The 14 predictions that came true in 2024 — and the 10 that didn’t

Making predictions is a tricky business, and here at Future Perfect, we don’t pretend to have a crystal ball. But we do think there’s real epistemic value in putting our forecasts out there and — just as importantly — owning up to how they turned out. (Something that happens too rarely in the media, as we learned after November’s election.) Looking back at our predictions for 2024, we had a wild ride trying to anticipate a year that threw more than a few curveballs our way.

For 2024, we made 24 predictions in total, covering everything from who would win the White House to whether Elon Musk could actually get those Cybertrucks on the road. When the dust settled, we got 14 right and 10 wrong — batting .583. That’s Shohei Ohtani on a hot streak, though down somewhat from our 2023 results. But I did say it was a topsy-turvy year.

Some calls were right on the money, though. We correctly saw Trump’s comeback and the GOP taking back the Senate. We nailed it when we said Oppenheimer would grab Best Picture (I mean, who didn’t love watching Cillian Murphy brood for three hours?). And we were spot-on about some big international news, like Claudia Sheinbaum making history as Mexico’s first woman president and Modi keeping his grip on power in India.

But hey, nobody’s perfect. We thought the FDA would greenlight MDMA therapy for PTSD — that was a swing and a miss. We seriously underestimated how many Cybertrucks Tesla would crank out. And while we got some tech predictions right (looking at you, Waymo and SpaceX), we whiffed on predicting OpenAI’s moves.

The whole point isn’t just to keep score — it’s about getting better at this prediction thing through practice and learning from our mistakes. And in a world that seems to get more unpredictable by the day, we think that’s a pretty useful skill to develop. —Bryan Walsh

Donald Trump will return to the White House (55 percent) — RIGHT

I like to imagine that at least one incredibly sheltered person is learning this fact from this article: Donald Trump was elected to a second nonconsecutive term as president. There wasn’t much courage or confidence in this prediction, which I put at only 55 percent odds.

My basic approach was to try to use a political science model incorporating national polling, and I came up with a prediction of a narrow Trump victory. President Joe Biden was fairly unpopular, and Trump was narrowly leading him in polling. I wasn’t confident that advantage would persist — but it did.

I will say that if I had updated my prediction throughout the year, it would have changed a lot. I remember in June, before the disastrous Biden-Trump debate, telling friends I gave Trump a 75 percent chance to win; after the debate, I bumped it up to around 90 percent. When Vice President Kamala Harris replaced Biden and surged in polling compared to her predecessor, I reverted to something like 50-50 odds. The actual race and its contours were changing dramatically, and my sense of the race changed dramatically too. Almost by coincidence, the ultimate election wound up being the narrow contest that polling would’ve predicted at the end of 2023. —Dylan Matthews

Republicans will recapture the Senate (85 percent) — RIGHT

I think my past self explained the reasoning here well: “There are many, many ways for Republicans to retake the Senate. Everything has to go right simultaneously for Democrats to keep it.” Everything did not go right simultaneously for Democrats this election. They had already lost a seat forever when Joe Manchin decided to retire in West Virginia, a place where no other Democrat-caucusing candidate could ever win, which left them with a 50-seat maximum in 2024.

Then they lost Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana, red states that were going to be tough for Democrats to hang on to in a presidential election year. Then, in something of a shock, Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey was defeated by a private equity multimillionaire who doesn’t really live in the state and can’t tell the Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers apart. When that guy wins, you know Democrats are having a bad year.

On the plus side, it could’ve been much, much worse for Democrats. Despite Harris losing Arizona, Democrat Ruben Gallego won the Senate race there narrowly. Tammy Baldwin barely hung on in Wisconsin, and Elissa Slotkin won an open seat in Michigan by 0.3 percentage points, even as those two states went for Trump. If the Senate results had followed the presidential map, Republicans would have a 56-seat majority and no trouble confirming anyone Trump wants in his Cabinet. Instead, they ended up with 53 seats, which might be just small enough to cause Trump actual trouble. —DM

Democrats will recapture the House (55 percent) — WRONG

My reasoning here was that Republicans held a very small majority in the House going into the election, and Democrats seemed likely to pick up a number of seats in New York in particular due to redistricting. Sure enough, the party picked up three seats in New York, but lost others to pick up only one seat on net — not enough to flip the chamber.

In my defense, I was clear this might happen, writing, “There’s still an easy-to-imagine world where Republicans hold the House, especially if Trump wins the presidential race and if he pulls out a popular vote victory this time.” As it happens, that is the world we live in. But with 220 Republicans in the House and 218 needed to pass anything, there might not be much that Trump can do with this majority. —DM

Inflation will come in under 3 points (65 percent) — RIGHT

I have not always had the best track record when it comes to inflation predictions, but this one worked out. It was clear in 2023 that inflation had started to decline rapidly in the wake of the Fed’s interest rate hikes, and that decline continued through 2024, enough so that the Fed was able to start cutting again.

By the Fed’s preferred measure — the personal consumption expenditures price index, minus food and energy — prices grew by 2.8 percent from October 2023 through October 2024. That’s an annual rate below 3 points, though not by a whole lot. The Fed’s goal is to get the number down to 2 percent. I find it hard to see prices stabilizing that much, especially if tariffs from the Trump administration cause consumer prices to spike in a one-off event. But we’re clearly doing better than a few years ago. —DM

2023 US car crash deaths will again exceed 40,000 (60 percent) — RIGHT

I like to make this prediction mainly to draw our readers’ attention to the scandalous number of Americans killed by our transportation system. In 2023, according to statistics released this year by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, that number dropped by about 3.6 percent from 2022, to a still-abysmal 40,990, a figure that remains significantly elevated after a Covid-era spike erased more than a decade of progress in reducing car crash deaths.

How many is that, exactly? It’s about as many Americans as are killed by guns and more than double the number killed in homicides overall, though it’s far fewer than the numbers of Americans who die from diseases like heart disease and cancer. It’s twice the number of people killed by cars in the European Union, even though the EU has 100 million more people. And the federal car fatality statistics are actually around 10 percent lower than the true number of Americans killed by cars because they exclude some cases, including crashes on private roads and parking lots.

If today’s rates remained steady, a rough estimate would suggest that about 1 percent of all Americans would be killed by cars — a stunningly high cost of admission into our car-dependent society. —Marina Bolotnikova

The worldNetanyahu will be unseated as Israeli prime minister (75 percent) — WRONG

I almost always predict that Netanyahu will stay in power, but I made an exception when writing last year’s predictions because the Israeli public was so incredibly furious at him after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Polls were showing that voters wanted him out — by a wide margin. I figured if ever there was a time when he could be pushed out, this was it.

But even this wasn’t enough. Israel has a parliamentary system, where governments typically form on the basis of coalitions. Netanyahu is really, really good at pacifying his allies in the governing coalition — and they have kept him in power. —Sigal Samuel

The world will be hotter in 2024 than it was in 2023 (80 percent) — RIGHT

Climate change is very obviously making its effects felt. This summer was the hottest on record globally. By November, scientists said this year is “virtually certain” to break 2023’s record. They also noted that 2024 marks the first year that Earth is more than 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than in the pre-industrial period.

Sadly, this prediction was a pretty solid bet: You can make it every year and you’ll get it right about 80 percent of the time. As my colleague Kelsey Piper has noted, “This is based on looking at the last 25 years of atmospheric temperature data: On average, in four out of five years, this prediction would be right.” —SS

Narendra Modi will remain as prime minister of India after the country’s 2024 elections (85 percent) — RIGHT

Modi secured a third straight term as India’s prime minister after this spring’s massive elections, which saw over 640 million voters turn out. It’s an achievement equaled only by India’s founding prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and one that was about as easy to predict as any outcome in this record-breaking year of global elections.

Modi rolled into the elections with an approval rating in the mid-70s, or roughly twice as high as Biden’s popularity around the same time. In a year when incumbent leaders around the world fell in election after election, Modi and his BJP party were a sure thing — so much so that my only regret was not choosing a probability of 99 percent.

Even so, this election did not turn out the way many prognosticators expected, myself included. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance secured a majority in Parliament with 293 seats, but that was well short of the 400 seats the alliance was shooting for. And the BJP itself only won 240 seats, a significant drop from the 303 seats it had won in the previous election. As a result, the party lost its solo majority in the lower house of parliament for the first time in 10 years.

As my colleague Josh Keating wrote, the results were bad for Modi but good for India as a whole, showing that the world’s biggest democracy remains a democracy. An overwhelming victory would have fed into Modi’s growing authoritarian inclinations, which were on display this year as the Indian government attacked critics at home and abroad — including in the US. India was a rare example in 2024 of the people successfully pushing back against a would-be autocrat. —BW

Claudia Sheinbaum will become Mexico’s first female president (90 percent) — RIGHT

There was no courage in the prediction that the massively popular, but term-limited, left-wing President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador (AMLO) would be succeeded by his protégée, Claudia Sheinbaum, a past mayor of Mexico City and climate scientist. The polling, even that early on, showed Sheinbaum with a massive lead over challenger Xóchitl Gálvez, an indication of both Sheinbaum’s talent and the popularity of AMLO and his Morena party.

Sheinbaum’s election was historic: She is not only the first woman elected president of Mexico, but the first Jewish person and (to the best of my knowledge) the first scientist. Climate advocates shouldn’t be too sanguine, though. Despite her professional background, Sheinbaum has no interest in shrinking the popular state-owned petroleum sector. —DM

Ukraine will not break the “land bridge” between Donbas and Crimea (70 percent) — RIGHT

After the chaos of 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and 2023, when Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group of mercenaries mutinied and nearly took Moscow, 2024 was a less momentous year in the war. There were major shifts, to be sure: Ukraine seized part of the Kursk region in Russia, giving it Russian land it might be able to trade for Ukrainian territory now under Russian occupation, and North Korea sent troops to the front line, signaling both that Russia has serious allies in the war and that it’s desperate enough to call upon them.

But there were no major battlefield breakthroughs, and one of the biggest goals of the Ukrainian military (splitting Russian troops on the Crimean peninsula from troops in the Donbas, the east of Ukraine) did not come to pass. Here is the map of military control I used in last year’s predictions:

This is what the map looks like today:

If you look carefully, you can see some modest differences between the maps. But overall, they’re nearly identical. The lines of control haven’t moved much in the past year, and with Trump ascending to office and seemingly hostile to extending aid to the Ukrainian military, the future is looking rather grim for Ukrainians defending their sovereignty. —DM

The FDA will approve MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD (85 percent) — WRONG

I don’t feel too bummed about having erred in my prediction here because the FDA’s rejection came as a surprise to almost everyone involved. When I made this prediction a year ago, patients, therapists, and policymakers alike were anticipating that Lykos Therapeutics, the company trying to get MDMA-assisted therapy approved, would be successful. After all, Lykos had collaborated with the FDA on the trial design, and the latter had signed off on the methodology.

But in March, a report raised fresh concerns about the trial design and unreported adverse events. In May and June, more researchers and advocates started to sound the alarm — not just about the psychedelic part of psychedelic-assisted therapy but about the therapy part. Some went so far as to accuse Lykos of being a “therapy cult,” one with a style that could increase risk to patients. Ultimately, the FDA responded to this new information by deciding not to approve Lykos’s application. —SS

OpenAI will release ChatGPT-5 by the end of November 2024 (75 percent) — WRONG

Did OpenAI release a whole lot of stuff in 2024? It sure did — so much so that the company decided to rebrand 12 days during the holiday season this December as “Shipmas,” releasing everything from ChatGPT Pro (a $200/month plan that includes unlimited access to its top model OpenAI o1) to its video creation model Sora to something called “Santa mode.”

The blizzard of product shipping — one matched by competitors like Google and Meta — is a sign of what my colleague Kelsey Piper identified as a shift in AI, away from a single-minded focus on advancing technical progress and toward creating products that people will actually be able to use (and even more importantly, given how expensive frontier AI work is, actually buy). It came as concerns were growing over whether AI was hitting a scaling wall and AI companies were hitting “peak data.”

But as I wrote last year, “for the purposes of this prediction, OpenAI will need to release a product called ‘ChatGPT-5’ — no ‘ChatGPT-4.5 Turbo’ or whatever.” Whether because it was running out of data or because it didn’t want to lock itself into ever-escalating model versions, OpenAI did not. I’ll take the L. —BW

Starship will complete a launch without either stage exploding (65 percent) — RIGHT

2024 was a banner year for SpaceX’s Starship, which saw four test launches. The first in March is a difficult case for my prediction: While the launch itself was successful, the booster stage burned up while hurtling back to the ocean and the ship itself appears to have disintegrated at some point. I predicted that neither stage would “explode,” and it’s hard to know if either did in this test. They certainly didn’t operate the way SpaceX had hoped.

Luckily for the company, and for my prediction, its three subsequent launches were all smashing successes. In its June 6 launch, the booster and second stage splashed down, intact, in the Gulf of Mexico and Indian Ocean respectively. The November 19 launch, viewed in person by SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s political ally Donald Trump, got the same results. But the one for the history books came on October 13, when the booster stage returned not to the Gulf of Mexico but to the very same launchpad in Texas from whence it came, where it was caught by two massive mechanical “chopsticks.”

Whatever else you think about Musk — and I think a lot of negative things — that was a fairly awe-inspiring achievement, and easily met my prediction that the Starship project would notch major successes this year. —DM

Fewer than 1,000 Cybertrucks will be delivered to customers (60 percent) — WRONG

I biffed this one pretty bad. For quarters one through three of 2024, Cybertruck sales totaled 28,250 in the US. Anecdotally, they seem to be everywhere in Washington, DC.

My rationale was that the extremely unusual design of the truck, complete with a metal rather than painted exterior and a truly massive windshield, would prove challenging to produce at scale. Moreover, Tesla tends to operate with extreme delays, which made me pessimistic that it would meet its timelines for the vehicle.

Ultimately, though, it’s a company with a lot of experience building EVs at scale, and the Cybertruck proved to be no exception. I did predict, however, that the nearly 4-foot “monowiper” used on the windshield would break down immediately in inclement weather. Guess what? Tesla had to launch a recall in June over exactly this. —DM

Waymo will expand to a new city (80 percent) — RIGHT

The industry leader on self-driving cars, a sister company to Google, entered the year operating in San Francisco and Phoenix but had announced plans to expand to Los Angeles and Austin. The latter city has seen testing among Waymo’s own employees but is not yet available to the general public through either the Waymo One app or Uber (which has partnered with Waymo in Phoenix).

In Los Angeles, however, driverless taxi rides are now widely available: In March, Waymo started letting Angelenos off its waitlist so they could hail rides, and as of November 12, anyone in LA County can use the service, without any waitlist. That fits my prediction that at least one city would see driverless rides become widely accessible the way they already were in SF and Phoenix. —DM

Antibiotics sales for farmed animals will increase at least 1 percent in 2023 (65 percent) — WRONG

Most antibiotics sold in the US don’t go to hospitals or pharmacies, but to farms. These antibiotics are used to make animals grow faster and keep them alive in overcrowded, unsanitary factory farms, and they’ve given rise to new antibiotic-resistant “superbugs.” When humans fall ill from these superbugs, the typical course of antibiotics may not do the trick to heal them.

Former Future Perfect fellow Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg called the growth in antibiotic resistance a “hidden epidemic.”

Tracking the amount of antibiotics sold to meat producers is a good proxy for understanding whether we’re backsliding or making progress on this epidemic, and last year, I predicted antibiotic sales for livestock would have increased by 1 percent in 2023. Instead, they went down by 2 percent. It makes sense that they declined because beef production decreased by almost 5 percent, and cattle account for around 40 percent of livestock antibiotic sales, while pork production remained stable. (I predicted 2023 sales because data is delayed by about a year.)

I more or less knew this would happen, as the US Department of Agriculture predicted decreased beef production, and they’re usually right about these things. Nevertheless, I ignored common sense and predicted livestock antibiotic sales would increase because they had been on the rise for the previous five years. It’s a mistake to assume that trend lines will always continue, and a lesson I’ll incorporate into future predictions. —Kenny Torrella

Oatly’s stock price will not exceed $5 in 2023 (60 percent) — RIGHT

Sadly, I was right on this one. Oatly’s stock has remained below $1.40 all year, hitting a low of just 61 cents in mid-November (it peaked at nearly $29 per share in the summer of 2021). It’s been a long fall from grace for the company that single-handedly made oat milk cool, moving it from the fringes of the dairy aisle to seemingly every coffee shop menu in America.

As I wrote about last year, the company has been beset by manufacturing problems and an onslaught of imitators. And it just hit another roadblock: In early December, a UK judge decided that Oatly can’t use the word “milk” on its products after a UK dairy trade group sued the company over the matter. It’s part of a larger trend of the livestock industry’s effort to restrict how plant-based companies can market their products.

In brighter news, the company recently reported its third-quarter revenue was up about 10 percent compared to 2023, with growth in the main regions in which it operates. Despite a flagging stock price, Oatly is down but not out. —KT

45 percent of the US egg supply will be cage-free by late November (70 percent) — WRONG

The US egg industry is still headed toward a cage-free future, but in 2024, it moved slower in that direction than I thought it would. Instead of amounting to 45 percent of the egg supply, cage-free reached 40.3 percent, just a 1.5 percent increase from late 2023.

I was confident it would reach 45 percent for three reasons: Since 2019, the share of egg-laying hens raised cage-free had been growing by about 5 percent annually, several states had cage-free laws — banning the sale and production of caged eggs — going into effect in 2024, and many large food companies had committed to a 100 percent cage-free egg supply by 2025.

Why was I so off? I likely discounted the impact the bird flu has had on the US egg industry; this year, the virus has resulted in the mass killing of 44.1 million hens as of mid-December — more than double that of 2023. I was also overconfident on corporate progress; according to the animal protection group the Humane League, many large food companies are behind on fulfilling their cage-free pledges. Lastly, I probably overestimated the impact of the 2024 state laws in Nevada, Oregon, and Washington; each have small egg industries and relatively small populations.

We might see the pace of progress accelerate in 2025: The states implementing cage-free laws next year — Michigan and Colorado — have a slightly bigger combined population than the three states from last year and, more importantly, they have much bigger egg industries. Meanwhile, the country’s largest egg producer, Cal-Maine, will have a number of new cage-free farms going online in summer 2025. But the ongoing bird flu outbreak — combined with the unpredictability of corporate pledges — could shift the trajectory. —KT

More than 20 million poultry birds will be culled due to bird flu (60 percent) — RIGHT

I hate that this is true, but I was right on this one two times over. More than 40 million chickens and turkeys were killed in the poultry industry’s H5N1 bird flu outbreak. And that’s just this year — since the outbreak began in early 2022, over 120 million have been culled.

Most of those are not killed by the avian flu itself; rather, any time there’s a single detection of the disease at a poultry facility, all of the birds are exterminated, often with gruesome methods, like literally overheating them to death with industrial heaters. Three years into this never-ending nightmare, both the factory farm industry and animal advocates are faced with the reality that the bird flu may be here to stay.

And one disturbing development we couldn’t have predicted last year: H5N1 is now pervasive in another farm animal species, dairy cows, across the country. Next year, I think this disease will keep surprising us. —MB

More animal rights activists will be sentenced to jail or prison (40 percent) — WRONG

My reasoning here was based on criminal trials being incredibly unpredictable — so while I thought it was more likely that at least one animal rights activist would be incarcerated than any other single outcome, I put the probability at less than 50 percent. The prediction was mostly a product of recency bias: Barely a month before we made our 2024 predictions, Wayne Hsiung, one of the most prominent US animal rights activists and a co-founder of the group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), was convicted and sentenced to jail for his involvement in actions at two California factory farms.

DxE activists have run many similar actions over the last decade, employing a strategy they call “open rescue,” in which they enter factory farms and other places where animals are exploited, remove a few animals and take them to live at a sanctuary, and invite confrontation with the criminal legal system. The first few criminal cases I covered involving the group ended in either dismissals or miraculous acquittals. But Hsiung’s 2023 jail sentence made it feel like the bill was coming due.

This year, I suspected that a long-awaited DxE court case, involving the rescue of three beagles from a company that breeds them for animal testing, would end in prison time because I knew it would be harder for the activists to make a legal argument for acquittal than in farm animal cases. But sure enough, the case was dismissed shortly before trial. More DxE trials are scheduled for next year, but now I know better than to try to predict the outcome. —MB

Billie Eilish will win a Grammy for “What Was I Made For?” (90 percent) — RIGHT

This was a big year for Billie! I didn’t predict her new album or extensive world tour, but it’s not rocket science to know that the academy loves her work. With a previous win for the James Bond theme she did back in 2020, the Song of the Year award was a shoo-in. This year’s Future Perfect 50 honoree and superstar is only missing a Tony and an Emmy for that sweet, sweet EGOT status. —Izzie Ramirez

One of the Kardashian-Jenners will appear in a Schiaparelli dress for the Met Gala (60 percent) — WRONG

I was wrong on this one — it wound up being Jennifer Lopez who looked beautiful in Schiaparelli. Whichever Kardashian-Jenner decided to read this and prove me wrong: noted. But honestly it’s better this way. J. Lo was a co-chair for the event alongside fashion darling Zendaya, so she needed the extra zhuzh. —IR

Oppenheimer will win Best Picture at the 2024 Academy Awards (70 percent) — RIGHT

What did I write last year? “The Academy loves biopics, it loves period pieces, and for some reason, it weirdly loves modern films that feature black-and-white scenes.” To no one’s surprise, Oppenheimer ran away with the show at the 96th Academy Awards, winning seven Oscars, including Best Actor for Cillian Murphy, Best Director for Christopher Nolan, and yes, Best Picture. Hot dog!

So, since explaining why something we knew would happen happened is pretty boring, I’m going to instead discuss an all-time-great Oppenheimer-related query posted on the subreddit r/NoStupidQuestions:

Well, Rafe_Cameron_OBX, is it weird that your boyfriend watches Oppenheimer for as much as 15 hours a week? I think it depends on a few things. Does he obsessively watch and rewatch the bravura scene of the Trinity test? Has he started mumbling something about being “death, destroyer of worlds” in his sleep? (Assuming he sleeps.) You say he always makes time for you, which is great, but does he insist on reciting lines from the Bhagavad Gita when he’s, uh, making time?

While I’m hesitant to interfere in another person’s relationship, if the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” I strongly suggest you drop him immediately. I’m worried that if he doesn’t get treatment he may progress to a more advanced stage of Christopher Nolanism and start making you watch Interstellar three to five times a week. —BW

Shohei Ohtani will lead the major leagues in home runs in the 2024 season (75 percent) — WRONG

You don’t have to be Bill James to know that two-way baseball super-duper megastar Shohei Ohtani had a pretty good year in 2024, his first with the Los Angeles Dodgers, even though an elbow injury kept him from pitching. He hit .310, good for fifth in the majors. He recorded 130 RBIs (second in the majors) and had an OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage, the gold standard hitting stat) of 1.036, also good for second in baseball.

He became the first player in major league history to hit more than 50 homers and steal more than 50 bases, becoming the only player in the 50/50 club. On September 19, he had what many people consider the single best offensive game in the 121-year history of Major League Baseball, going 6-for-6 with three home runs, two doubles, 10 RBIs, and two stolen bases. Oh, and he went on to win a championship, too.

The one thing Ohtani did not do is the one thing I predicted he would do: lead the major leagues in home runs in 2024. Ohtani mashed 54 taters, which would have been good enough to at least tie for the majors lead in all but three of the past 24 seasons. Unfortunately, very big boy Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees took the crown this season with 58 home runs.

I’ll admit, my mistake here was forgetting that as spectacular as Ohtani is across the board in baseball, the 6-foot-7, 282-pound Judge is really, really good at mashing dingers, at least in the regular season. He flamed out in his championship series against Ohtani’s Dodgers, going 4-for-18 with just one homer and three RBIs, enraging Yankees fans across the country. So even though my prediction failed, I’d say advantage: Ohtani. —BW