++And a new way to understand cities’ response to tent encampments. +
++Earlier this month, the federal government released new data estimating that more than 650,000 people experienced homelessness in America on a single night in January 2023, an increase of 12 percent from 2022. More than 60 percent of the some 400 jurisdictions participating in the federal Continuum of Care program across the country reported growth in the number of people found sleeping outside or in cars, abandoned buildings, or anywhere not meant for humans to live. This rise in “unsheltered homelessness” was not limited to cities; more than half of rural and suburban communities saw their numbers go up too. +
++As street homelessness grows, so does a corresponding mental health and drug crisis. Many people experience trauma when they lose their homes and attempt to survive outside, and many turn to substances like methamphetamine to curb hunger or stay awake. While leaders maintain they’d like to clear their streets, they face barriers like a lack of affordable housing, a lack of stable medical and social services, and resistance from unhoused people to staying in cramped, congregate shelters. +
++Neil Gong, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California San Diego, researches psychiatric services, homelessness, and how communities seek to maintain social order. His forthcoming book, Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles, explores inequality in mental health care, and specifically how divergent the psychiatric treatment options are for those living in poverty compared to those from wealthy families. +
++Gong’s book provides a new, critical lens through which to think about how cities respond to homeless tent encampments, deploy the Housing First model, and approach drug decriminalization. His work offers clarity for raging debates about whether governments should bring back forced treatment and asylums for those opposed to voluntary care. +
++Senior policy reporter Rachel Cohen talked with Gong about his research and what it means to have such bifurcated systems for treating mental health. Their conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. +
++Rachel Cohen +
++Your book finds that there are effectively two different systems for people dealing with serious mental illness. Can you explain how those systems have not only different treatment options, but also different measures of success? +
++Neil Gong +
++So we have a public safety net system, which has evolved since psychiatric institutionalization. And in many ways, it just sort of shuttles people through our broken welfare state. What that system is largely focused on is addressing all of these complex social problems like patient homelessness, incarceration, re-arrest. So if you look at the actual quantitative metrics they’re using, they’re things like how many days have people been homeless, how many days they’ve been hospitalized, how many days they’ve been incarcerated, and basically the goal is to lower those numbers. That makes a lot of sense, that’s a totally reasonable thing to do. +
++But then once you go and you look at what care is like for elite people, suddenly you realize there’s this whole different set of metrics you could be using for thinking about improving mental health care, with goals around not just symptom reduction but helping people rebuild their identities. So in many cases for affluent patients, this is about, for example, getting back to college after a psychotic break, getting a stable job, perhaps therapeutic work around complex family dynamics, helping people figure out what their dreams are, and trying to achieve them. +
++Rachel Cohen +
++When we think of bifurcated health care, we typically think about how a rich person might be able to access a certain type of effective cancer treatment that a low-income person might not be able to afford. In that scenario, the ideal therapeutic treatment is the same for both individuals, it’s just out of reach for the poorer patient. When you look at this landscape of psychiatric illness, do you feel like the ideal treatment for affluent people is the same ideal one for those you studied living in urban poverty? +
++Neil Gong +
++For the two treatment worlds I studied, each is able to achieve success, but only because they have such different ideas of what success is. So in the public safety net, because they’re dealing with patient homelessness and incarceration and people being stuck in this street-shelter-jail cycle, most of the focus gets devoted to that. And so in a sense, they are doing this more holistic treatment, not just using medication to focus on symptom reduction. +
++At the same time, it involves very different treatments than what you see for more privileged people, where you’re talking about a variety of types of psychotherapy because the goal is not generally about housing and basic stability, it’s about transforming the self. So you end up with different kinds of therapies that might range from psychoanalysis and behavioral therapies to family therapies. All of those things could certainly be positive for people who are living, say, in downtown LA and getting public safety net services, but in a sense, it doesn’t really make sense in that world because they’re so concerned with this other stuff. +
++Rachel Cohen +
++In your book, you coin this concept of “tolerant containment.” Can you explain what you mean by that? +
++Neil Gong +
++So tolerant containment is this approach to social deviance, which is basically neither trying to really correct problem behaviors nor trying to get at the root causes of an issue, just tolerating it so long as we can keep it out of the way. I see this as emerging from separate developments, with civil libertarian court decisions around social disorder on the one hand and then fiscal austerity on the other. In many ways, tolerant containment is this response to the social and economic costs of things like mass incarceration, or the asylum system, but we end up with situations where cities are told by the courts that you can’t police encampments or arrest drug users or hospitalize people in psychosis against their will — but we also don’t have the kind of resources we need to actually help people. You kind of end up just tolerating things in public space. +
++Rachel Cohen +
++Is there a difference between “tolerant containment” and harm reduction? +
++Neil Gong +
++I think of tolerant containment as a governance strategy focused on managing social disorder, whereas harm reduction comes from a philosophy of protecting individual and public health and respecting agency. In many cases, harm reduction did come out of crises where people were essentially abandoned, like during the AIDS crisis or the opioid crisis, leaving people to do the best they could with what they had. But I see tolerant containment as something cities have come to do because they have to since they are hemmed in by civil liberties law and fiscal austerity. The two overlap, and a city agency may use harm reduction practices in its pursuit of tolerant containment. Or, on the flip side, a well-intentioned harm reduction practice like Housing First may descend into mere tolerant containment when implemented poorly. +
++Rachel Cohen +
++In your book, you look at what emerged after the closing of asylums for treating low-income people with serious mental illness. What does that look like today? +
++Neil Gong +
++So in California, what emerged are called Board and Care homes, which are essentially these psychiatric group homes, which is this new business model that came about because people now had these federal disability checks. And these places are characterized by minimal oversight. They technically have rules about taking medication and not drinking, but the SSI-derived economic base means there’s really just not a lot of resources, and they essentially become these flop houses. +
++Rachel Cohen +
++Some of these places sounded really bleak. What do you see as the difference between these and the old asylums? +
++Neil Gong +
++The huge difference is they’re usually not locked and in a community setting. So people will go outside, and they can sort of do as they please, during the day, because again, there’s not enough staff to surveil residents. And although there might be rules against drinking and drugs, there’s often no one checking up on you. There’s certainly no therapeutic activities, because again, there’s not enough staff. And so it ends up being what I see as this kind of de facto harm reduction model. It’s basically tolerant containment: They tolerate a certain amount of drug use and social disorder so long as it’s not too disruptive to other residents within the building. +
++Rachel Cohen +
++There’s a lot of evidence for the Housing First model for ending homelessness, but reading your book I did start to think about the approach through the lens of tolerant containment — and moving people into housing primarily to satisfy the objectives of getting off the streets, staying out of jail, and out of the ER. +
++Neil Gong +
++Yeah, there’s a way in which the client empowerment and civil libertarian impulse behind harm reduction activism and Housing First can easily dovetail with the reality of austerity. In other words, because social workers do not want to force someone into being clean or to take psychiatric meds, there’s this sense of, “Well, we got someone inside and they said they’re fine. And they want to be left alone, so we must have achieved our goal, and we’ve respected their rights.” And there’s something to that logic, but there are also times when people are saying no to treatment or to care and contact for a variety of complex reasons, including having been burned before and trauma. +
++Rachel Cohen +
++Something that came through clearly in your book I had never really considered before is how private mental health providers and affluent families would never consider Housing First a successful treatment for severe psychiatric illness. +
++Neil Gong +
++This was articulated very well by a case manager who himself was a former patient of one of these elite clinics and then had done his social work internship at a Housing First agency. And he said, paraphrased, that the Housing First model was great in terms of keeping people out of prison and saving the county money, but you’d want more for your own loved one. And then I started to see that everywhere, which is that for wealthy people, the idea that their loved one might be living alone in an apartment yelling at a wall was hardly a success. Success for them is defined much more around these upper-middle-class norms around work, school, friends, and family. +
++I think Housing First should certainly be part of our system as a baseline for getting people into stable housing, but if that’s where you stop it’s as if we’re acting as if poor people with mental illness have no future or don’t deserve one. +
++Rachel Cohen +
++I recently wrote about tiny homes where advocates are excited about giving people who are living on the streets a private room with a door that locks. Did that come up in your research at all with regard to tolerant containment? +
++Neil Gong +
++From a safety and dignity perspective, a private space with a locked door can be important. But I think the danger that advocates see is also real, which is that municipalities may invest in these solely as a means of circumventing laws, or rulings like Martin v. Boise. +
++The risk identified is that these can be used primarily as a means to hit certain metrics so cities can then sweep encampments without actually helping people. That’s a real risk, and I hope we’re able to build up our infrastructure of new housing development, treatment centers, tiny homes, all of these things all at once. +
++Rachel Cohen +
++It didn’t seem like the elite mental health treatment centers could necessarily take unhoused or low-income patients, even if they somehow had subsidies to fund that kind of care. +
++Neil Gong +
++Yeah, I think the clearest way we can see this is that at one point an insurance company had a test case where they sent a homeless woman diagnosed with schizophrenia and opioid addiction to one of these elite clinics, and the center just couldn’t figure out what to do with her. They couldn’t figure out how to house her because the insurance companies won’t pay for non-medical housing. They couldn’t do their therapeutic procedures because they had to take her to court appointments, which ate up all their time. And while the woman’s family was paying for insurance, they weren’t involved in the broader sense of coordinating care or having home-based interventions. The kind of model these elite clinics employ doesn’t really work if you don’t have that baseline of stable housing and involved family. +
++Rachel Cohen +
++Your book looks at some of the pitfalls of the affluent private care model, too. What did you find there? +
++Neil Gong +
++One of my findings is that in the public safety net, they’ve ended up with tolerant containment because they essentially don’t have the capacity to surveil and control people. And actually where you do find this kind of surveillance and control is in these centers for privileged people. They don’t necessarily think of it as surveillance or control in this bad way. It’s more like, well, families are paying all this money to have their loved ones looked after. But from the patient perspective, it can be kind of overbearing, and you know, it’s ironic because a lot of social theorists and critical theorists working in the tradition of Michel Foucault predict that the state is going to micromanage these poor people who are social deviants. But again, as I’ve said, they basically can’t, and don’t have the resources to do so. And so where you see the micromanaging is in these elite centers, and sometimes that treatment looks really good and people appreciate it, but in other cases, they feel dominated, frankly. +
++Rachel Cohen +
++We are seeing this resurgent debate around forced treatment and whether there should be a return to institutionalization for people with severe mental illness. In your book, you push back on the premise and say there are things we need to answer first before we can get to the question about returning to asylums. +
++Neil Gong +
++I think it can be true that there’s some small sliver of people who will require long-term inpatient care or perhaps even life-long care. I think that can be true at the same time that a lot of people we currently think need that actually don’t. And so I’d say the first step is addressing housing needs and access to high-quality community care. If we build all of that out, there will be a lot of people who we probably thought needed a conservatorship but with all these high-quality voluntary services, actually will be able to get the care they need without giving up their rights. +
++At the same time, after we’ve done that, I think there will still be a sliver of people who are going to need this kind of long-term involuntary care, but instead of kind of disappearing a mass of people via old school asylum tactics, we will really have winnowed it down until there’s only a very small percentage of folks who we truly have figured out we cannot serve well through voluntary community services. I think there is a role for the asylum after we’ve done all those other things right. +
++Rachel Cohen +
++Do you have any ideas on how to avoid the pitfalls of the past when it comes to asylums? +
++Neil Gong +
++I think one really important move is to bring more care workers who have personal experience with mental illness and have been through experiences like conservatorships so they can help identify what parts work better than others. Could we redesign psychiatric wards with the input of architects who have themselves been hospitalized? +
++And then there’s the procedural justice question, which is like, even if people are going to have to go to court and lose their case and be conserved, there’s still a need to make sure that their voices are heard so that it’s actually legitimate and not a kind of kangaroo court situation. Because when people are treated with dignity, it makes a huge difference. So I think that ideally we’ll have far fewer people who even seem to be candidates for asylum or institutionalization. But among those who do, there’s both a design issue and procedural justice issues where we can make huge improvements. +
++The 21 forecasts we made in 2023, revisited. +
++Though the name might suggest otherwise, we are not technically in the “predicting the future” game at Future Perfect. We usually leave that to the pundits and analysts who will confidently tell you about who the next Republican nominee for president or NBA champion will be — and then conveniently forget should those predictions fail to come true. +
++But there is real epistemic value in not just trying to predict what’s to come, but putting a specific probability on that prediction — and then, just as importantly, evaluating whether and why you were right (or wrong) after the fact. It’s an intellectual exercise in both rigor and humility, and one that is becoming increasingly valuable in our part of the media. +
++So how did our 2023 forecasts do? Not bad — 14 correct predictions to 7 misfires. (Note that we had to invalidate two predictions from 2023’s list, on the number of poultry culled because of bird flu and Beyond Meat’s stock price, because of problems in how the predictions were formulated.) Politics proved relatively easy — yes, Joe Biden would run for reelection and would remain the Democratic frontrunner; no, not a single Republican would seriously challenge Donald Trump’s hold on the party and the likely nomination. +
++Economics proved more difficult, as we and just about every other analyst failed to foresee that the US would escape recession even as it brought down inflation. And tech turned out to confound some of our expectations, in part because technologies like lab-grown meat haven’t advanced as rapidly as we’d forecast, and in part because bad things, like the ongoing avian flu outbreaks, haven’t been quite as bad as we thought. +
++As I do every year, I’ll quote my colleague Dylan Matthews: “Predicting the future is a skill at which some people are dramatically better than others, and practicing is one of the best ways to improve at it.” Check back with us on January 1, when we unveil our predictions for 2024. —Bryan Walsh +
++United States +
++Joe Biden will be the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination heading into 2024 (70 percent) — RIGHT +
++Naturally, 2023 featured a lot of speculation and suggestions about dramatic change-ups on the Democratic side: should Biden even run again? Should he replace Kamala Harris with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer? Would a top-tier alternative like California Gov. Gavin Newsom challenge him? +
++Ultimately none of that happened, and the strongest challenger he got was Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, which must be who pollsters mean when they ask respondents their views of a “generic Democrat.” As a result, the prediction markets and platforms, from the crypto-based Polymarket to the staid and professional Metaculus to the goofy and anarchic Manifold to the old standby PredictIt, give Biden overwhelming odds to be renominated. This was the standard I chose for determining if Biden was the “frontrunner,” so I feel like I nailed this one. And, for what it’s worth, the polls agree. —Dylan Matthews +
++Donald Trump will be the frontrunner for the Republican nomination heading into 2024 (60 percent) —RIGHT +
++While a year later it feels inevitable that Trump would be crushing his rivals and that the Ron DeSantis bubble would’ve popped almost immediately, this was not exactly obvious in late 2022, which accounts for my relatively unconfident prediction. Trump, after all, was under investigation by several prosecutors, seemed likely to be indicted by a few of them, and is (no less than Joe Biden) showing his age these days. +
++But you can never go broke betting against Trump in a GOP primary, even after he was indicted several times, and so Polymarket and all the rest still put him as a decisive frontrunner as of this writing. —DM +
++The Supreme Court will rule that affirmative action is unconstitutional (70 percent) — WRONG +
++This may seem like a case where I was obviously right — the Court did rule affirmative action unconstitutional in most cases — but you have to look at the fine print. Here’s how I characterized my prediction: +
++++The reason I’m not more confident is due to a nuance [my Vox colleague Ian] Millhiser noted, which is that [Chief Justice John] Roberts appeared open to racial preferences at military academies, noting the federal government’s argument that the military needs a diverse officer corps to succeed. If such a carve-out is included in the ultimate ruling, my prediction here will be wrong: I’m predicting they’ll strike down affirmative action across the board at public or publicly funded institutions. +
+
+The Supreme Court did include such a carveout allowing for racial preferences at service academies. Here is Roberts, in footnote 4 of his opinion: +
++++The United States as amicus curiae contends that race-based admissions programs further compelling interests at our Nation’s military academies. No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context. This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present. +
+
+In her dissent, Sonia Sotomayor interprets this as meaning “the Court exempts military academies from its ruling.” I predicted they would not do this, so I got this wrong. I apologize to the good people at Manifold Markets whom I confused on this. —DM +
++The US will not meet its target for refugee admissions this fiscal year (80 percent) — RIGHT +
++Unfortunately, this prediction was right. President Biden had set the refugee admissions target at 125,000 for fiscal year 2023 but ended up resettling roughly 60,000. Even getting halfway to the target proved just out of reach. +
++America’s resettlement infrastructure still hasn’t fully recovered from the Trump administration, which gutted it. Biden promised to restaff the government agencies that do resettlement and reopen the offices that had been shuttered, but advocates say the rebuild has been too slow. +
++Yes, the US has welcomed some groups — like Afghans, Ukrainians, and Venezuelans — but note that those who came to the US via the legal process known as humanitarian parole only get stays of two years. They don’t count toward the number of refugees resettled, as refugees are given a path to permanent residency. —Sigal Samuel +
++The US will slip into recession during 2023 (70 percent) — WRONG +
++I was very wrong on this one. (Bad for me, good for the commonwealth.) At this point, it now appears that the US economy will likely have grown by more than 2 percent over the course of 2023, which, clearly, does not qualify as a recession. Despite concerns that the Federal Reserve’s campaign to quash inflation through interest rate hikes would inevitably squash growth, the US economy remained startlingly resilient in 2023, outperforming expectations across the board. Fed Chair Jerome Powell couldn’t have set up the country for a softer landing with a warehouse full of Tempur-Pedic mattresses. +
++But if I was wrong, I wasn’t alone. Recession expectations were historically aligned — everyone from Wall Street analysts to Fed economists to intense guys who really want you to buy gold largely assumed a recession was an inevitability sometime in 2023. Heck, according to one survey, 59 percent of Americans feel like the US is in a recession right now, which is a whole other thing. (See above: it is not.) +
++You can’t really blame the prognosticators. The US has almost never managed to curb inflation at this level without slipping into a recession. Economically speaking, what has happened in 2023 is akin to water suddenly flowing uphill — which is probably why a lot of analysts are still worried about the possibility of a recession next year. We’ll see if Powell can pull another rabbit out of his hat. —BW +
++Inflation in the US will exceed 3 percent (60 percent) — RIGHT +
++My definition of inflation for my predictions is the same as the one used by the Federal Reserve: the price increases of “personal consumption expenditures,” excluding food and energy. More specifically, I committed to using an average of the first three quarters of the year, as the fourth quarter data is not yet available. +
++Well, the first three quarters’ inflation rates were 5.0, 3.7, and 2.3 (see row 34 here on page 12), for an average of 3.67 percent. That is, for sure, above 3 percent, even as it was rapidly falling. Even adding in October’s data results in average monthly inflation of 0.28 percent for the year, or 3.36 percent in annual terms. +
++I think 2023 will be the year that inflation finally gets back to the 2 percent range, which is an impressive achievement for the Fed given no recession has occurred. But for 2023, it was still fairly high. —DM +
++There will be no Supreme Court vacancies in 2023 (90 percent) — RIGHT +
++Given the nine justices’ ages, wealth, and education levels, there was a less than 11 percent chance that a sitting Supreme Court justice would’ve died this year. That didn’t happen, nor did any sitting justice retire. +
++That could change next year. There’s growing pressure for 69-year-old liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor to leave the court before Republicans likely gain control of the Senate in 2024 and hold power over Supreme Court nominations for the next six to eight years, or longer. +
++That pressure will grow in 2024, in what’s already gearing up to be a wild ride of an election year. If Sotomayor were to die while Republicans control the Senate, it could lock in a conservative 7-2 majority for years and further erode American democracy. —Kenny Torrella +
++
++The world +
++Vladimir Putin will still be president of Russia (80 percent) — RIGHT +
++Putin recently announced his reelection bid for a fifth term as Russia’s president, and given the average life expectancy of Russian opponents of his regime, I give him very good odds. +
++My estimate of 20 percent odds of Putin losing power was based on a suspicion that the stalemate in Ukraine, and the massive economic and human toll it’s wreaked on Russia, would make him vulnerable. That was correct, and in June the mercenary Wagner Group and its colorful leader Yevgeny Prigozhin openly mutinied against Putin and began to march on Moscow. For a brief moment, it appeared they would be able to take the city and perhaps overthrow Putin. +
++But Prigozhin — who was not an opponent of the war but instead a believer that he could run it better than Putin — blinked and called off the march. Putin, at first, seemed to welcome him back into the fold. Then, on August 23, two months after the mutiny, the plane Prigozhin was flying in crashed due to an explosion on board. Putin has suggested that Prigozhin died when a cocaine-fueled hand grenade-tossing party aboard the plane got out of hand. As plausible as that seems, I agree with other analysts that it seems more likely Putin just killed the guy. +
++In any case, Putin was not able to prevent the pressures of the war from building into a dangerous mutiny. He was able to crush that mutiny, though, and to send a message that any future attempts will end in fiery death. —DM +
++China will not launch a full-scale invasion of Taiwan (90 percent) — RIGHT +
++It would be an exaggeration to say that Chinese relations with Taiwan are currently good. The Democratic Progressive Party — the more pro-independence, anti-Beijing party on the island — is currently leading polls for next month’s presidential election, albeit narrowly. China keeps sending carriers through the Taiwan Strait, and is reportedly meddling in the election to try to help the pro-unification Kuomintang party. +
++But there have not been any indications that China is amassing the troops it needs for a full-scale amphibious assault, or the ships it would need for a blockade meant to force Taiwanese capitulation. And thank goodness; the world hardly needs another high-casualty war right now. —DM +
++At least one new country will join NATO (90 percent) — RIGHT +
++Finland, which despite being a liberal democracy remained so diplomatically close to the Soviet Union that the country’s name became a term of diplomatic art, joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on April 4, in the most dramatic reaction of any country to Russia’s assault on Ukraine. The country, which was a Russian possession until 1917, shares an 832-mile border with Russia, which can now host NATO troops and bases from allied nations to deter Russian incursions west. +
++Sweden seemed likely to formally join this year as well, but it was blocked due to foot-dragging by Hungary and Turkey over Sweden’s criticism of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán and its past refusal to extradite Kurdish activists to Turkey, respectively. It still seems likely to join in 2024, but its path is a little more circuitous than Finland’s. —DM +
++Finland will remain the world’s happiest country, while America won’t crack the top dozen (75 percent) — RIGHT +
++Every year, the World Happiness Report ranks countries in terms of the happiness of their populations. It’s part of a burgeoning movement to pay more attention to indicators of subjective well-being as opposed to just raw GDP. +
++This year’s country rankings didn’t surprise me at all. Finland held on to the top spot on the list, thanks to its well-run public services, high levels of trust in authority, and low levels of crime and inequality, among other things. I was pretty confident that would be the case because the Nordic nation had already been the happiest country for five years running, and last year researchers noted that its score was “significantly ahead” of every other country. +
++Meanwhile, America’s ranking improved very slightly — from 16th place in 2022 to 15th place in 2023 — but, as I predicted, it didn’t make it into the top dozen spots. It never has, which is, um, really something to reflect on. —SS +
++
++Science and technology +
++A psychedelic-based mental health treatment will win US regulatory approval (60 percent) — WRONG +
++Based on indications from experts and the government, I suspected there was a decent chance regulators would approve MDMA for treatment of PTSD this year. And after publishing some promising study results, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies did indeed file for Food and Drug Administration approval of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. But it’ll be months before we get a decision out of the FDA. —SS +
++The US will not approve a nasal vaccine for Covid-19 (90 percent) — RIGHT +
++Even though we’ve been told that Covid-19 vaccines delivered through the nose may prevent more infections than shots in arms, and even though Covid-19 nasal vaccines created by American researchers have been tested in animals, the US doesn’t have them and probably won’t anytime soon. One big reason is a lack of funding: Biden asked Congress for more money for next-generation vaccines, but Republicans resisted. —SS +
++An AI company will knowingly release a text-to-image or text-to-video model that exhibits bias (90 percent) — RIGHT +
++When I made this prediction, I specified that I would judge an AI company to have “knowingly” released a biased model if the company acknowledges in a system card or similar that the product exhibits bias. +
++Well, in October, OpenAI released DALL-E 3, and stated in the model’s system card: “Bias remains an issue with generative models including DALL·E 3, both with and without mitigations. DALL·E 3 has the potential to reinforce stereotypes … We additionally see a tendency toward taking a Western point-of-view more generally.” +
++Other AI models, like Google’s recently unveiled Gemini, almost certainly exhibit bias, too — it’s just that, unlike OpenAI, Google is not saying what’s under the hood. —SS +
++OpenAI will release GPT-4 (60 percent) — RIGHT +
++GPT-4, released on March 14, was not a dramatic sea change in ability compared to GPT-3.5 that preceded it. But it’s quite a bit better, especially combined with other improvements that OpenAI rolled out this year: Code Interpreter, which can generate working code to solve problems based on plain English prompts; DALL-E 3, the latest OpenAI image generation model now integrated into ChatGPT; GPT-4 Turbo, yet another refinement of the core model; and GPTs, a program that enables users to train their own custom version of GPT-4 tailored to a particular task. +
++The boardroom chaos that consumed the company in November seems, in retrospect, to be mostly a blip in the context of its big product releases. It remains by far the dominant AI company, and with the aggressively commercializing Sam Altman now more firmly in charge than ever, it shows no signs of slowing down. —DM +
++SpaceX’s Starship will reach orbit (70 percent) — WRONG +
++SpaceX certainly tried to reach orbit in 2023. It launched the Starship twice, on April 20 and November 18. The first saw the vehicle explode after reaching 39 km, and the second saw the second stage reach 148 km before a safety procedure led it to self-destruct. But neither entered orbit; even a successful launch, by SpaceX’s own standards, would not have led to a full orbit of the Earth. +
++I think my failure here was partly raising a poorly framed question. What I meant, I think, was “will SpaceX have a Starship test that goes well.” I think the November test went well by many metrics. But as I phrased the question, I set the bar implausibly high, and SpaceX failed to meet it. —DM +
++
++Animal welfare +
++At least three lab-grown meat companies will begin selling their products in the US (50 percent) — WRONG +
++Two lab-grown, or “cell-cultivated” meat, companies began selling their products in the US in 2023. I was wrong here, but I had hedged my bet with 50 percent confidence because I had heard so much uncertainty from people in the sector about which companies would first get approval from US regulators to sell their products, and when. +
++Two of the startups with the most funding, Upside Foods and GOOD Meat — both based in the San Francisco Bay Area — gained approval the same day in June. Both make chicken derived from chicken cells, which they feed a mix of sugars, amino acids, salts, vitamins, minerals, and other ingredients for several weeks until they can be harvested as animal fat and muscle tissue. +
++The startups are selling their products to consumers, but in very limited quantities at just one US restaurant per company. They still have a long way to go to figuring out if they can scale their technology to compete with conventional meat on cost. But overcoming the regulatory hurdle is part of the battle in bringing a product to market, and this nascent field demonstrated their processes are safe and regulatory-compliant. —KT +
++The Supreme Court will rule in favor of the pork industry in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross (70 percent) — WRONG +
++In 2018, California voters passed a law, known as Proposition 12, that requires pork sold in the state to come from pigs given more space — essentially, cage-free conditions — whether those pigs were raised in California or not. A pork industry group, the National Pork Producers Council, sued the state over it, and the case made its way up to the US Supreme Court. I predicted with high confidence that the business-friendly Court would rule in favor of the pork producers, but instead — to my shock and delight — they sided with California and the pigs. +
++The case hinged not on animal welfare, but on states’ rights, and whether Prop 12 was unfairly forcing farmers in other states to give pigs more space if they still wanted to sell their pork in California. All nine justices agreed Prop 12 was constitutionally sound in this regard. The pork industry also claimed that the financial trouble the law imposed on producers outweighed any benefits the law delivered to Californians. On this matter, the justices voted to uphold Prop 12 and scrambled the political divide on the Court. Conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Clarence Thomas joined liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, for the 5-4 decision. +
++It was a momentous decision for the future of farm animal welfare, helping to ensure similar laws around the country remain intact and giving animal advocates a level of certainty that it’ll be harder to challenge future laws. —KT +
++Antibiotics sales for farmed animals will increase in 2022 (65 percent) — RIGHT +
++Farmed animals are raised in unsanitary, overcrowded conditions. Knowing that disease spread is all but inevitable, meat producers routinely feed animals antibiotics. A terrifying result of routine antibiotic feeding is that bacteria are mutating and developing resistance to these antibiotics, making them less effective in treating common conditions in humans, like sepsis, urinary tract infections, and tuberculosis. +
++Public health experts have been calling on meat companies to cut back on antibiotic use, and on the FDA to enact stricter regulations on the issue like its European counterparts have done. I predicted neither the FDA’s modest actions nor industry’s voluntary agreements over the past few years would have made a difference in cutting antibiotic usage in the meat business, and I was right. +
++Earlier this month, the FDA released data that showed in 2022 there was a 4 percent increase in sales of medically important antibiotics to the livestock sector. To the FDA’s credit, regulations it passed in the mid-2010s did help bring sales down for a couple years, but they’ve been ticking back up every year since 2017. —KT +
++
++Entertainment and culture +
++Top Gun: Maverick will not win Best Picture (75 percent) — RIGHT +
++Pfft, come on! Yes, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did deign to gift a Best Picture nomination to this paean to the American military-industrial complex and the medical wonders of Tom Cruise’s anti-aging regimen. But let’s be real — the mysteriously unnamed foreign adversary in the film was more likely to blast Pete “Maverick” Mitchell out of the sky than give the Best Picture to an action movie that, arguably, saved movies as an industry coming out of Covid. Seventy-five percent certainty was, in retrospect, way too low. +
++After all, the last time the Academy gave the Best Picture statuette to a mega-popular action film was 2004’s Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, but that was a) the third entry in a beloved trilogy of a beloved book series that had long been considered unfilmable, and b) had elves. Neither was true of Cruise’s air-combat masterpiece, which, besides pulling in some $1.5 billion at the box office, definitively proved the superiority of sexagenerian human pilots over remote-controlled drones. Instead, the Academy honored the multiversal extravaganza Everything Everywhere All at Once, which means there is now at least one Best Picture-winning film that features a mystical bagel as its central point. (Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan rocked, though.) +
++So congratulations, Academy, Tom Cruise basically gave you back your business, and for the fourth time, you sent him home with nothing. May you be haunted by whatever weird classical music ghost was poltergeisting around Lydia Tár’s palatial Berlin flat. —BW +
++The Philadelphia Eagles will win the 2023 Super Bowl (25 percent) — WRONG +
++Okay, so, I see it says here that the Kansas City Chiefs defeated the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35 in Super Bowl LVII in what was apparently the third most watched television program of all time. Weird — despite being a lifelong Eagles fan, I have no memory of this. But if I had watched the game, I would probably point out: +
+-
+
- +The field was suspiciously slippery in a way that neutralized the Eagles all-world pass rush against Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes, who is apparently exempt from the laws of physics — and all the NFL could do was blame Rihanna’s halftime show. + +
- +What kind of treatment allowed Mahomes to do plays like this on what was supposedly a very serious ankle sprain, and was it covered by State Farm? + +
- +How does a quarterback like the Eagles’ Jalen Hurts just… drop the ball like this? Not dropping the ball is an important part of being a quarterback, given that it is very hard to play offense if you do not, in fact, hold the ball in your hands. + +
- +At halftime of Super Bowl LVII, the Eagles held a 10-point lead, which gave them an implied win probability of 82.1 percent — significantly higher, I would point out, than the 25 percent I gave in my prediction. (For what it’s worth, the Eagles also had an 82.1 percent chance of winning their division this year before playing the Dallas Cowboys on December 10, who then soundly thrashed them 33-13.) + +
- +And most importantly… HOW DO YOU CALL A HOLDING PENALTY LIKE THIS ON THE KEY PLAY OF THE MOST IMPORTANT SPORTING EVENT IN OUR (well, mine, at least) LIFETIME? + +
+The lesson here is clear: Don’t put probabilities on your dreams. And maybe don’t drop the football. —BW +
++
++
++One year into Netanyahu’s latest tenure, Israel’s state and society are truly weakened. +
++A year ago today, Benjamin Netanyahu’s sixth government was inaugurated with a clear majority, ushering in what Israelis hoped would be a new period of stability after more than three years of political turmoil. Reality quickly proved otherwise. +
++Instead, 2023 has been Israel’s annus horribilis, marked by a series of events that shook the nation to its core. +
++In early January, less than a month after the government was formed, Minister of Justice Yariv Levin unveiled a plan to radically reshape the foundations of Israeli democracy and concentrate power in the hands of the executive. Israelis, many of whom perceived the move as a step toward authoritarianism, took to the streets to halt the judicial overhaul, staging some of the largest mass demonstrations Israel has ever seen week after week. In July, as the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament) passed the first legislation of the overhaul, concerns over social disintegration intensified. +
++Then came the deadliest day in the country’s history. On October 7, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israeli territory and killed over 1,200 people, including many civilians. In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the Israeli state proved incapable of an immediate effective response; it was left to voluntary organizations to evacuate Israelis living next to the Gaza border. The war in Gaza that ensued is still raging, with over 20,000 Palestinians killed and over 85 percent of the population displaced, over 160 Israeli soldiers killed, and no clear path for the Israeli government to deliver on its stated goals. An annus horribilis indeed. +
++How has it come to this — so much damage in so little time? +
++As a first attempt at this — focusing on the internal dynamics of Israeli politics and without assuming an exhaustive answer — three factors are worth highlighting: populism, polarization, and the personalization of politics. The interplay of these three factors proved so dangerous since it simultaneously weakened both Israeli society and Israel’s state capacity. +
++High levels of populism among members of the government fueled the judicial overhaul, which intensified internal strife — emboldening Israel’s adversaries. Then, after the October 7 attack, the government’s inadequate response exposed Israel’s weakened state, a result of populist assaults on public servants in a polarized climate as well as years of political personalization in which loyalty took precedence over professional qualifications in public service appointments. +
++This was a uniquely bad year for Israel, worth understanding in its own right. But Israel is far from the only democratic country confronting some combination of populism, polarization, and personalization — and democracies would do well to heed this tragic tale. +
++Netanyahu’s coalition entered power with a decidedly populist bent +
++Benjamin Netanyahu returned to the office of the prime minister, a position he had previously held from 1996–1999 and 2009–2021, and within a week, it was clear that populism would be a defining feature of his tenure. +
++On January 4, Levin announced a plan for a judicial overhaul that aimed to dramatically reorganize the basic architecture of Israeli democracy. According to Levin, the court “has eroded trust to a dangerous low and has not brought proper governance. People we didn’t choose — decide for us. This is not democracy.” The judicial overhaul was therefore designed to reshape Israel’s delicate system of checks and balances, lifting constraints over the elected branches. +
++The overhaul consisted of multiple measures, including granting the government greater influence in the selection of judges and restricting the court’s ability to strike down legislation. Critics warned that these measures were designed to collectively form what legal scholar Kim Lane Scheppele termed a “Frankenstate”: a disfigured democracy crafted by a mishmash of legal arrangements adopted from other countries and patched together to ensure maximum power in the hands of the government. Soon, one of the largest mass protest movements in the history of the country emerged, with hundreds of thousands of Israelis taking to the streets. +
++This attack on the functioning of Israel’s state was not some aberration in Netanyahu’s government. While much of the public attention following the formation of the government went to its most radical elements — such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, previously convicted of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization and now appointed as minister of national security — the judicial overhaul was central to the goals of all parts of the new coalition. It was presented not by a minister from a small fringe party, but by Levin, a minister from Netanyahu’s party, the mainstream Israeli right-wing Likud. This, however, should come as no surprise given evidence that the Likud stands out among mainstream right parties for its extreme level of populism. +
++For populists, politics is a never-ending struggle between the pure, unified people and the corrupt, malicious elites. Populist leaders claim that they, and only they, are the true representatives of the authentic people. Consequently, they perceive constraints on the executive branch — whether in the form of judicial review or public servants who are committed to ethical, professional service — as hurdles to be dismantled. +
++Clear examples of this populist script can be found in the rhetoric of elected representatives from the Likud party, commonly framing state institutions — from the military to the Bank of Israel — as an all-encompassing “deep state” at the service of corrupt elites. Former Minister of Information Galit Distel-Atbaryan tweeted that her party “will continue to free Israel from the oppression of the elites.” The minister of transportation, Miri Regev, railed against “an elite that seeks to override the will of the people.” Tali Gottlieb, a member of Parliament, stated that “the deep state has infiltrated the leadership of the Shin Bet and the IDF.” +
++New data confirms that extreme populism is a key feature of Israeli politics. The Chapel Hill Expert Survey measures the salience of anti-elite and anti-establishment discourse in the public communication of political parties around the world. While imperfect, this is a useful proxy to measure populism comparatively. Israel was just added to this data set, which allows us to locate Israeli parties next to their counterparts abroad. Such comparative analyses show that Likud is populist to the bone. Its levels of populism align more closely with the European populist radical right than with mainstream right parties. For instance, when compared to Germany, the Likud’s level of populism is more similar to the radical right Alternative for Germany than to the center-right Christian Democrats. +
++In fact, the Likud’s populism is in a similar league with that of the right-wing parties pushing for democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe: Fidesz in Hungary and PiS (Law and Justice) in Poland. In both countries, democratically elected governments sought to use legal means to hollow out democratic governance. This is the populist textbook of democratic erosion that Likud was following with its judicial overhaul: pushing a plan that, according to then-Chief Justice Hayut, would deal a “fatal blow” to Israeli democracy. +
++Partisan animosity in Israel is reaching a dangerous peak +
++Populism often fuels a vicious circle of polarization, as explained by political scientists Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer: “Populist leaders rail against the establishment or the elites, blaming them for the plight of the people […] When opponents reciprocate with derogatory antipopulist language, the polarizing dynamic spirals.” Importantly, this polarization manifests not in policy disagreements but rather in animosity and hostility across party lines. As would be expected, the growing salience of populist discourse in Israeli politics went hand in hand with growing inter-partisan animosity. +
++Analyses of survey data collected in Israel reveal that by late 2022, partisan animosity had reached record levels. The Israel National Election Surveys allows us to track changes over time in affective polarization, defined as the difference between how much voters like their own party and how much they dislike political opponents. Out-party dislike has increased since Netanyahu took office in 2009, following a decline during most of the previous decade. When Netanyahu reentered the office of prime minister in 2022, affective polarization had reached its highest level since data began to be collected in the early 1990s. +
++While comparable data has not yet been collected since the 2022 elections, clashes over the judicial overhaul likely deepened partisan divisions. Specifically, concerns over the spillover effects of polarization and the disintegration of military units were voiced throughout the year, with some 10,000 military reservists threatening to stop volunteering for service if the government persists with the judicial overhaul. +
++These were real blows to Israeli society and its sense of cohesion, which was interpreted by its enemies as an opportunity to strike. +
++As reported in Haaretz, a senior intelligence officer warned Netanyahu that clashes over the judicial overhaul are “worsening the damage to Israeli deterrence and increasing the probability of escalation.” Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant warned in March that the internal strife is eroding Israel’s national security. In response, Netanyahu sought to fire Gallant but rescinded the dismissal in the face of mass public outrage. In July, in a Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting regarding the implications of the judicial overhaul, Gallant warned that “there is harm to national resilience that may lead to harm to national security” and added that Israel’s enemies “believe, mistakenly, that they have the opportunity to take advantage of what they perceive as a weakness.” Yet the government moved forward with the judicial overhaul. And then came October 7. +
++A weakened state is facing a crisis +
++It has been almost three months since Hamas’s heinous attack that led to a full-scale war with catastrophic devastation in Gaza, and the magnitude of this catastrophe is beyond imagination. What was clear just days after the attack, however, is that Israeli civil society demonstrated outstanding solidarity. Organizations such as Brothers and Sisters in Arms, which emerged earlier this year to oppose the judicial overhaul, quickly reoriented their efforts to help survivors. They evacuated people trapped in fighting zones and provided them with food and basic amenities; shipped toys for families with kids living close to the border; and more. Such civic awakening in times of crisis is admirable, but it raises the question: Where was the state? +
++In short, it did not have the capacity to rise to the moment. +
++For populists who see themselves as the exclusive representative of the “real” people, civil servants with professional ethics and willingness to question politicians’ decisions can quickly be labeled as a “deep state” that must be dismantled. And in intensely polarized environments, civil servants raising tough questions may easily be accused of serving political opponents. The negative implications of these two factors on state capacity were further compounded by an additional feature of contemporary Israeli politics: personalization of the political system, defined as a “process in which the political weight of the individual actor in the political process increases over time, while the centrality of the political group (i.e., political party) declines.” +
++As political systems become increasingly personalized, individual leaders amass growing centrality and authority at the expense of collective institutions. In such a system, loyalty to the leader plays an increasingly important role in appointments to positions of power, overshadowing considerations of professional credentials and proven capacities. +
++This is what has happened to Israel over the last four decades. +
++Once again, comparative research is helpful: Researchers who compared levels of personalization in 26 established democracies in 2018 located Israel at the top of the list, together with Italy. This comparison is based on multiple indicators, such as decision-making procedures within parties and the ways media coverage centers on leaders rather than parties. The centrality of Benjamin Netanyahu in shaping Israeli politics is hard to overstate. Analyses of survey data reveal that sentiments toward Netanyahu have become the primary organizing principle in Israeli politics. +
++The implications of this extreme personalization for public service were dire as expected. Less than a month before the Hamas attack, public administration scholars Sharon Gilad and Ilana Shpaizman warned of the consequences of this weakening of the public service. Based on interviews and a focus group with hundreds of civil servants, they documented increased pressure from political appointees and politicians, and skilled civil servants’ intent to leave the public sector. As Haaretz reported, managers say they are facing difficulties recruiting and retaining qualified employees. Gilad and Shpaizman presciently concluded that the erosion of state capacity presents a significant threat to all Israelis. The magnitude of this threat became painfully evident when Israeli ministries were glaringly incapable of responding to the deadly October 7 attack. +
++What now? +
++For Israel, 2023 was a year in which decades happened. As the year draws to an end, Israelis are grappling with the repercussions of its unique noxious blend of populism, polarization, and personalization. +
++While Israel faces specific security threats, there is a lesson here that extends beyond national borders. A resilient political system is one that fosters competition across the ideological spectrum while steadfastly resisting the allure of those who undermine state capacity in the pursuit of loyalty and in their fight against imagined elites and fifth columns. The threats and vulnerabilities posed by populism, polarization, and personalization crystallize in times of crisis, when an urgent and robust response is needed but the state proves too weak to react effectively. +
++Democracies worldwide would be wise to heed this tragic cautionary tale. +