chief Bernard Arnault overtook him in October 2022 in part because Musk had to sell much of his Tesla fortune to finance his purchase of Twitter. But by May of the following year, Musk was back on top.

“Will Elon Musk still be the richest person in the world throughout 2024?” is actually two separate questions: one, will he be dethroned by anyone in the next year; two, will he live through the year? Normally the latter wouldn’t be a concern for a 53-year-old man with access to the best health care money can buy, but Musk is, uh, not the most stable person on earth. So I’d put maybe a 5 percent probability he loses the title by way of the Grim Reaper.

Five switches in the top ranking over 12.5 years of the Bloomberg ranking existing implies, naively, a 40 percent chance that the top rank will switch in any given year. There’s tons of fluctuation within the top 10 even in a given month, as these net worths are hugely dependent on stock returns.

Jensen Huang of Nvidia, currently ranked 12th, gained $73.4 billion in 2024 alone, by far the biggest part of his $117 billion fortune. It’s sobering to return to the 2013 article on Gates overtaking Slim, which notes at the bottom an up-and-comer named Elon Musk, whose car company brought him up to a net worth of $5.4 billion. Today, it’s $455 billion. Life moves pretty fast.

Anyway, 40 percent odds that Musk is overtaken by another billionaire plus 5 percent odds he dies = 45 percent odds that he is no longer the richest man, and 55 percent odds that he still is.

One exception to my policy of relying on Bloomberg here: hilariously, Bloomberg refuses to include Michael Bloomberg in its ranking, but should Bloomberg, LP’s value surge or Mike otherwise become the richest person in the world according to the Forbes World’s Billionaire List or some other reliable source, I’ll consider Musk dethroned, even if Bloomberg itself refuses to report on its leader’s riches. —DM

Metaculus aggregated forecast; 85 percent

Last year was an eventful one in the saga of psychedelics seeking a return to mainstream medicine.

Roughly 38 years of planning came to a head when Lykos Therapeutics — a for-profit outgrowth of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, founded in 1986 — submitted an application to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for MDMA therapy to treat PTSD. Despite widespread expectations it would succeed, the FDA did not grant approval, unsettling psychedelic companies, advocates, and the industry at large.

The FDA didn’t outright reject the application, but asked for another Phase 3 clinical trial, which will likely take a couple of years to complete and resubmit to the FDA. With Lykos going back to the drawing board, who’s going to take the next swing at FDA approval?

My prediction: no one, at least not in 2025.

At the moment, there aren’t many other companies with Phase 3 trials underway. Two of the closest behind Lykos are in the midst of trials looking at psilocybin to treat depression — Compass Pathways and the Usona Institute. Compass launched its trial in January 2023, but delayed a top-line readout of its results and cut 30 percent of its staff after the FDA’s decision on Lykos. They don’t expect to complete the study until February of 2026.

Usona launched its Phase 3 trial in March 2024 and doesn’t anticipate completing the study — let alone putting together a new drug application and submitting it to the FDA — until April 2026.

We certainly won’t see any companies announce a Phase 3 trial, complete it, and package the findings into an application to the FDA all within the span of one year. So it’s difficult to imagine any pathway toward an FDA approval in 2025. There are still some slightly cracked backdoors that could usher psilocybin into accepted medical use within the year, like the FDA granting an emergency use authorization, which could even force the holy grail of a true psychedelic renaissance — rescheduling it to a lower category of the Controlled Substances Act — before getting FDA approval.

So while I think the chances of normal FDA approval in 2025 are basically zero, considering the EUA backdoor, plus the general state of accelerating weirdness of the world these days, bumps my estimate up to 20 percent that we wind up with any federally authorized medical use of a new psychedelic drug in 2025. —Oshan Jarow

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 33 percent

The 2025–2030 federal dietary guidelines advise Americans to avoid ultra-processed foods (30 percent)

I just wrote a long story about why the concept of “ultra-processed foods” is kind of BS — it’s overly broad, arbitrary, and even liable to vilify foods that are good for us. It does not make sense as a policymaking tool. The scientific panel that’s advising the creation of the 2025–2030 federal dietary guidelines, due out this year, acknowledged as much in December, when it concluded that there’s not much reliable evidence linking ultra-processed foods to poor health outcomes.

The final dietary guidelines, which are jointly created by the US Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services and play an important role in shaping federal nutrition programs like National School Lunch, often aren’t fully aligned with the scientific committee’s recommendations. But where they differ, it’s often to benefit powerful food industries, like the meat industry and producers of sugary snacks. And a sweeping recommendation against ultra-processed foods would be consistent with neither nutrition science nor corporate interests.

So whatever the hype about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cracking down on ultra-processed foods, I expect the final document to come to more or less the same conclusion as the science. —MB

Most of the antibiotics used in human medicine are actually sold to meat companies, which put them in animals’ feed to make them grow faster and prevent disease outbreaks in factory farms. But some bacteria on farms are becoming resistant to these antibiotics, giving way to new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that make the drugs less effective in treating humans.

It’s a huge public health threat, and experts have warned that we ought to rein in antibiotic use in the meat industry.

Last year, I predicted that livestock antibiotics sales would increase by 2 percent in 2023, but instead, they declined by 1 percent. (Data on sales lags by about a year.) I erred in giving too much weight to past trends, as antibiotic sales to the livestock industry had been on the rise for years. Instead, I should’ve used projected meat production as a rough proxy for livestock antibiotic sales.

Doing so this time around, antibiotic sales to meat producers should have increased in 2024 by around 0.83 percent, given that beef production is expected to remain stable, pork production will increase by a few percentage points, and turkey production will decrease by a few percentage points.

There are numerous factors that could result in my guesstimate being off, such as disease prevalence and corporations reducing antibiotic use due to consumer pressure. For the sake of safeguarding one of humanity’s greatest inventions — antibiotics — I hope I’m wrong. —Kenny Torrella

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 50 percent

Since early 2022, 112 million poultry birds — mostly turkeys and egg-laying hens — have been violently killed in an effort to slow the spread of a bird flu outbreak that has roiled the poultry industry for nearly three years now.

The first year was the worst, with almost 58 million birds killed. Things slowed down a bit in 2023, with 21.8 million poultry birds dead, but then worsened in 2024, with 41 million birds killed as of mid-December. I predict at least another 30 million will die in 2025.

It’s incredibly difficult to make predictions for such an unpredictable disease, so I’m pegging my confidence level at a meek 60 percent. But it’s reasonable to think that the Trump administration will handle the situation in a similarly poor fashion to the Biden administration’s bungled, industry-friendly response, allowing the virus to circulate freely among livestock and wildlife.

The US Department of Agriculture has been testing vaccines for poultry birds and dairy cows. However, it’s unclear when they’ll be ready and, more importantly, whether they’ll be deployed, because using them could disrupt trade, and both industry and the USDA don’t want that to happen. —KT

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 96 percent

For six years, the US pork industry has been looking for a way to get rid of California’s Proposition 12, a landmark animal welfare law, passed by ballot measure in 2018, that outlawed certain forms of extreme confinement on factory farms. That included a ban on the sale of pork raised using gestation crates — tiny cages in which pregnant pigs are kept continually, barely given any room to move. The practice, as we wrote last year, is “equivalent to living your entire, short life pregnant and trapped inside a coffin.”

Having failed to convince courts, including the US Supreme Court, of their legal arguments for overturning the law, pork giants are now trying to get Congress to nullify Prop 12 through the Farm Bill, a massive legislative package passed every five years that shapes much of US food and farming policy. Last May, the House Agriculture Committee advanced a Republican-led Farm Bill that includes just such a measure. Always live to serve.

At the time, I didn’t think this version of the bill would go anywhere. This year, Congress will need to finally pass the long-delayed Farm Bill, and with a majority in both chambers, Republicans’ chances of axing Prop 12 will be much greater. Still, I don’t really see it happening, in part because some members of the Freedom Caucus oppose it as a severe limit on states’ ability to set their own policies. Much like their long-promised efforts to trash the Affordable Care Act, Republicans love to talk about repealing stuff but rarely follow through. —MB

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 78 percent

Earlier this year, Florida and Alabama banned the production and sale of “lab-grown” or “cell-cultivated” meat. Cell-cultivated meat is real meat but made without slaughtering animals — instead, startups take animal cells, place them in a large steel tank, and feed them a mix of ingredients, like sugars, minerals, vitamins, and amino acids, for several weeks until they can be harvested as meat.

The bans were transparent efforts to protect the respective states’ livestock industries and score political points by further pulling meat into America’s culture war. It’s a somewhat hollow victory for the culture warriors and red state governors — cell-cultivated meat is still incredibly expensive to produce and has only been sold in small batches for limited runs at a handful of US restaurants.

It’s an emerging technology, and there’s still uncertainty as to whether the startups that make it will be able to scale their operations to produce a meaningful amount of meat. But if they do figure it out, these bans could be a real headache in the future, both for the companies’ bottom lines and America’s climate goals, as cell-cultivated meat has potential to cut agricultural greenhouse gas emissions.

Nevertheless, lawmakers in other states are lining up behind Florida and Alabama to pass their own bans, including in Arizona, Michigan, Tennessee, and Illinois. Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen has said he plans to work with state lawmakers to introduce a ban in the next legislative session.

I think the likelihood that at least one of these states passes a ban is high, and especially in Nebraska, as Pillen is one of the nation’s largest pork producers and has railed against meat alternatives. While it won’t affect the cell-cultivated meat startups much in the short term, it would contribute to political hostility that could spell doom in the long run. —KT

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 85 percent

The evidence is adding up that the widespread legalization of gambling has been, at best, reckless. Putting a casino on the phones everyone carries around in their pocket has created social and economic harms that need to be taken seriously, before a deeper crisis sets in.

It is a world that is unthinkable to me, as somebody who grew up in the shadow of the Pete Rose scandal. Whatever you think of Pete Rose the person, the all-time hits leader is not in the Baseball Hall of Fame because his gambling was regarded as a violation of the game’s most important values. Today, Major League Baseball airs on the FanDuel Sports Network in my area and the biggest name in sports media, ESPN, runs its own sportsbook.

Only scandal could break the spell, right? But the truth is, we have already seen a series of sports betting scandals since the 2018 Supreme Court decision that unlocked this new era of gambling. NFL wide receiver Calvin Ridley lost a year of his young career to a gambling-related suspension. One NBA bench player was banned from the league for giving tips to gamblers and allegedly altering his play based on bets.

But those players were not All-Stars, much less household names. We have not yet had a player of the caliber of LeBron James or Patrick Mahomes implicated by gambling allegations. But we have come close. Last year, National League MVP Shohei Ohtani of the MLB’s Los Angeles Dodgers was ensnared when his personal trainer faced criminal charges related to his gambling, though Ohtani was ultimately found not to be involved.

It seems only a matter of time until a major sports star faces a serious gambling scandal. I don’t know if this will be the year. It may not be. But I’m confident the next Pete Rose is already out there. —DS

Metaculus aggregated forecast: 15 percent

Max Verstappen wins the Formula 1 World Drivers’ Championship (60 percent)

Listen, the four-time world champ has grown on me a lot. Red Bull driver Max Verstappen has proven his dominance on the track over and over again, but with Lewis Hamilton (who has won seven times!) moving over to Scuderia Ferrari, I’m not so sure anymore. Plus, there’s McLaren’s Lando Norris, who had a hell of a car this previous season. I’m not a Lando enjoyer, but it’s undeniable that he’s inching closer and closer to being a challenger for the title. All that said, my prediction is that Max will win the drivers’ championship, but Red Bull will lose the constructors’ again. —Izzie Ramirez

Charli XCX wins a Grammy for Brat (90 percent)

I’ve been a Charli stan since her Sucker and No. 1 Angel days, and it’s been absolutely wild watching her become a household name. Brat was as much a cultural phenomenon as it was the defining sound of the summer (and many political memes), with the album’s garish green becoming a shorthand for what’s cool. It appeared at the very top of year-end lists from publications like Metacritic and the New York Times — I’d be absolutely shocked if it didn’t win for album of the year. But I’m going to be intentionally open for this prediction: “360,” “Apple,” or the “Guess” remix featuring 2024 Future Perfect 50 honoree Billie Eilish are all also contenders in their respective song categories. Now if only the Academy could retroactively give Charli an award for her actual best song… —IR