Matthew Yglesias, co-founder of Vox.com, author of the recent book One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, and publisher of the excellent blog and newsletter Slow Boring, recently made a set of public predictions as a self-improvement exercise. This warms our hearts at Metaculus, as we're thrilled about there being more thoughtful thinkers who make, record, share and track their quantitative predictions.
Matthew generously gave Metaculus the go-ahead to record his predictions and run a short series about some of them, so that others can participate and try their hand at forecasting alongside him. You can read the (paywalled) blog post that kicked things off here.
And now for the numbers. Matthew Yglesias predicted, as of December 28, 2020, that in 2021:
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Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating higher than his disapproval rating (70%, updated on February 19th to 75%)
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Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating above 50% (60%, updated on February 19th to 65%)
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US GDP growth in 2021 is the fastest of any year of the 21st century (80%)
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The EU ends the year with more confirmed Covid-19 deaths than the US (60%)
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Apple does not release a new Mac Pro powered by Apple silicon (70%)
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Monthly year-on-year core CPI growth does not go above 2 percent (70%)
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Monthly year-on-year core CPI growth does not go above 3 percent (90%)
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Israel and Saudi Arabia establish official diplomatic relations (70%)