Saturday, February 22, 2020

Five 2030 Predictions


I think all of these have a more-than-50%-chance of happening, but I am probably overconfident:
  1. COVID-19 will kill more than 25 million people worldwide by 2030. I really hope I'm wrong and an effective, cheap vaccine is available soon.
  2.  More than one US state will default on their public employee pension obligations by 2030. Underfunded pensions are a chronic problem; I might be wrong and strong economic growth might push the day of reckoning past 2030. Or maybe COVID-19 will kill enough retirees to make the accounting work out (but I doubt it; the cost of dealing with lots of sick people is likely to strain government budgets at all levels).
  3. Polyamory and a push for state-sanctioned polyamorous marriage will be a big "culture war" issue during the 2020s.
  4. At least one country's central bank will issue a blockchain-based digital currency that will have a 'market cap' of more than 100 billion dollars by 2030.
  5. A woman will be US president before 2030.
UPDATE: I asked my Twitter followers what they thought; here are the poll results:
  1. 27% agreed with me(2,121 votes)
  2. 76% agreed (487 votes)
  3. 31% agreed (1,000 votes)
  4. 72% agreed (1,227 votes)
  5. 43% agreed (877 votes)
If my Twitter followers are right, I'll get two of five right.

3 comments:

  1. Very interested in how you came to predict #1 above?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Why did I predict it would be a big deal in February, before the rest of America realized that? As soon as I saw the reports of asymptomatic spread I thought there was no way we were going to contain it.

    Or how did I get 25million as the number of dead? I assumed 2 to3billion infected and a 1% fatality rate. I think I’ll be wrong— the fatality rate is probably lower than that, and some of the treatments look like they’ll bring it down to maybe 0.2%.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The vaccine will (happily) derail your prediction for COVID. But science hasn't developed a cure for death by old age yet, so prediction #5 looks like a good bet.

    ReplyDelete