‘Prediction is difficult, especially about the future” is the famous observation about life attributed to everyone from physicist Neils Bohr and Mark Twain to baseball’s king of malapropisms, Yogi Berra. But black swan events can also crop up and confound us. As those recede into the past and we see them in our rear view mirror, they eventually are judged as the inevitable outcomes of what has gone before and intriguingly we begin accepting them as part of the historical landscape.
For another approach, Foreign Affairs now asks panels of recognised experts to judge the likelihood of a particular trend that they have identified among international issues in order to “crowdsource” predictions. It publishes the distribution of opinions on the back page of each issue.
This broader competition will also appear in places like France where Emmanuel Macron will face strident opposition from the country’s right-wing nationalist party, riding popular economic discontents. Further, while the jury remains out, many experts are beginning to believe a fundamental change in the nature of work is now ongoing that may be as fundamental as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution when production moved decisively from homes to factories. With so much work now doable electronically from anywhere: “There is a broad consensus that the future is ‘hybrid’, and that more people will spend more days working from home.
One of the dangers of a list like this one for a new year is that unexpected events suddenly arise; witness the new wave of travel shutdowns with the emergence of the Covid Omicron variant. The Economist has argued that travel was beginning to pick up as economies reopened, even as some nations with a zero-Covid ‘suppression’ strategy, such as Australia and New Zealand, face the tricky task of managing the transition to a world in which the virus is endemic”.
These 10 trends are based on what The Economist informants relatively confidently predict. But what about those pesky black swans? Among the more obvious will be all the impacts stemming from the American midterm elections. If Republicans gain control – at least – of the House of Representatives, forget major legislation supported by President Biden, such as immigration and tax code reforms, let alone any items left out of the social infrastructure bill awaiting a Senate vote.
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