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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.
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.
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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