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, of course, 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 week after week.
But it’s worth noting that 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.
This was a hard year. But these 10 news stories remind us a better future is possible.
I’m not going to lie to you: 2023 was an ugly year. War rages in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan, with millions displaced, injured, or dead. On top of global strife, AI-fueled misinformation runs rampant, we’re barreling past climate goals, and abortion access dwindles.
But when the world is mired in horrible things, it’s important to imagine a better future; without hope, new solutions wouldn’t be possible. In 2023, despite everything, there were moments when that hope actualized into meaningful wins.
From the Supreme Court upholding America’s toughest animal cruelty law to new developments in curing sickle cell disease, 2023 saw progress across policy and scientific research that will help shape well-being for humans and animals alike for years to come. Here are 10 breakthroughs in 2023 that help remind us that a better future is worth fighting for. —Izzie Ramirez
The economy started undoing 40 years of rising inequality
Among the many surprises of the post-pandemic economy was a deep reversal in long-running trends of wage inequality. Over the last three years, an unusually tight labor market has undone an estimated 38 percent of the wage inequality between poor and wealthy workers that shot up between 1980 and 2019. Researchers dubbed this “the unexpected compression.”
Young workers without college degrees benefited the most. That’s especially good news given the ongoing debates around “deaths of despair,” where economists are trying to figure out how to counter the rising mortality rates from heart disease and drug overdose among Americans with the least education. The boosted wages were concentrated among workers who changed jobs. Low-wage workers tend to raise their pay faster by switching jobs than by staying put, but the costs of leaving a bad and low-paying job, especially with the relatively weak American safety net, often keep workers in place.
Toward the end of 2023, the wage compression looked to be cooling off, but not reversing. To be clear, inequality remains a defining feature of the American economy, evidenced by calling its reduction an “unexpected” compression. The Biden White House is pushing some ideas that could help solidify these trends, like banning noncompete agreements or boosting workers’ bargaining power. With a few structural changes and a bit of luck, 2024 could build on these trends, transforming our expectations so that reducing inequality becomes the norm. —Oshan Jarow
After completing phase 3 trials, psychedelic-assisted therapy seeks FDA approval
In September, MAPS Public Benefit Corporation (BPC) — a company developing prescription psychedelics — published positive results from their second phase 3 clinical trial on MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. (Phase 3 trials feature thousands of patients, and are mostly randomized and blinded.) CEO Amy Emerson stated that these results, published in Nature Medicine, were the last hurdle before applying for FDA approval of MDMA-assisted therapy.
For decades, new and effective treatments for mental illnesses like PTSD, depression, and anxiety have been scant. Over the same period, a resurgence in clinical research on psychedelics has been amassing evidence of their potential for treating precisely these conditions (the potential benefits of psychedelics extend beyond therapy, but that’s another story).
The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), the nonprofit that owns MAPS PBC, has been patiently working toward FDA approval of MDMA therapy since its founding in 1986. This most recent randomized study included 104 participants who’ve lived with PTSD for an average of 16 years. Participants were split into a treatment group that received MDMA plus three monthly therapy sessions, and a placebo group that received extended therapy sessions but no MDMA.
86.5 percent of the treatment group experienced measurable benefits, and 71.2 percent no longer met the criteria for a PTSD diagnosis. The therapy-only group still experienced significant benefits, but less so: 69 percent recorded clinically significant improvements, with 47.6 percent no longer meeting PTSD criteria.
In December, MAPS PBC officially filed its application to the FDA, concluding a nearly 40-year effort. The approval of MDMA-assisted therapy would mark a watershed moment in the world of mental health, and likely pave the way for other psychedelic drugs, like psilocybin, to follow. —OJ
It’s another year of massive progress in developing and deploying vaccines
This past year saw a wave of progress in vaccines and treatments for malaria (a disease that still kills about half a million people in Africa each year), tuberculosis (that killed 1.3 million people in 2022), and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV (the leading cause of infant hospitalization in the US and the killer of over 100,000 children worldwide in 2019).
In October 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended its first-ever malaria vaccine, RTS,S. In July 2023, the WHO, Unicef, and Gavi (a global vaccine alliance) committed to delivering 18 million doses of RTS,S across 12 African countries over the next two years. Then, this October, the WHO recommended a new and improved R21 malaria vaccine with an efficacy of 75 percent that can be maintained with booster shots.
On the tuberculosis front, there hasn’t been a new vaccine in over a century, but a promising option, the M72 vaccine, is entering its final phase of clinical trials. And more are in the works. The advent of mRNA vaccines for Covid-19 has inspired similar efforts to develop mRNA vaccines for TB, too.
And in July, the FDA approved a new preventative treatment for RSV. The only approved antiviral treatment for RSV before that was a monoclonal antibody developed in 1998 called palivizumab, a monthly treatment that was expensive, approved only for certain at-risk infants, and reduced infant hospitalizations by about 58 percent. The new treatment, Beyfortus, offers a number of upgrades. It’s approved for all infants up to 24 months, not just those at high risk. Its efficacy in reducing not just hospitalizations but all doctors’ visits is up to 70 percent as compared to placebo. And immunity lasts five months, enough to cover the full RSV fall season. As with the others, more promising treatments are already in the works. —OJ
Mexico decriminalizes abortion
Latin America’s abortion rights movement — colloquially called the “Green Wave” after the verdant scarves Argentine activists wore in the late 2010s — notched another win this year.
In September, Mexico’s Supreme Court eliminated all criminal penalties at the federal level for people seeking abortions. The ruling will require all federal health institutions to offer abortion to anyone who requests it. As my colleague Nicole Narea explains, states will have to change their laws to comply, new clinical standards and guidelines will have to be rolled out, and the public will have to be educated on their newfound right to an abortion and how they can access it. It’s a big shift, one that will have cascading effects for years to come.
Mexico’s decriminalization of abortion fits in a wider discussion around femicide and women’s rights across all of Latin America. Thanks to the Green Wave stemming from the 2015 Ni Una Menos (Not One Woman Less) protests, Argentine lawmakers voted to legalize the procedure in 2020, Colombia’s highest court decriminalized abortion in 2022, and Ecuadorian lawmakers made abortion legal in cases of rape in 2022. There’s still progress to be made, but considering the US backslide, Mexico’s shift comes at an opportune time. —IR
Bangladesh gets the lead out of turmeric
We all know lead isn’t good for you, but its true deadliness can often be overlooked. Lead poisoning contributes to as many as 5.5 million premature deaths a year — more than HIV, malaria, and car accidents combined.
In poorer countries, lead remains ever-present, but Bangladesh has a story of success where scientists, advocates, and government officials worked together to lower lead exposure levels.
Despite phasing out leaded gasoline in the 1990s, high blood lead levels continued to be a problem in Bangladesh. When researchers Stephen Luby and Jenny Forsyth tried to isolate the source in 2019, it turned out to be a surprising one: turmeric, a spice commonly used for cooking, was frequently adulterated with lead.
With this in mind, the Bangladeshi government and other stakeholders launched an education campaign to warn people about the dangers of lead. Once producers had been warned that lead adulteration was illegal, the government’s Food Safety Authority followed up with raids and fines to those who were caught.
A 2023 paper found that these efforts appear to have eliminated lead contamination in turmeric outright in Bangladesh. “The proportion of market turmeric samples containing detectable lead decreased from 47 percent pre-intervention in 2019 to 0 percent in 2021,” the study found. And blood lead levels dropped in the affected populations, too. —IR
The Supreme Court upheld America’s strongest animal welfare law
In 2018, Californians voted to pass Proposition 12, a law requiring that much of the eggs, pork, and veal sold in the state come from animals given more space on factory farms — essentially cage-free conditions. The change is incremental, as cage-free farming is still pretty terrible for the animals, but it represents progress on a massive scale: Californians buy about 12 percent of the US meat and egg supply. (Disclosure: From 2012 to 2017, I worked at the Humane Society of the United States, which led the effort to pass Prop 12.)
It was the biggest legislative victory yet for the farm animal welfare movement, reducing the suffering of more animals than any other US law. But this year, the Supreme Court came close to striking it down.
After Prop 12 passed in 2018, pork producers sued the state to repeal the part that covers pork. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and I anticipated the business-friendly conservative majority would side with the pork producers. They didn’t. The court upheld Prop 12 in a 5-4 decision.
The vote guarantees that the 700,000 or so breeding pigs raised for California’s pork supply won’t be confined in cages so small they can’t even turn around in a circle for virtually their entire lives. It also protects a number of similar laws animal advocates have helped pass since the early 2000s, ensuring millions of animals don’t go back into cages. —Kenny Torrella
You can now buy slaughter-free meat
Almost a century ago, Winston Churchill predicted that eventually humans would grow meat directly from animal cells, rather than raising animals on farms. It wasn’t until 2015 that a company, Upside Foods, was launched to give it a shot.
This summer, eight years after its founding, the startup sold its first “cell-cultivated” product — chicken grown from animal cells, no slaughter required — at an upscale restaurant in San Francisco, after the US Department of Agriculture gave final approval. Another startup, GOOD Meat, gained final regulatory approval on the same day and is selling its cell-cultivated chicken at a José Andrés restaurant in Washington, DC.
Each company is serving up very limited quantities of meat, so it’s nowhere near coming close to displacing conventional meat. The two startups, and the other 150 or so cell-cultivated meat companies around the world, have a long way to go to scale up their technology and bring prices down to compete with farmed meat. It’s far from certain they’ll ever get there. But it’s promising that, in under a decade, the nascent field has made major technological and political strides in the attempt to transform the inefficient, inhumane, and unsustainable factory farming system. —KT
Governments around the world are investing in a meat-free future
Animal farming accounts for around 15 to 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet governments have invested only about $1 billion since 2020 in developing meat alternatives, and very few policymakers have proposed initiatives to help humanity cut back on its meat consumption. By comparison, governments have invested $1.2 trillion since 2020 to scale up clean energy.
The lack of attention to making food production more sustainable is starting to change, and some big developments occurred this year.
Most notably, the government of Denmark invested nearly $100 million into a fund to help farmers grow more plant-based foods and companies develop meat- and dairy-alternative products. It also launched the world’s first “action plan” to guide new plant-based food initiatives, like training chefs to cook plant-based meals, reforming agricultural subsidies, and increasing exports of Danish plant-based food products. South Korea announced a similar plan this year too, while German policymakers are putting 38 million Euros toward building up the country’s plant-based industry sector and helping farmers transition to growing plant-based foods amid falling meat production and consumption.
Canada announced a renewal of $110 million into its multi-year program for plant-based food R&D and investments in plant-based companies, while Catalonia, the UK, and other countries also put down money this year to develop alternative proteins.
Much more is needed, and fast, but increasingly, policymakers are grasping the necessity of transforming food systems in order to meet critical climate goals. —KT
Europe is quickly phasing out the ugly practice of “male chick culling”
Each year, the global egg industry hatches 6.5 billion male chicks, but because they can’t lay eggs and they don’t grow big or fast enough to be efficiently raised for meat, they’re economically useless to the industry. So they’re killed hours after hatching, and in horrifying ways: ground up or burned alive, gassed with carbon dioxide, or suffocated in trash bags.
In the last five years, however, scientists have begun to commercialize technologies to identify the sex of a chick while still in the egg, enabling egg hatcheries to destroy the eggs before the males hatch. The first machine came online in Europe in 2018, and the technology is now being adopted by European egg companies at a rapid pace.
According to the animal welfare organization Innovate Animal Ag, at the end of September 2023, 15 percent — or 56 million — of Europe’s 389 million egg-laying hens came from hatcheries that use this technology. That percentage is expected to further rise in the years ahead as several more egg-scanning machines will come online soon.
In the realm of animal farming, technology is often deployed in ways that hurt animals, like breeding them to grow bigger and faster while sacrificing their health and welfare. But here, it’s used to end one of the industry’s cruelest practices. I hope we’ll see even more technologies used for good in the food and farming sectors in the years ahead. —KT
The FDA has approved the first-ever gene editing treatment for use in humans, offering a cure for sickle cell disease
In December, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first-ever therapy using CRISPR gene editing technology for patients 12 and older, offering a potential cure for sickle cell disease (SCD). The disease affects 100,000 people in the US and millions more abroad. Prior to the approval, the only cure for SCD was a bone marrow transplant, a procedure that requires a compatible donor, and kills 5 to 20 percent of patients.
SCD is a collection of inherited blood disorders where a mutation in hemoglobin, a protein found in red blood cells, shapes them into crescents (”sickles”) that restrict blood flow and limit oxygen delivery across the body’s tissues, causing severe pain and organ damage.
The new therapy, under the brand name Casgevy, uses CRISPR like a molecular pair of scissors. It edits a specific portion of a patient’s DNA to make bone marrow cells produce more fetal hemoglobin, which boosts oxygen delivery. In clinical trials, 29 of 31 patients who received treatment were cured of the events that cause pain and organ damage. A second therapy was also approved, Lyfgenia, which adds to a patient’s DNA the functional hemoglobin genes that are resistant to sickling.
As with many novel therapies that rely on frontier technology, the treatment will be expensive, time-consuming, and unavailable to the majority of those in need. At least at first. Roughly three-quarters of those living with sickle cell disease are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa. And with price tags of $2.2 million for Casgevy and $3.1 million for Lyfgenia, they remain a pipe dream for most (though racking up payments across a lifetime of SCD is also expensive, averaging about $1.7 million for those with insurance).
Still, the news of a cure is providing hope to millions who live with severe chronic pain, and the question of how to expand accessibility is already at the forefront of many doctors’ minds. Clearing the major hurdle of getting the first-ever gene editing therapy approved for use in humans will allow experts to turn their attention to the question of how to make the treatment available for the millions of people with SCD whose lives could be dramatically improved by it. —OJ