Here’s how I did with my 2024 predictions.

Last year’s predictions

US

Congestion pricing

• Begins collection by EOY: 70% (did not happen)
• Collects the expected $1b annualized (factoring in discounts): 40% (did not happen)
• I notice reduced traffic volumes in my neighborhood: 30% (did not happen)

The first one was a near miss; instead, collection is scheduled to start on January 5th, 2025, after the governor (in my opinion) illegally paused the program until after the federal elections, allegedly to help Democrats in vulnerable New York districts.

Obviously the revenues and traffic impacts didn’t happen, either. The top-line tolls were also cut from $15 to $9; I expect annual revenues to be correspondingly lower, and the impact on congestion to also be pretty minimal.

Second Avenue Subway

• Phase 2 construction starts before end of year: 50% (did not happen)
• Phase 2 budget exceeds $7 billion at some point: 80% (happened, but disqualified)
• Future phases officially cancelled: 10% (did not happen)

I think the first bullet would’ve happened, but because of congestion tolling delays, it was delayed. The first contracts for doing construction for Phase 2 are just now being awarded, and I expect them to start breaking ground early next year.

The second bullet shouldn’t count as a success, IMO; by October last year the official estimates for Phase 2 already exceeded $7b. My numbers were just outdated.

California HSR

• P50 estimate of Bakersfield-Merced opening delayed to at least 2034: 60% (did not happen)
• Base YOE cost of Bakersfield-Merced rises to or above $33B: 50% (did not happen)
• Project officially cancelled: 30% (did not happen)

I whiffed on all three of these, mostly because of an oversight on my part - the California High Speed Rail Authority only issues project update reports (where the project timeline & budget estimates live) once every two years, and this year they didn’t issue one. As a result, the estimates are all officially unchanged, so I’ll call this a loss.

Unofficially, though, the fact that the Authority is recently targeting $35B in revenues and shopping around numbers like $130B for the whole project indicates to me that the project timelines will be delayed, and budgets will be increased, next time around. I was wrong about the project management bits, but I think I was right about the fundamentals of how the project is going.

Other

• US enters a recession: 20% (did not happen)
• Donald Trump
  • Goes to trial before the general election in any of his current cases: 10% (happened)
  • Wins the Republican primary: 90% (happened)
  • Wins the general election: 40% (happened)

Very happy about the first, and extremely unhappy about the rest.

Rest of world

• We decide this year to move to Canada: 50% (did not happen)

We put the decision off a year, since we can afford to do that.

• Ukraine
  • Admitted to NATO: 20% (did not happen)
  • Cedes territory to Russia: 20% (did not happen)
• Labour wins UK elections: 90% (happened)
• China
  • Enters a recognized recession: 40% (did not happen)
  • Formally revokes Hong Kong SAR status: 10% (did not happen)
  • Xi Jinping leaves power: 10% (did not happen)
  • Invades Taiwan: 10% (did not happen)
• BRICS loses a member: 70% (happened)
  • Any of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, or any member that joins during 2024.

Both Saudi Arabia and Argentina, who were going to join BRICS, did not end up as members at the end of the year. I’m going to call this a win in letter only, because I listed SA explicitly. However, I’m encouraged by just how brittle BRICS has been overall.

In general I’m pretty optimistic about the direction things are going in the world. The one big exception here is the war in the Ukraine, which I’ve been following closely, and am very sorry to see things trending in a bad way.

Tech

• OpenAI
  • Announces GPT-5: 90% (did not happen)
  • Releases GPT-5 for consumer use: 80% (did not happen)
  • Gets a new CEO: 50% (did not happen)
• We achieve AGI: 5% (did not happen)

I was surprised a lot by this. Feels to me like OpenAI is trudging towards failure, which I pessimistically did not expect to happen.

• Alphabet, Amazon, or Apple are forced via lawsuit to spin off at least one company: 25% (did not happen)

This might still happen in 2025! The DoJ formally sought to force Google to spin off Chrome in November; we’ll see what the result is.

• At least one company offers widely-available self-driving cars: 30% (did not happen)

Waymo expanded operations but is not what I’d consider widely-available.

• Tesla stops selling a product named “Full Self-Driving”: 40% (happened)

They renamed FSD to “FSD (supervised)”, which I think qualifies.

• Twitter files for bankruptcy: 70% (did not happen)
• Amazon, Google, Apple, or Steam accept Bitcoin: 5% (did not happen)

How’d I do?

Here’s a calibration chart of my predictions, bucketed into three groups - things I thought were 0-33%, 34-66%, and 67-100% likely to happen. The red line is how often things in each bucket should’ve happened if I was exactly correct about my probability estimates; the blue line is how often they actually happened. The ideal is for the two lines to be exactly the same.

Not amazing! A few things went wrong. First, I was waaay overconfident across the board - stuff I thought would happen ~17% of the time actually happened 0% of the time, and stuff that I thought would happen 46% of the time only happened 25% of the time. Second, I was particularly inaccurate for things I thought were sure to happen - for stuff in the 66-100% category, only ~43% came true.

This happened for a few reasons. Three of my whiffs could never have happened - the CA HSR project update snafu that I could’ve avoided if I’d doine a little more research. And a lot of stuff was conditional on congestion tolling happening in NYC, so when Hochul stopped that from happening, several of my predictions immediately became wrong.

Overall, I think I need to be a lot less certain in general. I think that’s why this exercise is valuable - it feels good to know how wildly off my beliefs are, and that I should be particularly careful for things I think are obvious.