And now the 2021 predictions are starting to roll in. I blew my one free Project Syndicate article for the month on this, which seems like an okay choice.

• Covid-19 will recede as vaccines roll out, and the economy will recover. This seems to be a near-consensus, although there is one minority report. And the average growth rate of course hides inequalities, which have gotten worse.
• As you might expect, lots of speculation about U.S. politics and what Biden will do, but most people expect a return to the pre-Trump status quo at the UN, WHO, Israel and Palestine, the Iran nuclear deal, the climate deal, and democracy/human rights rhetoric we mostly fail to live up to. Of course, there are newfound doubts about U.S. political stability in the medium- to long-term.
• Renewable energy will continue to be cheap and competitive with fossil fuels.
• Electric vehicles come up a couple times – the market is pulling, and there may be a big push because the U.S. is significantly behind many other countries on adoption. (My take: The electric and auto industries are behind this, and the oil industry presumably is not but nobody seems to care. Could this break their backs?)
• U.S.-China tensions will ramp up! Or they’ll die down…the crystal ball is murky on this one.
• North Korea likes to test new U.S. Presidents with a missile test or two.
• Poverty and violence have gotten worse in Africa while the rest of the world has been distracted by other things.
• The effects of food insecurity and extreme weather events are getting worse in developing countries.
• Cash may be dead, and if so there is at least a three-way race to replace it – “private tokens, central bank digital currencies, and efforts to upgrade the current system”.