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Notes -
2023 Predictions
Where percentages mean the expected share of predictions at that percentage that are correct by the end of the year. Essentially, I expect 4 of my 5 80% predictions to occur, one of my four 25% predictions, etc.
Asset Markets will:
50% at some point in 2023, the SP500 will be 12%+ below its December 31st, 2022 value.
25% at some point in 2023, the SP500 will be 20%+ below its December 31st, 2022 value.
The Federal Reserve will:
80% raise interest rates by 50+ basis points.
80% not cut interest rates before July 1st, 2023.
50% raise interest rates by 100+ basis points.
The Bank of Canada will:
80% raise interest rates by 50+ basis points.
50% raise interest rates by 100+ basis points.
Canada will:
50% have a “moderate” recession which begins in 2023 defined as either of: (1) a cumulative decline in GDP of 2% across any number of quarters, (2) the unemployment rises to 7% at any point.
80% see detached house prices decline by 15%+ as measured by the December over December CREA national benchmark.
25% Canada will have an election in 2023 and … the Liberals will win a minority government.
50% Canada will have an election in 2023 and … the CPC will increase seats and win the most votes.
25% Have a constitutional or jurisdictional crisis over provincial / federal issues, probably related to guns, but possibly related to the Alberta Pension Plan, health care funding, or equalization. This is hard to define, but I would take any kind of Meech-Lake style conference, or Supreme Court decision on constitutional questions, the creation of the Alberta Pension Plan, or refusal by local police to enforce federal gun bans as positive evidence.
At the risk of narcissism, I will:
50% Buy a house.
80% Save over half of our family's after-tax income.
25% Switch jobs.
Not going to estimate certainty, and I don't even have a specific prediction, just want to be on record saying: something's up with the trans front of the culture war, the vibes are shifting. Whereas I don't really see BLM / CRT / MeToo / other aspects of wokeness going anywhere (other than the volume being turned up or down), I have a strong feeling there's something unstable about the trans stuff. Will it lead to a collapse, and if so will it be this year? Don't know, just saying keep an eye on this space.
Oh, a house! At first I thought you were planning on buying a horse. Well, good luck either way!
My sense is that we're in a lull right now. A culture war recession. It's hard to even rank them. I would almost say MeToo is the highest right now but only because of the recent Roe decision, but that turned out to be more of a pop than a bang, didn't it? Maybe the affirmative action case decisions in June will stoke the BLM/CRT set.
One theory is that Blue Tribe turns the burner up or down for purposes of tactical or strategic advantage. Given that they're more or less back in control, what advantage is there on turning the burner back to high?
Thousands of extra black people are being killed per year, compared to five years ago, and this rise correlates neatly with the largest social intervention in law enforcement in living memory. But this is an inconvenient correlation to examine, so it simply goes unexamined, and people mention how it seems like things have chilled out lately. Well, sure. The chillness or lack thereof of our collective environment is entirely determined by Blue Tribe social consensus, and is entirely detached from any actual facts of our physical existence.
BLM was a crisis of the cops hunting black people in the street, not because the cops were actually hunting black people in the street, but because the media and other organs of blue-tribe social consensus generated a collective delusion that it was so. Now black people are actually being killed at rates approximating those delusive rates, but no one cares. This is how it works, and in fact how it has always worked. We've collectively outsourced our cognition to a small cadre of radical utopians, and we dance to their whim.
It will remain so until the existing system ruptures badly enough that the problems become undeniably immediate.
You're missing something important here. Floyd for example was viral on Black Twitter and communities BEFORE media or Blue Tribe got involved. The ideas about police brutality exist in urban black communities and then that filters to their nominal political allies in the Blue Tribe. Which then will get signal boosted by the media etc. The sentiment does not vanish (whether or not it is accurate) because it is not based on data. It's based on stories and previous experiences and then the emotion is usually triggered by a specific incident (often one with a video that can stir up emotions).
You could have zero deaths of black people to cops for 5/10 years or more and no media stories about it and this belief would still persist. The evidence is that stories of white doctors killing black babies in utero as part of maternal care is something that still persists through the stories told by say my ex-wife's mother who is certain white doctors in the 60's killed her first two babies. She successfully had 5 kids after skipping all maternal visits thereafter until thinking her fears were overblown she went back to a doctor for her 6th and youngest. Then when he was born, they discovered he had a needle broken off in his skull and suffered brain damage and partial blindness. So the belief was reinforced, spread to her community and crucially to her children. Did white doctors try to murder her kids in utero? I don't know, but she believes they did.
My ex-wife, an educated IT worker, decided this was no longer a worry, but when she miscarried our first child after a visit to her (white) Ob/Gyn where did her thoughts go? For our second, she repeated her mother's ideas and refused to visit any doctors for the first 6 months. I am pretty confident the miscarriage was a coincidence, but I really want people to understand just how these cycles of issues and thoughts can re-occur even with "normal" events because they are not driven or created by data, they are created by fears and passed on stories from family and friends. Her sister then refused to go to any doctor for her 2 kids. Vaccination rates in Black communities still lag due to "taking the government needle" STILL being an active concern.
Blue Tribe media does not GENERATE these beliefs. It SPREADS them to Blue communities. This is an important difference for understanding what is going on.
I don't understand your point. There's plenty of batty ideas out there (I happen to hold some myself!), that either side's media would refuse to spread, and if they spread organically, they'd only address them in a negative way.
I'll buy "those ideas were already out there" as an excuse for Blue Tribe media when I see them give the Great Replacement the same treatment they gave BLM.
Ahh, i think you misunderstand. I am not talking about blame, just correcting an erroneous understanding (in my view) of the situation.
If FC is correct once the media stopped the narrative the issue would vanish entirely, because they generate it from whole cloth. If I am correct even if the media didn't mention the issue at all you would still get periodic race based protests/rioting within black communities regardless, when a trrigering event occurs.
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I'm sorry, what? Is this supposed to be a COVID thing? If so, "killed" is a rather questionable word choice.
I want to see a source.
I wish I had some faith we won't see the exact same demands for sources the next time this issue comes up.
No, I’m convinced on this one. I really did think OP was somehow blaming COVID policy, which clearly wasn’t the case.
He also gave a source and I concede that the phenomenon is real. I even mostly agree with the reasoning!
By all means hold me to this in the future.
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Here's a starter. We have the largest increase in the homicide rate ever recorded, immediately following one of the largest social and political interventions into our law enforcement system in living memory, an intervention that directly interfered with the function of law enforcement nation-wide and repeatedly created "cop free zones" with massively-elevated murder rates.
Now, to be fair, it's true that we can't actually prove that the attempted deconstruction of our entire street-level law enforcement apparatus has anything to do with the historically novel murder rate. After all, the NYT hasn't declared it so, and if the NYT doesn't say it, it isn't true. One can merely point out that this exact consequence was predicted from the beginning of the intervention and before, because similar interventions at smaller scale had similar effects.
...Perhaps the point should be made with less snark.
We talk about policy a lot here. Generally, the pattern is that an intervention is proposed, carried out, and then we discuss the outcomes. Usually in the field of public policy, the outcomes of a policy are subtle and difficult to detect, and so we get a lively debate back and forth over whether the intervention worked or not, whether it was worth the cost or not. Does increasing black representation in TV shows increase metric [x]? Inquiring minds want to know.
BLM was a significant social and political intervention, one of the most massive and abrupt in recent memory. Its interventions coincided with an immediate and unprecedentedly massive increase in violent crime and murder, which has not relented in the two years since. This increase in violent crime is the largest ever recorded. A massive increase in violent crime was predicted by conservatives from the start of BLM, myself included. The increase in murders was immediately visible following the start of George Floyd riots, in the blocks surrounding where he died. Thousands of extra black people are currently being killed every year, for real and not merely in the imaginations of Blue Tribe.
I assert that the linkage between the BLM movement and its activism and the increase in the murder rate, particularly for black men, is the clearest, most obvious linkage in social science in the last generation, and possibly since the invention of the discipline. To the extent that you or others think that the evidence for this linkage is insufficient, I think it bears examining why, and whether such skepticism applies to claims more amenable to one's tribe.
Thank you.
I will admit that I was unaware of the magnitude, and thought you were alluding to COVID policy rather than violent crime. But yes, the rate of gun homicides has jumped by quite a bit in the last few years.
It’s hard to tell exactly when it started without tick marks. I tried to verify with FBI stats, but for some reason they stop with 2017, 2018, 2019. These numbers suggest that black Americans were victims in about 50% of gun homicides even as the total number decreased. Simultaneously, around 42% of victims were white.
The final point in your graph gives ~57 bgh/100k. Scaling by relative population sizes, we’d expect something like 12 wgh/100k. Given that the white homicide rate didn’t get nearly that high, something clearly happened in black communities.
Rioting and reduced police presence are clear candidates. Opponents note that lots of murders happened in red-tribe areas, rather than just the cities, and did not correlate with defunding. This is however compatible with demotivating. At the very least, BLM obviously failed to make anything better.
Does this seem like a fact that you should be unaware of, given your basic assumptions and expectations of how society operates? Like, if I had claimed last week that the murder rate could do what it did, and you'd be completely unaware of it for years after the fact, would you have thought, "yeah, that seems like an accurate description of how the world works", or would you think I was booing my outgroup or waging the culture war?
...At some point, it seems to me that Gell-Man Amnesia stops being a curiosity, and needs to actually be engaged with. I think this conversation demonstrates a fundamental disconnect between fact and perception that is pervasive and lasting, and that should pretty clearly have decisive consequences for everything relating to the culture war.
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That's a pretty bad cite. Most of the sub-cites are pay-walled, but I'd seen the NYT one with the city-to-city comparisons before and it was bullshit. Their list of cities was "arbitrary"; no real rhyme or reason, but it included cherry-picked tier-3 cities with Republican mayors just so they could play dishonest games with percentages (This small R city went from 4 murders to 8. That's a 100% increase! Much worse than D megacity that went from 500 to 800, which is only 60%.). I ended up just taking the wiki list of top 50 cities in the US and looking at the before and after murder count for the Republican and Democrat mayored cities. R cities definitely had a large increase, but it was still significantly smaller than the D increase.
Then the first article that isn't paywalled keeps trying to compare San Francisco to Jacksonville. The degree of point-missing is almost an art. They take a rich, white city criticized for the crimes/ills of drugs, homelessness, shoplifting and burglary, with a dash of random hate crimes against Asians for seasoning, and compare it to a much blacker city, and act like it some sort of gotcha that one has a higher murder rate. Same deal with the comparisons of states. All those "Red" states are also the ones with much higher rates of black people. And when the claim in question is something like "Racial(ist) backlash against policing of black people has increased the costs and reduced the incentive for policing black people, and this has resulted in a bloodbath", it's hard to imagine this coming from a place with any good faith.
Or maybe the reliably left-wing, pro-police reform Brennan Center is just trying to deflect blame for their own promoting of this exact situation.
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If a progressive had claimed 'large-scale black leftist resistance will lead to a racist backlash by cops and society, which will lead to more dead black people' before BLM, that doesn't make them correct, even though there were protests and there were more dead blacks. Similarly, the right making a claim, and then the outcome happening, doesn't make their claim about how true.
We all get the 'ur biased towards ur team' thing, that doesn't make it unimportant to establish causation! It's not implausible, just not proven at all.
What would proof actually look like? A detailed look at the experience of the criminals/victims/observers whom the homicide rate increased dramatically, establishing the ways in which cop pullback - maybe - led to less fear of starting fights openly, or in places with more people, leading to more homicides.
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Surely the obvious counterpoint is that the BLM movement utterly failed at the ballot box, with multiple major cities having elections resulting in the side pushing for increased police funding winning (or not even having a serious candidate pushing for any kind of police reform).
But I'm guessing your claim is that the protests themselves discouraged the police from doing their jobs, leading to less effective policing (per officer/dollar spent). Which seems to just prove BLM's point that the current way we do public safety / law enforcement is bad for black people.
I'm having a hard time understanding this argument. I assume that you accept that less police attention = more black people getting murdered. How does this mean that policing is bad for black people?
If the system can just arbitrarily decide to not protect them, that seems like pretty good evidence it's not acting in their interests.
The BLM movement's main issue is that they believe police-as-we-know-it is a bad (and in particular systematically racist) way to handle public safety / law enforcement and that those issues should be handled by different organizations than what we currently call "police" (or at least that the current police should play a smaller role). The police murdering black people directly and the police deciding to do nothing about others murdering black people are both reasons for black people to not like the police.
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BLM's specific argument (if one should exist) was that cops were engaged in 'open season' on black people - that it was their actual presence making life hard for the downtrodden.
You cannot pretzel that back to a vague, generalized, 'reasonable' complaint about 'failures of modern law enforcement practices, therefore BLM is on to something' without appearing dishonest or suspect.
BLM wanted less police-as-we-know-it, not less money/effort put towards public safety and law enforcement. One of their commonly repeated complaints is that the militarization of police is expensive leading to less money to hire actual people who they believe would be more effective than expensive equipment at improving public safety.
See Campaign Zero, for instance, which lists:
as their first two policy goals.
(EDIT: That list formats correctly as "1." and "2." in the preview, but not in the post...)
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He's talking about general murder rates.
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He's referring to the recent spike in homicide rate, which happened disproportionately for black victims / offenders. The claim is that BLM -> less police enforcement -> more murders. Dunno how accurate that is, most convincing evidence for it would look like anecdotes from said criminals, or people involved, attesting to it. "Gangs are more active now that the cops are paying less attention"? idk.
I agree with your implication that criminals aren't in their hideaway saying "cops are gone, let's go nuts!"
Fortunately, there's an easier explanation. Most violent crime is committed by a small minority of people. By arresting and prosecuting a small number of offenders you can reduce the crime rate by a huge percentage. The average person will commit zero violent crimes, but the average offender might commit dozens if left unchecked.
Fail to arrest a person the first time they assault someone, and they can continue to victimize more and more people. Here in Seattle, we joke about needing a "10 strikes and you're out" law for that reason.
My point is that, if that's what's happening, because a 50% increase in homicides is a lot, there will be many anecdotes or sorts of evidence of the form 'our group is getting much less police pressure now, and are able to operate in more parts of the city', or jail occupancy rates for specific severe crimes significantly decreasing, or officers reporting seeing - many times - letting someone go for a mid-tier crime and seeing them commit more crimes, at a rate 50% higher than in 2019.
Just staring at a 'blm graph' and a 'homicide graph' and observing they both go up in 2020 isn't enough to prove that. Nor are a dozen or even a hundred articles about 'X was released after arrest crime Y and then committed crime Z later', because those articles also existed in 2019, and the way media reporting works, the numerical effect of media attention and people sharing articles totally overwhelms any signal in frequency relative to a mere 50% increase.
I disagree that "staring at a 'blm graph'" adequately responds to the argument.
BLM was a social movement that took direct and powerful action to alter our society, ranging from mass protests to large-scale violence to widespread social shaming to a whole spectrum of other activities. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that its touch was felt in every facet of adult life nation-wide. It directly impacted my personal relationships. It changed the content of the sermons I heard at church. It changed the art I'm paid to make. It changed every show I've watched on stream since. It directly caused and then publicly justified large-scale lawless violence and criminality, and attacked the role of police in our society without a modicum of restraint. It was the largest-scale social intervention of my lifetime, powerful enough to cause obviously-connected harmful effects on the other side of the world for no reason but sheer social inertia.
The law-enforcement systems it was directly and unambiguously aimed at experienced the largest-magnitude change ever recorded, almost immediately after these interventions began.
There is clearer causation between the BLM movement and our current murder rate than there is between any social-science intervention and any given result in living memory. If the causation is not clear enough in this case, it is obviously not clear enough in any other case either, and we should admit that statistics don't work and the very concept of "social science" is invalid.
...For the record, I'm making bold claims here because I think the evidence is overwhelming. Can you point to a stronger intervention, or a greater-magnitude result? A shorter timeframe? A closer linkage?
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Has anyone heard any competing theories?
Racism and covid, iirc. Less plausible.
scott wrote a post about this
The "stare at graphs" method of determining causation for complex phenomena in large-scale human groups is not effective. There are so many ways a big number can increase or decrease, it just can't prove the convenient explanation. And the complex economic methods to find causation often fail here too. It's plausible, and it's something many cops claim (they have local experience), but idk.
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So things will probably get cooking here in a year when the next presidential cycle kicks is in full swing?
The next bit of heat will likley be the Supreme Court kicking blacks out of college. Err, rather their decision on affirmative action in higher education. This will be 100% noise, because the schools aren't going to change regardless of the decision except in the direction of even more affirmative action, but it will be a lot of noise, marches, rallies, overwrought editorials, cancellation of those agreeing with the decision, etc.
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Your presumption is that the next presidential election will be competitive. Given that we now have confirmed colusion between the federal security apparatus, big tech, and the media to "fortify" presidential elections in favor of Blue Tribe, a process that moderates here consider so pedestrian as to be unworthy of comment, I'm skeptical. Certainly you should expect the burner to go back to high should Reds appear to be gaining significant ground in formal power structures, though.
They aren’t really moderates though. They are moderate within the context of progressives.
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Democrats don't benefit from turning up the woke dial; it likely hurts them electorally. Instead it increases in times of intra-coalition competition. How does one advance in sclerotic organizations? Politics. By deploying shared cultural principles in a novel, militarized way, you eliminate existing power and replace it with your own.
The effects on the rest of society are unintended side effects. If it results in worse social outcomes or lost elections, it doesn't matter: you still get a bigger paycheck and have greater social status in elite circles, which is all that matters.
Didn't they kick off BLM2 in the summer preceding the 2020 election? Use MeToo to strike at Kavanaugh?
A lot of them initial led by Shor which I agree with believed the BLM move before the election was a mistake. That election should have been a landslide instead it was 50k votes.
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