2026-01-01 20:00:00
来自多伦多初创公司New School Foods的植物基三文鱼排。| Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals
在整个2010年代，减少肉类摄入并拥抱植物性饮食对许多美国人来说是一种理想化的追求。大量民众告诉民调机构他们正在减少肉类消费，许多学校和医院都参与了“无肉星期一”活动，一线明星也尝试过素食主义，而风投投资者则押注植物基肉类产品，如Impossible Foods和Beyond Meat，将成为食品行业下一个大趋势。而这种趋势是有其道理的。人们开始担心，美国人每年平均消耗超过200磅的肉类对健康的影响。揭露工厂农场残酷现实的调查报道震惊了公众，而畜牧业巨大的环境足迹也逐渐受到新闻媒体的关注。
但如今，美国已经“不再假装对肉类有好感”，正如《大西洋月刊》今年早些时候所言。植物基肉类的销量正在下降，一些明星也开始放弃植物性饮食，而以肉类为主的饮食方式，尽管仍属边缘，却在社交媒体上日益流行。我并不打算提出一个完美的理论来解释这种转变，但我认为几种文化动态在其中起到了一定作用。第一种是政治左翼中日益普遍但误入歧途的观念，即认为个人行为无足轻重，而所有解决社会问题的责任都应由企业和政府承担。第二种是选民和流行文化向右的反应性转变。第三种则是跨越所有政治立场的共同点：美国人对蛋白质，尤其是动物性蛋白质的日益痴迷。
但这些原因在更深入的审视下并不成立。当个人减少肉类摄入时，确实能通过降低需求来产生影响；无论政治立场如何，美国人普遍反对工厂养殖；而我们对蛋白质摄入不足的担忧是没有根据的（植物性来源可以轻松满足蛋白质需求）。因此，当我们思考2026年社会应向哪个方向发展时，我希望我们能超越那些表面的、基于感觉的动态因素，重新发现我们确实应该减少肉类摄入、增加植物性食物的坚实理由。
如果你对此感兴趣，可以注册Vox的Meat/Less通讯，这是一份关于减少肉类、增加植物摄入的实用指南。它涵盖了诸如以下问题：
转向更以植物为主的饮食是2026年最具影响力的新年决心之一，而我们在这里为你提供帮助。
我认为，我们为了获取肉类、牛奶和鸡蛋而对动物所做的事，可以被称作一种折磨。如果这种行为施加在宠物狗或猫身上，那无疑是折磨。许多动物被培育得体型过大、生长过快，导致它们行走困难，或患有慢性关节和心脏问题。许多物种的某些身体部位，如母鸡的喙、火鸡的鼻瘤、牛的角、猪崽的尾巴和睾丸，都会在没有麻醉的情况下被切除。大多数母鸡和母猪（繁殖母猪）一生都在狭小的笼子里度过，无法自由活动。绝大多数农场动物一生都无法踏足草地或呼吸新鲜空气，许多动物因痛苦的疾病而提前死亡。这一切都在一个难以想象的规模上发生——在美国，每年有超过100亿只农场饲养的鸟类和哺乳动物，全球则达到约850亿只。如果你把水产养殖和甲壳类动物也算进去，全球畜牧业每年导致的动物死亡数量接近万亿。
美国的畜牧业产业投入大量资金游说政客，以维持现状，同时又投入大量广告费来安抚消费者的担忧。尽管有少数公司和农场比现状更善待动物，但很难区分哪些是真实的，哪些只是“人道主义洗白”（humanewashing）。一些所谓“高福利”的公司被调查后，暴露出的条件却相当糟糕。寻求真正更高福利的动物产品是对工厂养殖恐怖现实的合理回应，也应成为解决方案的一部分。但转向更少肉类、更多植物性饮食对动物的影响会更大。而且，这种饮食转变的理由远不止动物福利。
考虑以下关于肉类和乳制品生产的事实：
对环境的影响：
对社会的影响：
对公共健康的影响：
我认为植物性饮食最鼓舞人心的地方在于，它是一种几乎任何人都可以参与的行动，能同时解决许多社会问题。此外，每个人其实已经吃了很多植物性食物；在美国，大约70%的热量来自植物来源。但将其中30%的动物性热量转向植物性食物可能让人感到困难。那么，应该吃什么替代品？如何养成新的习惯？这正是Vox的Meat/Less通讯存在的意义，它旨在帮助所有处于减少肉类摄入范围的人，从“弹性素食者”到完全素食者。注册后，我们将每周发送一封通讯邮件，教你如何轻松将更多植物性食物纳入饮食，并提供基于证据的行为策略，帮助你坚持下去。
我不知道2026年是否会是植物性饮食再次变得有吸引力的一年。但如果你超越那些表面的“感觉”，证据表明我们的饮食习惯与我们真正重视的东西之间存在明显差距。我们中的许多人并不清楚植物性饮食在解决诸多社会问题上的潜力，更重要的是，我们不知道如何开始将它融入自己的生活。现在就是最好的时机，开始改变吧。
Throughout the 2010s, eating less meat and embracing plant-based food was — to many Americans — aspirational.
Large swathes of the public told pollsters they were trying to cut back on meat, lots of schools and hospitals participated in Meatless Monday, A-list celebrities dabbled in veganism, and venture capital investors bet big that plant-based meat products, like those from Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, were the next big trend in food.
And for good reason. People were concerned about what the more than 200 pounds of meat that Americans eat on average each year does to our health. Undercover investigations that exposed the cruelty of factory farms shocked us. And animal agriculture’s huge environmental footprint slowly gained attention in the news.
But now, America is “done pretending about meat,” as The Atlantic put it earlier this year. Plant-based meat sales are declining, some celebrities are backtracking on their plant-based diets, and the carnivore diet, while still fringe, is ascendant on social media.
I’m not going to suggest I have a neat theory that explains this shift, but I think a few cultural dynamics explain some of it.
The first is the increasingly pervasive, yet misguided, notion — especially popular on the political left — that our individual actions don’t matter and that all responsibility to fix social problems lies with corporations and governments. The second is the rightward, reactionary shift of the electorate and pop culture.
The third unites people of all political persuasions: Americans’ growing obsession with protein, and especially animal-based protein.
But these reasons don’t quite hold up under closer scrutiny. When individuals eat less meat, it really does make a difference by reducing demand for meat; Americans, regardless of their political beliefs, strongly oppose factory farming; and our fears of not eating enough protein are unfounded (and you can easily up your protein intake with plant-based sources).
So as we think about what direction we’d like society to take in 2026, I hope we can move past the surface-level, vibes-based dynamics that seem to influence the public debate around American meat consumption, and rediscover the airtight case that we really ought to eat less meat and more plant-based foods.
If all that speaks to you, you can sign up for Vox’s Meat/Less newsletter — a practical guide to eating less meat and more plants. It covers questions like:
Moving to a more plant-rich diet is one of the most impactful New Year’s resolutions you can make — and we’re here to help you do it.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call what we do to animals for their meat, milk, and eggs a form of torture. It surely would be if it were done to a pet dog or cat.
They’re bred to grow so big, so fast that many have difficulty walking, or have chronic joint and heart issues. Many species’ body parts are chopped off — hens’ beaks, turkey’s snoods, cows’ horns, piglets’ tails and testicles — without pain relief. Most hens and sows (female breeding pigs) spend their entire lives in tiny cages, unable to move around. The vast majority of farmed animals will never step foot on grass or breathe fresh air. Many will die prematurely from painful diseases.
This all happens on an incomprehensible scale — over 10 billion farmed birds and mammals in the US and around 85 billion globally every year. If you count farmed fish and crustaceans, which I certainly think one should — fish are incredibly underestimated and misunderstood — the global death toll of animal agriculture gets close to one trillion animals each year.
The American livestock industry spends a lot of money lobbying politicians to keep things this way, and a lot of money on advertising to assuage consumers’ concerns.
To be fair, a tiny minority of companies and farmers treat their animals better than the status quo, but it can be difficult to separate what’s real from “humanewashing,” and investigations into some of the supposedly highest-welfare companies have exposed pretty terrible conditions. Seeking genuinely higher-welfare animal products is a sensible response to the horrors of factory farming, and it should be part of the solution, but shifting to a less-meat, more plant-based diet will have much more of an impact for animals.
And the case for that dietary shift goes well beyond animal welfare. Consider the following about meat and dairy production.
On the environment:
Meat’s social consequences:
It’s putting public health at risk:
What I find most empowering about plant-based eating is that, in a world where we often feel powerless and overwhelmed, it’s something just about anyone can do that tackles so many social problems at once. Plus, everyone already eats a lot of plant-based foods; in the US, about 70 percent of our calories come from plant sources.
But getting started on shifting more of that 30 percent of animal-based calories to more plant-based foods can be daunting. What should you eat instead and how do you make new habits stick?
This is where Vox’s Meat/Less newsletter comes in, which was written to help anyone on the less-meat spectrum, from aspiring “flexitarians” to full-on vegans. Sign up and we’ll send you five newsletter emails — one per week — that’ll teach you how to easily incorporate more plant-based foods into your diet and give you evidence-based behavior strategies to make it last.
I don’t know if 2026 will be the year that plant-based eating becomes aspirational again. But if you look past the vibes, the evidence suggests a clear gap between how we eat and what we really value. Many of us just don’t know the power of plant-based eating to address so many of our social problems, and more importantly, how to begin incorporating it into our lives. There’s no better time than now to start.
2026-01-01 19:00:00
以下是该文本的中文简化版总结：
美国
全球
科技与人工智能
健康与医疗
文化与娱乐
以上是对原文内容的简要总结，涵盖了政治、经济、科技、健康和文化等多个领域的预测。
For the seventh year in a row, the Future Perfect staff — plus assorted other experts from around Vox — convened near the end of the year to make forecasts about major events in 2026.
Perhaps in keeping with the year we just experienced, the prognostication had grim overtones. Will the US remain an electoral democracy? Will the country fall into a recession? Will there be war in Taiwan? Will more states ban lab-cultivated meat? Will a Category 5 hurricane make landfall in the US? Will Beyoncé release a rock album? (Which is maybe just grim to me — there are so many better options!)
As always, we try to avoid random guessing. Each prediction comes with a probability attached. That’s meant to give you a sense of our confidence in our forecasts. The idea here is to exemplify epistemic honesty — being as transparent as we can about what we know we know, what we know we don’t, and what we don’t know, we don’t know.
As we have every year, we’ll check back at the end of 2026 and provide a report card on how we did, whether our accuracy ends up being Nostradamus level, or more like a band of blindfolded monkeys throwing darts at a board. You can check out how we did in 2025 here. We hope you enjoy reading — and don’t forget to update your priors. —Bryan Walsh
Entering 2026, assessing the health of American democracy is a bit of a puzzle.
There is no doubt that, in the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency, American democracy has weakened significantly. He has smashed through constitutional constraints on his power, targeted his political opponents for repression, and run roughshod over civil liberties protections. It’s bad enough that three of the world’s top scholars of comparative democracy — Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, and Lucan Way — have concluded that the United States has crossed the line into a form of authoritarianism.
On the other hand, there is little indication that Trump has been able to create a lock on power — or even significantly compromise the fairness of elections. Democrats dominated elections in 2025, anti-government activists operate freely, and the media is (mostly) as independent and critical as it was before Inauguration Day. When I spoke to Levitsky in December, he told me that Trump was failing “at consolidating autocratic power.”
For this reason, my own view is that the United States is still best classified as democracy, albeit a much weakened one. V-DEM, the leading academic metric of democracy, distinguishes between two classes of democracy — the stronger liberal democracy and weaker electoral democracy. When V-Dem releases its ratings for the past year, I expect the United States will fall from the former into the latter.
However, my confidence is low. What’s happening in the US is unprecedented for the world’s hegemon, and there is at least some credible evidence of bias in global democracy ratings — making the ultimate outcome a bit tricky to say for sure. —Zack Beauchamp
If the last one was tricky, this one is straightforward. There are at least five clear reasons to believe Democrats are headed for a midterm romp.
Point 1: In modern American politics, the president’s party almost always performs poorly in midterms.
Point 2: The Democratic Party is increasingly strong with college-educated voters, who tend to turn out more reliably in midterms than non-college voters — meaning the party has a structural leg up in those contests.
Point 3: Trump is an especially unpopular incumbent. The only 21st-century president with equivalently bad numbers at this point in his term was Trump himself, who experienced a massive electoral wipeout in the 2018 midterms. And there is real evidence Trump’s coalition is fraying from the inside.
Point 4: Democrats have dominated 2025 elections so consistently that it has become a meaningful indication of 2026 performance.
Point 5: Voter dissatisfaction is driven by a combination of affordability and concerns about his extreme policies in areas like immigration, and the White House seems either unable or unwilling to change in response to these concerns.
For all these reasons, Democrats are basically a lock to take back the House — barring hard-to-pull-off election tampering or some kind of unforeseen event that transforms the political environment. The Senate map is unfavorable, making it a much tougher fight, but they’re still competitive given the fundamentals. —ZB
The dismantling of the Education Department was one of the biggest stories in the early days of Trump’s second term, as the administration fired hundreds of staffers and Education Secretary Linda McMahon promised to lead the department on its “historic final mission.”
The president can’t actually dissolve the department without an act of Congress, but his administration has been moving bits of it to other agencies since the spring. In November, the White House announced perhaps the biggest shift yet, moving programs supporting K-12 students to the Labor Department, with other functions parceled out to the Departments of Health and Human Services, Interior, and State.
However, experts have long warned that other departments don’t have the expertise to take over Education staffers’ work, and the moves that have already occurred have reportedly been plagued with problems. Now Republican lawmakers are starting to voice concerns about what happens if the administration tries to transfer special education programs to another department, a move it has not yet made but hasn’t ruled out.
The Trump administration has already done lasting damage to the department, experts say. But getting rid of an agency is a lot harder in practice than in theory, and with Republicans starting to throw up warning signs, it’s more likely than not that at least one function of the department will remain through the end of next year. —Anna North
To date, at least three federal courts have ruled that President Donald Trump exceeded his power under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), when he imposed a broad range of constantly shifting tariffs on foreign imports. The Supreme Court is likely to join these three courts before the close of its current term.
For the most part, this Supreme Court’s Republican supermajority has been extraordinarily loyal to Trump. This is, after all, the same Court that held that Trump may use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes. But the Republican justices do sometimes break with Trump on issues that divide Republicans, and especially on issues that divide conservative legal elites.
The tariffs cases are just such an issue. At least some of the lawsuits challenging the tariffs were brought by right-leaning legal shops that hew to the GOP’s more traditional, libertarian views on foreign trade. Numerous Republican luminaries have joined briefs opposing the tariffs,
Including former Sen. John Danforth (R-MO), an early mentor to Justice Clarence Thomas. Over the spring, at a conference hosted by the conservative Federalist Society, a number of speakers criticized the tariffs and questioned their legality.
At the Supreme Court argument on the tariffs in November, the Court’s Republicans did, indeed, appear divided on whether to back Trump. While some members of the Court defended the tariffs, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — all Republicans — asked very skeptical questions of Trump’s lawyer.
It is always dangerous business to predict that this Supreme Court will break with a Republican president, which is why I still think there is a 30 percent chance that Trump prevails. And even if Trump does lose this round of litigation, he is likely to attempt to reinstate at least some of his tariffs by invoking other statutes. But my prediction will come true if the Court rules that Trump exceeded his authority under the IEEPA when he imposed his tariffs on imports. —Ian Millhiser
Trump is unpopular — a recent Associated Press poll pegs his approval rating at 36 percent — and his party just got hosed in the 2025 elections. Republicans are still favored to hold onto the Senate after the 2026 midterms, largely because the Senate is malapportioned to favor small states that tend to vote for the GOP, but the Republican Party is in a deep enough hole that it could lose both houses of Congress.
And if the Democrats do take the Senate, they can prevent Trump from ever confirming another federal judge again. Which brings us to 75-year-old Justice Samuel Alito.
Alito is the Court’s most unapologetic partisan. If you want a full rundown of Alito’s history of rulings favoring the Republican Party, I encourage you to read my profile of him entitled “The Republican Party’s man inside the Supreme Court.” The short of it is that he’s often willing to embrace arguments that even his fellow Republican justices find embarrassing, at least when those arguments favor the GOP or its preferred policy outcomes.
If Alito retires while Republicans still control the Senate, he can be confident that his replacement will be a Republican who shares his views on the overwhelming majority of issues. He might even be replaced by one of his former law clerks.
If Alito does not retire, by contrast, he risks losing his last chance to retire under a Republican president and a Republican Senate. In the worst case scenario (from Alito’s perspective), he could die after Democrats regain both the White House and the Senate, ensuring that he will be replaced by his ideological opposite.
There’s also a chance that a different justice could either retire or die. Thomas is 77. Justice Sonia Sotomayor is 71. Roberts is 70. If any justice leaves the Court in 2026, a Republican Senate will almost certainly confirm Trump’s nominee to replace them.
That said, there is a chance that Alito and his fellow Republican justices are enjoying the power that comes with being part of a six-justice supermajority so much that they won’t want to give it up. But Alito has been such a reliable partisan during his time on the bench that it would be surprising if he denied his party its best chance to replace him with a younger version of himself. —IM
Netanyahu has led the Israeli government for 15 of the last 16 years. He has weathered indictments, a criminal trial, coalition fractures, and of course the horrors of the Gaza war. Why would anyone bet against him in the 2026 elections (currently scheduled for October)?
The answer, I think, is that he has been living on borrowed time since October 7, 2023.
After that day’s atrocities, Netanyahu’s poll numbers collapsed — with most Israelis blaming him and his government for Hamas’s successful attack. His survival since then has had nothing to do with voters, and everything to do with coalition management: He has managed to prevent his far-right coalition partners from defecting and triggering early elections. But in 2026, there will be elections — and all indications are that his coalition doesn’t have the votes.
“The Netanyahu government has not been able to win a majority in any credible survey,” Dahlia Scheindlin, a leading Israeli pollster, told me last year.
That said, you really do not want to count Netanyahu out. And there are easy-to-imagine scenarios where he survives despite his obvious problems.
Currently, the best-polling opposition party is led by former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. While Bennett is strongly anti-Netanyahu, he is also a right-winger — and to form an anti-Netanyahu government, polls suggest he’d likely need support from a broad coalition, including the left and even an Arab party. You can easily imagine Bennett failing to overcome the opposition’s ideological divisions and striking some kind of deal with Netanyahu instead. Or you could imagine protracted coalition negotiations that leave Netanyahu in power for months after the October elections, even if he is deposed in 2027.
The point is that there’s a lot of uncertainty here. But I’m going to bet on the most consistent thing: Polls showing that a clear majority of Israelis are done with Bibi. —ZB
The Trump administration has been pushing hard for a ceasefire deal in recent weeks and there was some optimism it might end before Christmas. But the underlying dynamics of the conflict are still the same and still make an end to the war in the coming months more unlikely.
Despite the heavy casualties Russia is taking, the damage to its economy inflicted by sanctions, and the slow pace of progress on the battlefield, Russian President Vladimir Putin believes he is winning the war and is unlikely to be satisfied with any deal that does not severely curtail Ukraine’s sovereignty. It’s not even clear if the 28-point plan cooked up by his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in November, which was heavily tilted toward Russian interests, would have been enough to satisfy him.
On the other side, Ukrainian leaders mostly accept at this point that they’re unlikely to regain all of the territory currently held by Russia by military force. But they are just as unlikely to accept Trump’s recent demands that they cede the so-called fortress belt of heavily defended positions in eastern Ukraine, something that would be suicidal fairly likely event that Russia restarts its war in a few years. And while NATO membership may be off the table at this point, Ukraine is likely to insist on security guarantees from NATO countries that will probably be unacceptable to the Russian side.
While US support for Ukraine gives it significant leverage, European countries are now the primary economic and military backers of the Ukrainian war effort and Ukrainians are making far more weapons of their own, including the ubiquitous drones that are playing such a vital role on the battlefield.
For all Trump’s public attacks on Ukraine, the United States is still providing intelligence support to the Ukrainian military and selling the country for weapons (in many cases, paid for by Europe). And if the past year’s back and forth is any indication, Trump’s current pro-Moscow tilt could shift.
Trump’s success with the Gaza ceasefire showed that these deals can come together much more quickly than many expect, but for a variety of reasons, the combatants in Ukraine are less susceptible to American pressure and less willing to call off the fighting. Most likely, Ukraine is facing a fifth year of devastating and brutal war. —Joshua Keating
In 2021, Adm. Phil Davidson, then the head of Indo-Pacific Command, told Congress he believed China would likely seek to achieve its ambition of taking control of Taiwan “in the next six years.” We’re now approaching the later end of what has become known in defense circles as the “Davidson window.” But for the moment, war — or something close to it — still seems unlikely. The biggest question mark around a military scenario in Taiwan is whether the US would intervene directly to defend the island. And the best case for the argument that China will move soon is that President Donald Trump’s words and actions have given little reason to believe he would do that. But an amphibious invasion of a mountainous and densely populated island with a hostile population is still a daunting prospect even if the US doesn’t get involved.
A blockade or quarantine might be more likely, something Taiwan’s economy is vulnerable to, but the island’s importance to the global tech economy means the fallout from a blockade would be both massive and widespread. (One analysis predicted a blockade of Taiwan would cost the world $2 trillion in lost economic activity.) And the US is not the only country that might come to Taiwan’s aid: Japan’s new prime minister recently enraged Beijing by suggesting a Taiwan crisis would be a survival threatening situation for Japan, meaning it would have legal justification to deploy its military.
To put it bluntly, at the moment, Xi Jinping has a good thing going with Trump, who is seeking better trade relations with China and has even gone so far as to agree to sell advanced microchips that the Chinese never even asked for. China may also be holding out for the possibility of “peaceful reunification.” The island’s major opposition party, the Kuomintang, now favors much closer relations with Beijing.
We should absolutely expect more economic pressure on Taiwan and its supporters abroad, more moves to block diplomatic contacts between Taiwan and the outside world, more influence campaigns and propaganda directed at the Taiwanese public, and even possible “gray zone” attacks targeting Taiwan’s infrastructure, such as undersea communications cables.
Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine showed that sometimes autocratic leaders can make risky moves that seem to make little sense from the outside, but assuming Xi is a bit more level-headed, he’s unlikely to gamble it all on an invasion or blockade in the coming year. —JK
The last few years have seen the birth of a new paradigm in how housing in the United States is regulated and built. Ever since the widespread adoption of zoning codes over the last century, it’s been local governments — cities, suburbs, small towns — that decide what’s allowed to be built, usually to an extreme degree of prescriptiveness. Most residential land across the country is zoned exclusively for detached single-family homes — no duplexes, triplexes, or apartment buildings allowed. That is, as I wrote about last year, what’s fundamentally at the root of the great American housing shortage and housing affordability crisis.
But those rules are steadily, if slowly and unevenly, starting to change. Many states have passed legislation that begins to unwind the morass of local obstacles to building homes, with single-family-exclusive zoning being a frequent target. While this trend is technically a form of centralization, I think it’s better to think of it as a kind of deregulation that gives power back to people to create things in their communities. California, Maine, Montana, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington all now have laws requiring local governments to allow at least duplexes, and in some cases even more homes, on lots zoned for single-family homes in many residential areas. Several other states are considering similar bills, and more will probably be introduced this year.
These state-level zoning preemption laws are, in reality, usually enormously complex and often include carveouts and exceptions that were needed to get the legislation over the finish line because local opposition to new housing can be fierce. So while I think we’re extremely likely to see more states pass housing liberalization laws in 2026, I think the chances that two more states pass laws with my exact criteria — ending single-family zoning in the residential areas that cover most of the state’s population — are just under 50-50. —Marina Bolotnikova
The grass is green. The sky is blue. The rich get richer.
Some things are just common sense. But actually, the wealth of the very wealthiest people does not always get bigger year after year. Take 2022, for example, when stock market woes made the world’s billionaires about $2 trillion poorer than they were the year before. Womp, womp.
But ever since then, the ultra-rich have indeed only gotten richer. A new billionaire was born every 37 hours of 2025, lifting the total number of billionaires to nearly 3,000 and their collective wealth to a record-shattering $15.8 trillion, according to the UBS Billionaire Ambitions report. Many have gotten rich off the AI boom, while others are heirs and heiresses, whose inheritances grew by a collective $297.8 billion last year as part of a giant wealth transfer that’s just getting started.
As long as nobody bursts their bubble, the ultra-rich will probably just get richer in 2026. And if their wealth keeps growing at the rate it has been, they’ll very likely be sitting on over $17 trillion by the time UBS publishes its report next winter. —Sara Herschander
Recession forecasts are the meteorology of economics: Everyone complains when you’re wrong, and nobody sends thank you notes when you’re right. Still, the reason I’m slightly over 50 percent is simple: Late-cycle economic risk is real, and the list of plausible triggers — the AI bubble popping, trade policy finally hitting home, a major international crisis — is long.
Even in “good” times, the US economy is a balancing act between consumer spending, business investment, financial conditions, and whatever policy choices Washington makes in a given week. It doesn’t take a Great Depression-level shock to tip that balance — sometimes it’s just interest rates staying tighter longer than expected, a confidence shock, or a geopolitical event that hits energy and trade. And if 2020 taught us anything, it’s that the economy can fall down the stairs faster than it can climb them.
For scoring, I’d define “recession” as a National Bureau of Economic Research-dated recession that begins in calendar year 2026. If the NBER hasn’t ruled by the time we do our year-end grading (they are not known for sprinting), we’ll use a proxy: two consecutive quarters of negative real GDP growth in 2026.
Why only 55 percent? Because the US has a stubborn capacity to muddle through — until it doesn’t. —BW
At the end of 2024, cage-free eggs accounted for 38.7 percent of the US egg supply. By September 2025 — the most recent data available — that figure hit 45.3 percent. It was a major shift for such a short period, and equates to millions of egg-laying hens no longer spending their entire lives in tiny cages.
I think that in 2026, this trend will continue, but not fast enough for the US egg supply to reach 50 percent cage-free by the end of September. And that’s because a few big events occurred in 2025 that spurred this momentum that won’t occur next year.
The first is that laws in three states — Arizona, Colorado, and Michigan — that require eggs sold to be cage-free went into effect in 2025 (though Arizona quickly delayed its implementation by years). No new laws will go into effect next year.
Additionally, over the last decade, hundreds of food companies pledged to source cage-free eggs, and many set a 2025 deadline. While a lot of them have not followed through on their pledge, a lot inched closer during this deadline year.
I could be — and hope I will be — wrong, and there are two reasons why I might lose this prediction. The first is that animal advocacy groups are now focused on pressuring grocery chains to meet their cage-free pledges, and if they’re successful in 2026, that could quickly tip the scales, since grocery stores account for where most eggs are sold. Second, there’s bird flu — if the virus were to disproportionately hit cage farms this winter and spring, that would affect the ratio of cage-free to cage eggs for much of 2026.
The food industry’s rapid move away from cages for egg-laying hens is a major success story for the modern animal rights movement, and hitting 50 percent of the US egg supply will be an important milestone. I think it’ll happen soon — let’s say by March 1, 2027 — but I don’t think it’s in the cards by the end of September, 2026. —Kenny Torrella
In 2024, Florida and Alabama banned the production and sale of lab-grown, or cell-cultivated, meat. They represented unabashed protectionism — favoring livestock farmers over startup food companies — and hollow, conspiratorial culture war posturing (when he signed the bill into law, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis implied this was a contest between real Floridians and globalist elites).
Even though many ranchers and farming groups have opposed the bans, arguing that it looks bad to outlaw your competition, five more states passed similar laws in 2025 — three with full-on bans (Mississippi, Montana, and Nebraska), and two with two-year bans (Texas and Indiana). In many other states, lawmakers introduced similar bills that failed, and I figure at least one will succeed next year (for the purpose of accuracy, I’ll count a temporary ban as a ban).
I’m not particularly confident, however, because some states seemed to have settled on strict, unfavorable labeling requirements for cell-cultivated meat producers as opposed to banning the product altogether. And in some states, the bills have proven controversial (for example, many ranchers in Wyoming were opposed to a ban on libertarian grounds).
At this moment, the bans mean little in practical terms — only a few restaurants around the country serve cell-cultivated meat, and in small quantities. But the bans could pose a problem for the industry down the road if they figure out how to affordably produce cell-cultivated meat at scale. —KT
The US is entering its fifth year of a truly ghastly bird flu outbreak. It’s caused dozens of human bird flu cases across the country, it’s sparked an outbreak in dairy cows, it’s sent egg prices soaring, and it’s been catastrophic for the tens of millions of chickens and turkeys who’ve died horrible deaths on infected farms. And all this is happening despite the fact that we already have vaccines that could dramatically blunt the damage.
So why, four years into this outbreak, have we managed to do so little to get avian flu under control?
It has more to do with bureaucracy and economic interests than scientific capacity. The American chicken meat industry exports a significant share of its product abroad, and the fear is that our trading partners would reject US chicken because of the challenge of determining whether a poultry bird is infected with avian flu or simply has antibodies from vaccination. So instead of vaccinating, the US has resorted to mass killing chickens and turkeys — quite painfully — in a mostly unsuccessful attempt to control the spread.
As the outbreak stretches on, and egg and turkey producers complain that they aren’t allowed to vaccinate because of the chicken industry’s trade concerns, pressure has mounted for US regulators to approve a plan to start vaccinating poultry birds across the country — something that ought to be a no-brainer given that, as Vox’s Kenny Torrella has pointed out, the costs of managing the outbreak have been much higher than the value of the chicken industry’s exports. As of last summer, the US Department of Agriculture was reportedly working on such a plan.
Will we start routinely vaccinating in 2026? We’re closer than we have been in any previous year, but securing assurances from trade partners is hard, long work, as is devising a plan for vaccine rollout that satisfies those partners, and all indications are that we’re not close yet. If we start to see more severe bird flu spread in 2026 and sustained spikes in egg prices, the USDA’s calculus might change. But for now, I think we’re less likely than not to see the agency authorize vaccination as part of a standard avian flu control program in poultry birds (rather than just as part of limited pilots or experimental uses). —MB
Per the International Energy Agency, data centers consumed 1.5 percent of the world’s electricity in 2024, around 415 terawatt-hours. Though these massive, energy-hungry facilities are proliferating at a rapid pace, they’re still a small fraction of humanity’s energy use.
Tech companies say they need many more of them, particularly to run their AI products, but data centers have an image problem. They are starting to wear out their welcome in some communities and are being thoroughly shunned in others. Only 44 percent of Americans say they would want one of these giant humming boxes near them. Speculation around their energy demand is already starting to raise electricity prices for consumers in some markets.
Now some environmental groups and activists are already calling for a moratorium on new data center construction, not just voting down individual projects, and at least one community has officially imposed a pause.
There are also strains on the global supply chain for data center components, so even places ready to go on a construction spree will have to wait for parts to catch up. Additionally, more power generators are continuing to come online, so the percentage share that goes to data centers won’t rise as quickly. —Umair Irfan
The United States lucked out in 2025 with no major hurricane hitting the mainland. However, it’s only a matter of time before one does so again. The question is how strong it will be. There are typically 14 storms strong enough to be given a name in any year, but only 45 were ever known to have reached Category 5 strength, with sustained winds at 158 miles per hour. Fewer still maintained their full strength as they reached the shore.
The last Category 5 hurricane to hammer the continental US was Hurricane Michael in 2018, so baseline chances of this happening again next year are fairly low. The year 2026 is poised to start as a La Niña year, where the surface of the Pacific Ocean cools to below-average temperatures. That tends to create more favorable conditions for hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. The pattern is then lonely to shift into a neutral phase that has minimal effects on cyclones in the Atlantic. The other key variable is how much heat is in the Atlantic Ocean. Hurricanes run on warm water, and the fever of record-high temperatures broke in the Atlantic Ocean this year.
Add to that the variability in how hurricanes travel and you have a fairly low chance of the most powerful type of hurricane hitting the continental US at maximum power next year. —UI
One of the past year’s most striking AI-related visuals was a graph showing that the length of tasks AI can do is doubling every seven months. This may seem a bit in the weeds, but it’s actually really important, because it speaks to AI’s growing ability to work autonomously. According to METR, the research group that made this graph, Claude Opus 4.5 has already hit four hours and 49 minutes, which means that the chatbot is expected to succeed at least 50 percent of the time on tasks that took humans that long. Extrapolating from this graph, I predict that at least one AI model will hit at least 16 hours by the end of 2026. I’m making this prediction with 75 percent confidence.
I could go higher, but I won’t, because a few variables could still change the trajectory. For example, if compute growth slows, we could see substantial delays in capability milestones. I also want to emphasize that you shouldn’t take this to mean that AI will put you out of work by the end of 2026: What’s being measured here is AI’s ability to succeed at very particular tasks, not its ability to generalize to the whole of what you can do. — Sigal Samuel
The White House has come out strongly against state-level AI regulation, releasing an executive order in December saying that the “Administration must act with the Congress to ensure that there is a minimally burdensome national standard — not 50 discordant State ones.”
But it’s very unlikely that we’ll see comprehensive federal legislation in 2026 requiring AI companies to implement safety plans. For one thing, there is no consensus on what shape such a national framework should take. For another, the White House’s attempt to ban state-level regulation (with the idea of putting in a national framework instead) has proven extremely unpopular, including among Republicans. Plus, with so much tech lobbying aimed at relaxing regulation rather than entrenching it, there’s little incentive for the White House to push through comprehensive federal legislation on safety.
Taken together, all this leads me to think that while Congress may pass more specific AI provisions in 2026 (for example, related to national defense), it won’t pass a comprehensive national standard when it comes to actually keeping us safe from AI. —SS
This is the kind of prediction that sounds silly right up until it’s not. Wholly AI-generated music has already crossed one major threshold, when the country track “Walk My Walk,” by the AI band Breaking Rust, topped Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart. One survey found that 60 million people were using AI tools to make music, while the streaming platform Deezer reported that a third of the tracks uploaded each day were AI generated.
The remaining barrier to AI music colonizing your ears isn’t capability so much as distribution: You don’t hit No. 1 because you made a great song — you hit No. 1 because the machinery of attention (TikTok, streaming playlists, fandoms, and labels) decides to make your song unavoidable. And I could see the sheer novelty factor pushing at least one AI generated song to the top of the pops.
So what counts as “primarily AI-generated” here? For scoring purposes, I’d define it narrowly: The core musical content (melody/arrangement and a substantial share of the vocals or instrumentation) must be generated by an AI system, and that fact has to be publicly acknowledged by the creators or credibly reported: “AI was used in mastering” or “a producer used AI for a synth patch” — aka AI as a means to supplement human-made work doesn’t count. If it’s essentially an AI-made track with human polishing, it qualifies.
Why 60 percent? Because the incentives of novelty, speed and cost all line up. The big uncertainty is backlash: legal, cultural, or platform-level. But history suggests that if something can go viral, it eventually will. —BW
Musk is on track to become history’s first trillionaire. His fortune is already so gargantuan that if he wanted to, he could end world hunger and subsidize a free national preschool program and still have hundreds of billions of dollars to spare.
But don’t bet on it, because the world’s richest man may soon become the first person ever to go take-backsies on the Giving Pledge, a promise by the ultra-wealthy to donate half of their wealth in their lifetime or upon their death.
To be fair, plenty of other signatories have quietly died without fulfilling their pledge. But Musk has also drifted far away politically from who he was when he signed in 2012, and his qualms about philanthropy — including that of his fellow pledgers — are no secret. He thinks it is “extremely difficult” to give money well. MacKenzie Scott is “concerning.” Nonprofits are “money laundering” schemes. Philanthropy is “bullshit.” And the pledge’s founder Bill Gates, Musk told his biographer Walter Isaacson, is “categorically insane (and an asshole to the core).”
Oh, and his good friend Peter Thiel has been openly encouraging Musk — whose charitable foundation has regularly failed to meet the minimum legal giving requirements anyway — to unsign. Altogether, it’s become more likely than not that Musk will publicly bow out of the Giving Pledge before December 31, 2026. It could come in the form of a quiet delisting on GivingPledge.org, but chances are we’ll find out on X before anywhere else. —SH
Space is getting awfully crowded.
About 15,000 satellites currently orbit Earth. That number has risen exponentially in recent years due to megaconstellations, large satellite networks launched by private companies like SpaceX and Amazon to provide broadband internet access around the world. Most of these satellites are in low earth orbit (LEO), or 1,200 miles or less above the planet’s surface. As of late October, there were at least 12,000 active satellites in LEO — and just over 66 percent are a part of SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, which aims to eventually have up to 42,000 satellites.
We’ve launched more satellites to LEO in the last four years than we have in the previous 70 years combined. By 2040, we should expect to see more than 560,000 satellites in orbit based on planned launches. It’s hard to predict exactly how many satellites we’ll have by the end of 2026, but we know that Starlink and other megaconstellations will continue to grow.
The more satellites we have, the greater the chance that they will collide into one another or “space junk” — debris from human-made objects like defunct satellites, bits of spacecrafts, and old rocket parts. Various countries have space traffic management systems to protect against this, but they certainly aren’t fail-safe, especially given the rate at which new satellites are being launched into orbit and the increasing risk of collisions that comes with that.
On December 9, a Starlink satellite narrowly avoided colliding with a Chinese satellite. Space X claimed that the Chinese operator didn’t share its location data. Starlink satellites can automatically change course to avoid objects, but they have to know they’re there for this to work. In the first half of 2025, Starlink performed more than 144,000 avoidance maneuvers. So yes, collisions are inevitable — they’re just a question of when. I’d say 2026. —Shayna Korol
GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy are all the rage, but high demand has meant serious shortages. That’s partly because these drugs are complex peptides grown from living cells, a process that’s hard to scale. But that won’t be the case for long.
Eli Lilly, an American pharmaceutical company, has developed an oral GLP-1 pill that works like the injections but is structurally very different, more similar to an aspirin. A pill like that would be much cheaper, won’t require cold storage, and can be pressed into pills by the billions. In pivotal trials, the drug showed weight loss rivaling the injections.
Lilly is submitting for FDA approval by year’s end, and the drug has been selected for the FDA’s new priority voucher program, which can cut review times from 10 months to as little as two. The government has already struck a deal with Lilly capping Medicare patients’ costs at $50 a month if approved. And CEO Dave Ricks told CNBC he expects a global launch “this time next year.”
Already in late December, the FDA approved a pill version of Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy. But that’s still a semaglutide, or peptide — not what I’m covering with this prediction. But if Lily’s approval goes through, we’ll be in a true era of GLP-1 abundance. —Pratik Pawar
RFK Jr. has never been a natural fit for the Trump administration. A longtime Democrat with a history of environmental advocacy, he was initially useful to Trump largely because he brought in voters supportive of his Make America Healthy Again movement. But his anti-vaccine advocacy has gotten him into trouble with Republican senators and occasionally put him out of step with Trump, who said in September that “you have some vaccines that are very amazing.”
Indeed, if I’d been making this prediction in the fall, I might have given Kennedy less than even odds of staying in his position through 2026. However, he has scored wins lately, like rolling back the federal recommendation that infants receive the hepatitis B vaccine at birth (to be clear, experts say getting rid of the recommendation is dangerous and could lead to unnecessary deaths). He has also managed to avoid real political fallout around the release of Olivia Nuzzi’s memoir about their alleged affair. Vaccine skeptics are reportedly excited about their recent victories and looking forward to more.
Neither vaccine opposition nor MAHA more generally are truly core to Trump’s governing project, to the extent that he has one, and it’s possible to imagine a post-midterm shakeup of the US Department of Health and Human Services. For now, however, the odds favor Kennedy keeping his job. —AN
The United States earned measles elimination status from the WHO in 2000, after decades of a successful vaccination campaign. More than 90 percent of children received the measles vaccine — and Americans widely agreed on its value. In the following years, with rare exceptions, the only cases in the US were brought here from other parts of the world where measles was still more widespread.
Not anymore.
Measles vaccination rates have been sliding for years, and 2025 brought the biggest single outbreak in more than three decades, seeded in West Texas among a religious community that is skeptical of vaccinations. Even as that outbreak petered out over the summer, after more than 700 cases and three deaths, local outbreaks have persisted in Utah and South Carolina.
The WHO’s criteria for revoking measles elimination status is 12 months of continuous transmission. Considering the same strain of the measles virus that was present in Texas in January was still circulating as of November, it doesn’t look good.
It seems to me that only a massive effort from the federal government could stamp out the disease in time — but that appears far less likely than the Kennedy-led health department limiting access to the measles vaccine next year. Instead, it looks like a pretty safe bet that one of the most contagious viruses known to humanity will continue spreading long enough to undo one of the US’s signature public health wins. —Dylan Scott
Not many of my colleagues know this about me, but I’m a huge Beyoncé fan — and how could one not be? She has a voice like honeyed velvet, she can belt like no one else alive, and she can tear through choreo in six-inch heels like she’s just getting warmed up. Her creative instincts have made her one of America’s most consistently admired stars for over two decades, and she’s nothing if not incredibly versatile.
It’s already widely speculated that the third album in Beyoncé’s Renaissance trilogy (the first two being 2022’s Renaissance and 2024’s Cowboy Carter) will be rock ’n’ roll-adjacent, with many reports citing the rock songs she’s already released on Lemonade and her most recent album, plus the numerous rock-coded Easter eggs she’s been dropping over the last year. But she’s also been manifesting a bigger rock project ever since her jaw-dropping backbend set to electric guitar at a 2009 performance of “Freakum Dress,” and probably for even longer.
Her Renaissance trilogy, so far, has explored the Black musical roots of modern pop music, with each release encompassing not a fixed genre but a sonic world with porous borders. So while rock is a narratively satisfying guess for Beyoncé’s next act, there’s also a great deal of uncertainty — she’s rarely straightforward or predictable.
Nevertheless, I’ll place my bets that she’ll have an album out this year with rock or a rock subfield as its primary genre, as defined by at least one major music chart or streaming platform (Billboard, Apple Music, or AllMusic), or as defined by album reviews in a majority of the following outlets: Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, The Guardian, and Vulture. A tad overconfident? Perhaps. But we could all use a hard cultural pivot from the last few years of country music and aesthetics, and I can’t wait to see what Beyoncé will do as rock frontwoman. —MB
Oh, Mr. Kissing Booth. I didn’t think you had it in you, but your sorrowful, baby doe eyes as the creature has endeared me!
I went to see Frankenstein in IMAX with one of my friends, and I knew that I was going to walk into a monster-sympathetic adaptation. (It’s Guillermo del Toro we’re talking about, he of Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water.) I’m a big fan of the book, and was eager to see how Elordi would interpret the creature’s curiosity, rage, and desire for love. Elordi’s creature was more than I could have ever hoped for. Elegant, childlike, and grotesque, all wrapped into one lanky 6-foot-6-inch body — a beautiful foil to Oscar Isaac’s impetuous Victor. I entirely forgot this is Nate from Euphoria! And apparently so did everyone at Cannes.
He will be nominated for Best Supporting Actor, but the odds he wins are lower, depending on who from One Battle After Another is nominated, either Benicio del Toro or Sean Penn. If it’s both, Elordi is cooked. —Izzie Ramirez
2025-12-31 21:00:00
2025年受到特朗普第二届政府的主导，同时伴随着“埃普斯坦文件”的发布以及一系列政府动荡事件，包括历史上最长的联邦政府停摆和众议员马乔丽·泰勒·格林宣布辞职。这一年也见证了诸多历史性的政治时刻，例如加沙停火、海外由Z世代主导的政府抗议活动，以及年轻政治人物如佐赫兰·马姆达尼的崛起。此外，世界迎来了首位美国教皇，拉布布乌成为家喻户晓的名字，而中国则通过推出DeepSeek在人工智能领域掀起了新的讨论热潮。在看似无休止的政府更迭中，这一年以美国在多国发动新打击行动而告终，全球局势愈发不安。让我们回顾一下定义2025年的这些密集事件。你可以在Vox的YouTube频道上找到这段视频以及更多相关内容。
2025 was dominated by the second iteration of the Trump administration, the release of the Epstein files, and government shakeups that ranged from the longest federal shutdown in history to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announcing her resignation. It was also a year of historic political moments — from a ceasefire in Gaza to Gen Z-led government protests abroad, and the rise of young politicians like Zohran Mamdani.
Along the way, the world got its first American pope, Labubu became a household name, and China upended the AI conversation with the introduction of DeepSeek. Amid seemingly endless government transitions, the year closed with a growing sense of unrest as the US launched new strikes in multiple countries. Let’s take a look back at the jam-packed events that defined 2025.
You can find this video and many others on Vox’s YouTube channel.
2025-12-31 20:00:00
特朗普第二个任期以来，联邦政府在基础数据收集方面出现了持续的退化。有些变化源于他对数据本身的意识形态抗拒，有些则是为了掩盖令人不适的趋势，而更多则是由于严重的人员和预算削减，导致相关机构无法有效追踪国家情况。
关键要点：
收集国家基础数据是联邦政府的重要职责之一。毕竟，人口普查是宪法规定的。了解人们健康状况、环境变化和经济情况的数据，对于准确描绘国家现状至关重要。这些数据也是合理分配资源和评估政策效果的基础。良好的数据是问责机制的重要工具，而缺乏数据或低质量数据将使领导者更容易误导公众。
一旦数据收集系统被削弱，后果会迅速显现：科学研究放缓，对健康威胁的早期预警被忽视，经济政策变得更加不稳定，公众对政府机构的信任进一步下降。当然，准确的信息往往具有巨大的政治影响，这使得篡改数据的诱惑力很大。但特朗普政府已经远远超越了前任，不仅削减了整个数据收集项目，还任命了意识形态偏颇的人负责事实调查，同时施压机构支持既定结论。如果白宫如愿以偿，未来还会有更多数据收集项目的削减。
以下是今年白宫削弱我们对国家乃至世界进行统计和测量能力的几个重要方面：
1）削减关键健康调查项目
今年春季，特朗普政府解雇了负责收集人们健康状况基础信息的联邦雇员，并启动了对联邦调查问卷的改革，以删除有关少数族裔和LGBTQ+群体的问题。虽然我们可能不会将联邦政府视为全球最重要的调查机构之一，但实际上它正是如此。我们关于青少年吸烟、肥胖率上升以及健康保险覆盖率的数据，主要来自政府。例如，被解雇的CDC（疾病控制与预防中心）员工负责进行有关妊娠风险、青少年吸烟和性暴力的调查。没有这些数据，国家在面对新的健康趋势时将如同在黑暗中航行。此外，政府试图从数据收集中剔除某些被忽视的群体，这使得我们难以了解LGBTQ+群体中抑郁和焦虑是否更为普遍，或者某些群体是否更容易患上高血压或糖尿病。
白宫以“削减政府浪费”和“消除对跨性别者和非二元性别者的保护和承认”为由，部分地为这些削减辩护。但这样做意味着我们能够干预和阻止健康问题的原始数据正在消失。
2）削减科研经费
美国国家卫生研究院（NIH）每年向科研人员提供超过400亿美元的资助，是全球最大的独立科学研究资助机构。但今年，政府削减了约27亿美元的科研经费，并计划在未来进一步削减。据《普罗比卡》报道，被取消的NIH项目种类繁多。多年来，科学家们一直在努力使临床试验参与者多样化，以更好地反映整个社会的人口情况。例如，一项旨在改善阿尔茨海默病临床试验招募的项目，被特朗普政府取消。另一项研究揭示了污染饮用水对胎儿发育影响的项目也被取消。还有关于歧视对年轻西班牙裔人群心理健康的影响、黑人女性的母婴健康、以及黑人女性宫颈癌死亡率过高的原因的研究项目也被取消。这些复杂的研究问题，联邦政府的调查无法独自回答。因此，美国长期以来支持独立研究人员来提供答案。这种体系依赖于对科学过程的信任。但现在，这种信任已经不复存在。
3）修改儿童疫苗接种计划
特朗普政府正在修改儿童疫苗接种计划，这并非基于新的科学发现，而是出于卫生部长罗伯特·F·肯尼迪 Jr.及其挑选的疫苗怀疑论者顾问们的强烈信念，即鉴于公众对疫苗的信任度下降，必须进行调整。例如，肯尼迪的疫苗顾问们以所谓“疫苗免疫力随时间减弱”的不实数据为由，决定取消新生儿接种乙肝疫苗的建议。但即使是在顾问委员会中，也有成员质疑这一改变的科学依据。一位来自塔夫茨大学的儿科医生和传染病专家在顾问会议上表示：“没有一个健康的人在按照推荐计划接种疫苗后出现疾病或症状，也没有人患有慢性病。证据非常明确地表明，乙肝疫苗能提供终身免疫。” 然而，新批准的建议指出，如果孩子没有在出生时接种乙肝疫苗，应在至少两个月大时再接种。至少有两名委员会成员认为，两个月的建议缺乏科学依据，也没有数据支持。尽管如此，这一改变还是被批准了。一位来自马里兰大学的传染病专家在观看会议后表示，这让人想起魔术师的障眼法，他们只选择支持自己观点的数据。
4）删除气候相关数据
从一开始，特朗普政府就将联邦气候研究作为目标。项目2025（由赫里奇基金会提出）建议白宫应“在所有地方彻底消除气候变化的提及”。特朗普不仅删除了“气候变化”一词，还让与气候相关的工具、数据和报告下线。例如，国家海洋和大气管理局（NOAA）的预算和人员削减，导致像气象气球发射这样的关键数据收集活动减少，这对天气预报模型至关重要。此外，用于飓风研究的飞机飞行任务也因预算和人员削减而受到影响。该机构还关闭了追踪过去40年美国最严重极端天气事件的数据库。最近，美国还撤出了最后一艘前往南极洲进行气候研究的科研船。现在，特朗普政府希望解散国家大气研究中心（NCAR），该机构是国际知名的机构，白宫预算负责人兼项目2025作者卢斯·沃赫特称其为“美国最大的气候恐慌来源之一”。
气候研究不仅仅是理解气候变化，它对于追踪环境风险和经济威胁至关重要。联邦政府在气候研究方面长期处于世界领先地位，其努力很难在其他地方复制。
5）限制环保局（EPA）的职能
环保局的职责是保护人类健康和环境，但特朗普政府却在庆祝其限制环保局的行动。其中一项策略是撤销对污染监测和执行法规的努力。例如，《一项伟大的美丽法案》（One Big Beautiful Bill Act）取消了对违反车辆燃油效率和污染法规的汽车制造商的罚款。环保局还使工业界更容易申请豁免空气污染标准。该机构还取消了用于测量工业设施社区污染物的资助。今年，环保局对污染者提起的诉讼数量是25年来最少的。同时，司法部环境执法部门的律师人数也减少了一半。随着执法力度的下降，政府对违反污染法规行为的监控资源减少，而企业则面临更小的环保压力。此外，环保局的科研与发展办公室（OR&D）也于今年夏天被关闭，该办公室为制定有毒化学物质和水污染物等法规提供了科学依据。其中包括人体研究设施，这是美国最大的实验室之一，研究了烟雾、烟尘等对人类身体的影响。展望未来，白宫计划关闭现有的追踪二氧化碳的卫星，并从下一代气象卫星中移除污染监测功能。同时，环保局还计划停止要求主要工业污染者报告温室气体排放，这包括超过8000个设施。所有这些措施都将导致我们对地球宜居性的了解减少，问责机制也相应削弱。
6）打击就业数据
如果特朗普政府如愿以偿，我们可能无法及时了解当前就业市场的严峻状况，因为失业率已经达到了四年来的最高水平。今年夏天，特朗普解雇了劳工统计局（BLS）局长，因为该机构发布的修订后的就业数据使经济状况看起来不佳。特朗普的第一任人选是赫里奇基金会的首席经济学家，他曾提议暂停每月就业报告，但因两党反对，白宫不得不撤回提名。目前，该机构由代理局长威廉·瓦特罗斯基领导，等待特朗普政府的新提名。因此，目前就业数据似乎仍然安全。但考虑到该机构约三分之一的领导职位空缺，以及特朗普仍对数据运作机制持怀疑态度，这些数据是否能长期保持安全尚不确定。
7）针对季度财报的攻击
自1970年以来，美国公司被要求每季度公布财务数据，这被认为是全球最可靠的企业透明度数据之一。但特朗普希望改变这一做法。他在9月的Truth Social帖子中呼吁证券交易委员会（SEC）让公司改为每半年公布一次财报。他认为这将“节省成本，并让管理层专注于正确经营公司”。他曾在第一任期尝试推动这一政策，但当时没有结果。如今，SEC正在积极研究这一提议，如果特朗普成功，美国将更接近英国和欧盟的做法。然而，许多美国公司的发展速度远超欧洲同行，投资者更需要频繁的信息。
8）对人口普查的干预
人口普查是一项历史悠久的调查，其结果可以重新划分选区，并决定数百亿美元的联邦资金分配，用于学校、道路和医院建设。因此，人口普查局作为美国最大的统计机构，必须准确进行人口统计。几十年来，人口普查询问美国人的方式发生了巨大变化。在拜登总统任期内，政府要求2030年人口普查新增“中东或北非裔”和“拉丁裔或西班牙裔”等选项，以更好地捕捉人们的种族身份。这一改变非常重要，因为更准确的数据将有助于更有效地分配资源和执行民权法案。然而，特朗普政府可能首先采取行动，撤销这些改变。一位白宫官员最近表示，政府正在考虑撤销这些改变，因为它们与多样性、公平和包容有关。特朗普还多次试图将无证移民排除在人口普查之外，这将是前所未有的改变。如果这些措施实施，国家将更难了解自身，而被低估的美国社区将承受后果。
拯救残余的数据
当然，这并不是特朗普第一次试图操纵、忽视或抹去数据。研究人员、非营利组织和活动人士早已发出警告，担心失去对高质量政府数据的访问。现在，有多个组织正在努力抢救和归档联邦统计数据和网站，同时也有指南帮助人们寻找那些已经消失的信息。然而，企业和大学等机构很难与美国政府的数据收集规模和深度相抗衡。白宫若继续集中力量削弱或操纵政策背后的数字，将很难阻止，而这些影响将持续多年。
One of the biggest changes so far during President Donald Trump’s second term has been the steady degradation of basic data collection.
In some cases, moves have been driven by his ideological resistance to the numbers themselves; in others, by a desire to bury uncomfortable trends. And in many places, it’s simply the result of deep job and budget cuts that have left agencies unable to track the country they’re meant to govern.
• The federal government is a key collector of vital data about the makeup of the country.
• President Donald Trump has long been hostile to data that contradicts his messaging and has presided over major rollbacks to data collection relating to the environment, public health, employment, demographics, and the weather.
• With less robust and accurate data, advances in science will slow down, Americans will have a murkier picture of the economy, and officials could miss important health trends. It will also further erode trust in public institutions.
Gathering basic data about the country is one of the key responsibilities of the federal government. After all, the census is mandated by the Constitution. Getting correct numbers about people, their health, the environment, and the economy is essential for taking an accurate snapshot of the country. These data are also the essential foundation for allocating resources and for sorting what works from what doesn’t.
Good numbers are a key accountability tool, and with the absence of data or lower-quality numbers driving decisions, it will be easier for leaders to mislead. Strip away the measurements and tallies, and the consequences pile up fast: Scientific research slows, early warnings about health threats get missed, economic policies become more volatile, and trust in institutions erodes even further.
Of course, good information can often have huge political consequences, which creates a strong temptation to fudge the figures.
But the Trump administration has gone far beyond its predecessors, cutting entire data-collection programs while putting ideologues in charge of fact-finding — all while pressuring agencies to support preordained conclusions. And if the White House has its way, even more rollbacks are in store.
Here are some of the most significant ways in which the White House has diminished our capacity to count and measure the country, and the world, this year:
Over the spring, the Trump administration laid off federal workers responsible for collecting basic information about people’s well-being and put in motion the process to overhaul federal surveys to eliminate the questions related to racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people.
We may not think of the federal government as one of the most important pollsters in the world, but it is: The best data we have about everything from teen smoking to increases in obesity rates to how many people have health insurance has come from the government.
Among the estimated 3,000 employees laid off from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were staffers who conduct surveys assessing everything from pregnancy risks to youth smoking to sexual violence. Without that data, the country will be flying blind when new health trends emerge. And as the administration moved to erase certain underrepresented communities from data collection, it will be harder to know whether depression or anxiety are particularly high among LGBTQ+ people or whether certain populations are becoming more susceptible to hypertension or diabetes.
The White House justified the cuts partly in the name of reducing government waste and partly as part of its ongoing crusade to erase any protections for and recognition of transgender or gender non-conforming people.
But that comes at a cost. The raw data that allows us to intervene and stop health problems are evaporating. —Dylan Scott, Vox senior health correspondent
The National Institutes of Health, which awards upward of $40 billion in grants to scientific researchers every year, is the single biggest funder of independent scientific inquiry in the world.
But this year, the administration slashed its financial support for those research projects by an estimated $2.7 billion while proposing billions more in future cuts — cutting off another vital source of information about what’s driving changes in the population’s health and how any emerging problems might be fixed.
The list of canceled NIH projects, as documented by ProPublica, is long and varied. Scientists have been working for years to diversify their clinical trial participants, to collect better data that better reflects the wider population. One such project, to improve the recruitment for Alzheimer’s disease clinical trials, was being funded by an NIH grant — and it was cut by the Trump administration. Another grant uncovering new data on how contaminated drinking water affects fetal development — cut. New research into how discrimination affects the mental health of young Hispanic people, into the maternal health of Black women, into the driver of the disproportionate death rate from cervical cancer among Black women — cut, cut, and cut.
These are the kinds of nuanced scientific questions that the federal government’s surveys can’t answer on their own. That’s why the US has long provided support to independent researchers who can provide us with answers. This system has relied on the trust of the scientific process.
But not anymore. —Dylan Scott, Vox senior health correspondent
The administration has been busy overhauling the childhood vaccination schedule — based not so much on new facts but out of the deeply felt convictions of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his handpicked panel of vaccine-skeptical advisers that something must change given the declining public trust in vaccines.
For example, Kennedy’s vaccine advisers justified their decision to end the recommendation for a birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine based in part on dubious data that they said suggested the vaccine’s immunity waned over time. But even some of the advisory committee’s own members, who were overruled on the final decision at a December meeting, questioned the evidence for the change.
“There is not a single case who is otherwise healthy who received the recommended schedule, of anyone who developed disease or is symptomatic or has chronic disease,” Cody Meissner, a Tufts University pediatrician and infectious disease specialist, said during the adviser meeting. “The evidence is very strong that there is lifelong immunity to hepatitis B.”
The new recommendations they approved did suggest, however, that if your child does not receive the birth dose, you should wait until they are at least two months old before giving it to them. At least two members of the committee argued that there was no scientific basis for the two-month recommendation, and no data had been presented to justify it.
“It’s unconscionable,” Hibblen said shortly before the final vote. Nevertheless, the change was approved.
As Wilbur Chen, an infectious disease physician at the University of Maryland, put it to me after watching the meeting: It calls to mind a magician with a sleight of hand. They were picking data, whatever it is that supports their argument.” —Dylan Scott, Vox senior health correspondent
From the outset, the Trump administration has had federal climate change research in its crosshairs. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s proposed agenda for Trump’s second term, said that the White House needs to “eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”
Trump has done much more than delete the words “climate change” though; his administration has taken climate-related tools, data, and reports offline.
The budget and staff cuts at agencies like NOAA — the main department monitoring weather and climate — have reduced data collection activities like weather balloon launches that are important for forecasting models. There have also been budget and personnel cuts to divisions that do key tasks for research and predictions like flying aircraft into hurricanes. The agency also retired its database of billion-dollar disasters, which had tracked the costliest extreme weather events across the country going back more than 40 years.
More recently, the US has withdrawn its last research ship from Antarctica, a key field site for climate research. And now Trump wants to dissolve the National Center for Atmospheric Research, an internationally renowned institution that White House budget director and Project 2025 author Russ Vought called “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.”
Climate research is about much more than understanding climate change; it’s a critical field for tracking evolving risks in the environment and threats to the economy. The federal government’s climate research work has long led the world, and its efforts will be hard to duplicate elsewhere. —Umair Irfan, climate correspondent
The Environmental Protection Agency has a mandate to protect human health and the environment, but the Trump administration has been celebrating its efforts to constrain it. One of its strategies is to roll back efforts to monitor pollution and enforce regulations. For example, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act zeroed out fines for car manufacturers that violate vehicle fuel economy and pollution rules.
The EPA made it easier for industries to apply for exemptions to air pollution standards. The agency also scrapped grants for measuring pollutants in communities with industrial facilities.
This year, the EPA initiated the fewest lawsuits against polluters in 25 years. The Department of Justice’s environmental enforcement division, which handles EPA’s litigation, now has around half the number of lawyers it did at the start of the year. With declining enforcement, the government has fewer resources to monitor violations of pollution regulations, while industries face less pressure to track and reduce their impact on the environment.
The agency is cutting back on its scientific efforts as well. The EPA’s Office of Research and Development, which provides the scientific basis for its regulations for things like toxic chemicals and water contaminants, was shuttered over the summer. This includes the Human Studies Facility, one of the largest laboratories in the country, which studied how smog, smoke, and soot affect the human body.
Looking ahead, the White House wants to shut down existing satellites that track carbon dioxide and remove pollution monitoring capabilities from the next generation of weather satellites. And the EPA wants to end greenhouse gas reporting for major industrial polluters, which includes more than 8,000 facilities.
All of this means less visibility and accountability for the things that make our planet less livable. —Umair Irfan, climate correspondent
If the Trump administration had had its way earlier this year, then we might not have known just how bad the job market is right now, with the unemployment rate now at its highest level in four years.
Over the summer, Trump — who has a history of rattling wildly inaccurate unemployment numbers — fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the agency released revised jobs data that made the economy look bad. Trump’s first pick for a replacement, the chief economist of the Heritage Foundation, floated suspending the monthly jobs report altogether before bipartisan condemnation forced the White House to withdraw his nomination. The agency is currently being led by acting commissioner William Watrowski, a longtime civil servant, pending a new nominee from the Trump administration.
So, for now, the jobs data appears safe. But with about one-third of leadership roles at the agency vacant, and a president still very much in denial about how the numbers work, it’s unclear if they will stay that way for long. —Sara Herschander, Future Perfect fellow
Since 1970, American companies have been required to report their earnings on a quarterly basis — a cache of data offering transparency about public companies that is considered to be among the most reliable in the world.
But Trump would like to change that.
In a September Truth Social post, he advocated for the Securities and Exchange Commission to make firms report on a semiannual rather than quarterly basis. This would, according to Trump, “save money and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies.”
He tried to push this through during his first term, although nothing materialized then. But now the SEC is actively looking into this, and if Trump is successful, this would put the US more in line with UK and EU practices. But many companies in the American market are growing significantly faster than their European counterparts, and investors benefit from more — not less — frequent information. —Shayna Korol, Future Perfect fellow
The centuries-old census is a very big deal. Its results can redraw voting districts and control the fate of hundreds of billions of dollars of federal funds for schools, roads, and hospitals.
That’s why it’s so important that the Census Bureau, the country’s largest statistical agency, gets its counting right. Exactly how the census asks Americans about themselves has evolved dramatically over the decades. During President Joe Biden’s term, the administration required the 2030 Census to include, for the first time, new checkboxes for “Middle Eastern or North African” and “Hispanic or Latino” participants under a question about race and ethnicity. This is a crucial change because with more accurate data for those previously undercounted populations, the country will be able to more effectively allocate resources and enforce civil rights legislation.
Unless, of course, the Trump administration gets to it first. A White House official recently said that the administration is considering revoking those changes — which were made to better capture people’s racial identities — amid a broader war against anything even remotely tied to diversity, equity, or inclusion.
Trump has also repeatedly attempted to exclude undocumented people from the census, which would be an unprecedented change. If either of those things happen, the country will likely be one step further away from understanding itself — and undercounted American communities will suffer the consequences. —Sara Herschander, Future Perfect fellow
This, of course, isn’t Trump’s first time in office, nor is it his first attempt to manipulate, ignore, or erase the numbers. And researchers, nonprofits, and activists have raised the alarm before about losing access to quality government data.
There are now multiple groups working to rescue and archive federal statistics and websites, as well as guides for finding information that has gone missing.
But there’s only so much companies, universities, and NGOs can do to match the US government’s data-gathering scale and depth. A concerted effort from the White House to diminish or manipulate the numbers behind policies will be hard to counteract, and the effects will linger for years to come.
2025-12-31 19:00:00
又到了一年一次的时刻。每年1月1日，Future Perfect团队都会预测我们认为在接下来的365天内会发生或不会发生的事件。每年12月31日，我们都会回顾这些预测并统计我们的预测准确率。我们所有的预测都是积极的，即某件事会发生，并附带了概率，以表示我们对预测的信心程度。为了简化评分，我们把概率高于50%且最终实现的预测标记为“正确预测”，概率低于50%但最终实现的预测标记为“错误预测”。如果某些预测无法确定，例如由于新美国政府选择延迟发布数据或报告，我们则将其标记为“未决定”。我们的得分是：19次正确预测，4次错误预测，2次未决定，如果将平局算作半个胜利，那么我们的胜率是80%。这比1906年的芝加哥小熊队（当时大联盟历史上胜率最高的球队）还要好一点。希望这不会意味着我们将被诅咒一个世纪。无论如何，我们的目标不是为了记分，而是通过识别我们的成功与失败，来提高我们的预测能力，也许还要在某些地方更敢于冒险。幸运的是，我们明天还会再次尝试，届时我们将发布2026年的预测。
——Bryan Walsh
国会通过一项重大关税法案（20%）——正确预测
2025年确实没有缺乏关税新闻，但几乎所有的消息都来自特朗普政府，该政府利用行政权力对大多数国家实施广泛的关税，并且最高法院也在审查这些关税是否合法。年初曾有猜测称，共和党大税法案可能包含一些特朗普风格的关税，但并未发生，主要是因为不需要这么做。正如我最初的预测所说，“特朗普通过总统权力实施新关税的可能性几乎为100%。”实际上，这一概率可能被低估了。
特朗普解散教育部（5%）——正确预测
根据我的预测，如果国会通过法律正式解散教育部，那么该预测为真。但2025年并未发生这种情况，因此预测仍然成立。特朗普确实发布了一项行政命令，指示教育部秘书采取一切必要措施，以“最大程度地促进教育部的关闭”。随后，教育部进行了大规模裁员，引发了各种法律挑战，其中在7月最高法院裁定支持该政府的行动。尽管特朗普试图通过各种方式削弱教育部，但该部门并未被正式解散。
《平价医疗法案》被废除（30%）——正确预测
我的预测中提到，废除《平价医疗法案》需要满足至少以下三个条件：削减或取消该法案对医疗补助计划的资格或联邦资金、削减或取消医疗保险税收抵免、取消某些雇主必须为员工提供医疗保险的强制规定。2025年通过的《一个伟大的美丽法案》确实满足了前两个条件，但并未改变雇主强制医疗保险规定，也未允许《平价医疗法案》的补贴用于健康储蓄账户。因此，我认为《平价医疗法案》尚未被废除。
杰罗姆·鲍威尔将不再担任美联储主席（10%）——正确预测
特朗普一直希望解雇鲍威尔，但最终未能如愿。鲍威尔仍担任美联储主席，直到2026年5月。他还可以继续担任美联储董事会的普通成员，直到2028年1月。尽管特朗普在2025年多次表达对鲍威尔的不满，但实际并未成功解雇他。
特朗普的公众好感度为正（25%）——正确预测
根据民调，特朗普的公众好感度一直低于中立，现在更是有13个百分点的反对声。尽管他可能在某些方面有所改善，但整体上仍不受欢迎。我预测他将比喜欢他的人更多被讨厌，这在2025年看来是合理的。
马斯克和特朗普仍是朋友（40%）——正确预测
尽管两人关系在2025年经历了重大冲突，尤其是围绕《一个伟大的美丽法案》和马斯克的狗狗币未能有效减少联邦支出，但他们的关系似乎有所缓和。马斯克的推文已被删除，两人似乎尝试修复关系。尽管关系不如年初那样牢固，但仍然保持了一定的联系。
世界卫生组织将在2025年宣布H5N1成为大流行（25%）——正确预测
H5N1禽流感病毒在2025年继续引发关注，但尚未达到人类大流行的水平。尽管在动物中感染人数增加，但人类病例仍较少。目前，世界卫生组织尚未将其宣布为大流行，但病毒的传播潜力和适应性令人担忧。
某大型实验室将正式宣布实现AGI（30%）——正确预测
尽管许多公司都在努力实现AGI，但2025年没有一家正式宣布成功。我低估了中国公司在这一领域的进展，尤其是“DeepSeek”事件。虽然AI领域总是充满惊喜，但2025年并未出现AGI的正式声明。
2025年第三季度，美国电动车销量占比将超过10%（65%）——正确预测
2025年第三季度，电动车销量占比达到了10.5%，但主要是由于联邦政府对电动车的7500美元税收抵免在9月底到期，导致人们提前购买。特朗普政府还削弱了拜登时期的燃油效率标准，并限制了电动车充电站的建设。尽管如此，电动车销量仍有所增长。
比特币价格在2025年某时将突破20万美元（70%）——错误预测
尽管我曾对比特币充满信心，但2025年比特币价格波动剧烈，未能达到预期。特朗普上任后，由于关税政策的不确定性、AI热潮和其他经济变量的影响，比特币价格大幅下跌。尽管在10月短暂触及12.5万美元，但最终未能突破20万美元大关。
埃隆·马斯克仍是世界上最富有的人（55%）——正确预测
截至2025年12月29日，马斯克仍然是世界上最富有的人，身价超过6380亿美元。尽管其他富豪如拉里·佩奇和谢尔盖·布林也大幅增加财富，但马斯克仍然保持领先。
新的 psychedelic 治疗药物应用提交给FDA（20%）——正确预测
尽管去年Lykos Therapeutics未能获得MDMA辅助治疗的批准，但2025年仍有公司提交了相关申请。虽然没有达到预期的高概率，但确实有进展。
2025-2030年联邦膳食指南建议美国人避免高度加工食品（30%）——未决定
由于特朗普政府的干预，膳食指南的发布被推迟，因此该预测尚未确定。我低估了政府在这一问题上的无能和与专家共识的偏离。
2024年用于畜牧业的抗生素销售至少增长0.5%（55%）——正确预测
2024年，用于畜牧业的抗生素销售增长了15.8%，远超我的预期。抗生素在畜牧业中的使用是公共卫生问题，因为导致了耐药菌的出现。
到2025年底，禽流感导致至少3000万家禽死亡（60%）——正确预测
2025年是禽流感最严重的一年之一，截至12月12日，已有近5400万只家禽被扑杀。禽流感对蛋鸡产业造成了严重影响，导致鸡蛋短缺和价格上涨。
加州的动物农业法案Prop 12不会被国会推翻（65%）——正确预测
尽管国会尚未通过新的农业法案，但Prop 12仍然有效。该法案旨在提高动物福利，而畜牧业行业反对该法案，但未能成功推翻。
2025年至少有一个州禁止实验室培育肉（80%）——正确预测
2025年，有多个州禁止实验室培育肉，包括密西西比州、蒙大拿州、内布拉斯加州、德克萨斯州和印第安纳州。这些禁令主要由共和党立法者推动，以保护传统肉类产业。
一场重大体育赌博丑闻导致至少一名四大职业联赛的全明星球员被停赛（30%）——错误预测
虽然有球员因参与赌博丑闻被停赛，但未达到“至少一名全明星球员被停赛”的标准。我预测的30%概率未能实现，但体育赌博的丑闻确实持续存在。
马克斯·维斯塔潘赢得2025年F1世界冠军（60%）——错误预测
尽管维斯塔潘表现优异，但最终Lando Norris以微弱优势赢得冠军。我原本认为维斯塔潘有更大的胜算，但最终结果令人失望。
Charli XCX因专辑《Brat》获得格莱美奖（90%）——正确预测
Charli XCX在2025年获得了三项格莱美奖，包括最佳舞曲流行录音、最佳唱片封面设计和最佳电子舞曲/电子专辑。虽然我原本希望她获得最佳专辑奖，但她的表现确实令人满意。
It’s that time of year again.
Every January 1, the Future Perfect team makes forecasts for the events we think will (or won’t) happen over the next 365 days. And every December 31, we go back over those predictions and tally up how we did.
All of our predictions were made positively — as in, something will happen — and came with probabilities attached, which are meant to indicate our relative confidence in the forecast. To simplify scoring, predictions that came with a higher than 50 percent probability that proved out, or with a probability below 50 percent that did not prove out, were marked as “correct call.” Those that came with a higher than 50 percent probability that did not prove out, or with a lower than 50 percent probability that did prove out, were marked “incorrect call.”
If for some reason the forecast could not be resolved — such as, random example here, a new US government chose to delay putting out data or a report that would have clarified the question — we marked it as undecided.
The scorecard? Nineteen correct, four incorrect, and two undecided works out to a winning percentage of .800, if we count ties as half a win. (That would put us a tad over the 1906 Chicago Cubs, who recorded the best single-season winning percentage in major league baseball history. Hopefully this doesn’t mean we’ll be cursed for a century.)
As always, the point is less to keep score than to get better at forecasting by identifying where we’ve succeeded, where we’ve failed — and maybe where we need to take some more chances. Fortunately, we’ll have another shot tomorrow, when we publish our 2026 forecasts. —Bryan Walsh
2025 certainly did not lack for tariff news, but almost all of it came from the Trump administration, which used executive powers to impose sweeping new duties on most countries on Earth, and from the Supreme Court as it weighed whether any of that was legal.
There was some speculation at the start of 2025 that the need for new revenue in Republicans’ big tax bill would lead it to include some Trump-y tariffs. That didn’t happen, mostly because it didn’t need to happen: President Donald Trump could just impose the tariffs unilaterally, or try to at least. As I wrote in my initial prediction, “the odds that Trump does new tariffs using presidential authority are nearly 100 percent.” If anything, “nearly” 100 percent was an underestimate. —Dylan Matthews
Let’s check the fine print: This prediction would’ve resolved true if Congress passed a law formally abolishing the Department of Education. That did not happen in 2025, so the prediction stands.
What Trump did do is issue an executive order instructing the Secretary of Education to, “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.” What has followed are sweeping staff cuts that it’s fair to call a gutting of the department, with various court challenges that in July culminated in a Supreme Court ruling in favor of the administration, at least for the time being. One major pending fight is over the legality of the department moving its functions to other parts of the federal government.
But again, read the fine print. The administration’s solicitor general, in his Supreme Court filing in June, stated, “The government has been crystal clear in acknowledging that only Congress can eliminate the Department of Education.” What the administration did were simply layoffs, not the closure of a legally created government agency. While the Trump team is clearly trying to have it both ways here, I’m inclined to trust their lawyer — they did not dissolve the department. —DM
This is another one where the fine print matters. In my initial prediction, I wrote that a bill “repealing the ACA” has to do at least three of the following five things:
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act certainly satisfies the first two of these requirements. Per the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s breakdown, the bill includes $1.1 trillion in cuts to health care programs over a decade. The vast majority of those cuts go to Medicaid, by imposing work requirements, limiting “provider taxes,” and other changes. But about $226 billion in cuts go to the Affordable Care Act’s exchange-based coverage, mostly by making certain immigrants ineligible.
But squeezing Medicaid and the exchanges is, at most, cutting the Affordable Care Act, not repealing it. Trump and Congress did not change the employer mandate for health insurance, or allow ACA funds to go into health savings accounts, or, crucially, eliminate protections for people with preexisting conditions or limits on hiking premiums based on age. In my book, that means the ACA has yet to be repealed. —DM
Trump would love nothing more than to fire Jerome Powell, who was first appointed chair of the Federal Reserve by some fiendish anti-MAGA president named Donald Trump way back in 2017. Powell has been open about the way Trump’s tariffs, by hiking prices, are slowing the Fed’s process of lowering interest rates, and the president does not like that one bit.
In April, Trump said Powell’s “termination cannot come fast enough!” In July, he showed off a letter he had written, but not filed, firing Powell. In November, he told reporters he wanted to fire Powell, but people like Treasury Secretary Steve Bessent are “holding me back.” And in August, Trump attempted to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook, a move the Supreme Court has blocked but which was, among other things, a clear threat to Powell that he could be next.
Yet here Powell is, still chair of the Fed. Actually removing him, or trying, proved too rich for Trump’s blood. Powell’s term as chair ends in May 2026, meaning Trump will pick his successor, but it appears he’ll be able to stay in charge until then. He can also keep his post as a regular governor on the board until January 2028, if he wants it. —DM
Let’s go to the graph, folks:
Everyone’s polling average is a little different, but basically every one looks like this from Nate Silver: Trump began his presidency slightly above water, but now Americans disapprove of him by a healthy margin (13 points here). The Economist’s average shows him as less popular than either President Joe Biden or Trump himself in term one were at this point in their presidencies.
Being below water at this point has become pretty normal for presidents in the 21st century, so there wasn’t much courage in me predicting Trump would be more disliked than liked. But it’s interesting to me that the speed of the decline has picked up in recent months. I would’ve guessed that Trump’s most-disliked period would’ve been the height of DOGE, but it’s been the period when his ties to Jeffrey Epstein were most under question. —DM
Only two men can tell us if Elon Musk and Trump are truly, as of December 2025, “friends.” But the formal definition I used here is that they stop being friends “if one or the other publicly and unambiguously disparages his counterpart at least three times” over the year. And buddy…
Those Musk tweets are now deleted, and there appears to have been some degree of rapprochement in the ensuing months. But as predicted, there was a massive blow-up in their relationship, centered around the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and, implicitly, the failure of Musk’s DOGE to do anything to actually reduce federal spending. While it does seem as if they’ve made an attempt to patch things up, what’s clear is that their bond is much weaker than it was on January 1. Sad! —DM
America stands out among wealthy nations for being the land of death by cars. But there is, finally, some good news here: After a terrifying period of elevated car fatalities during Covid, the US has seen 13 consecutive quarterly declines in these deaths. As of 2024, we’re back below 40,000 Americans killed by cars annually, according to federal statistics — an achievement that (sadly) calls for celebration. But we still have a ways to go before we’re back down to the pre-pandemic baseline. —Marina Bolotnikova
Netanyahu seemed like a marked man going into 2025.
The war in Gaza had already stretched past a year, and dozens of hostages remained in the hands of Hamas, even as Israel was coming under fire for charges of genocide in its conduct of the war. Netanyahu himself was facing long-running corruption allegations and public anger over both judicial reforms and the war, while the International Criminal Court had issued arrest warrants for him and for his former defense minister Yoav Gallant (as well as Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif).
Well, there’s a reason that Netanyahu is the longest-serving leader in Israeli history: The man has an undeniable talent for political self-preservation. With Trump returning to the White House, Netanyahu had an ally who gave him an even freer hand in Gaza, where Israel adopted tactics that maximized damage (and civilian suffering) in Gaza while reducing the record number of casualties it had suffered in 2024. In June, he launched a major attack against Iran that represented a major tactical victory, one that ultimately included enlisting the US in the attack. By October, whether he fully wanted it or not, Netanyahu had a ceasefire in Gaza that included the return of the remaining 20 living hostages.
As 2026 begins, Netanyahu is far from popular and Israel has increasingly become an international pariah, but he has yet to be dislodged from his position at the top of his deeply divided country. Perhaps that will change with the next Israeli elections, which must take place no later than October 27, but I, for one, have learned not to bet against this man. —BW
This has been a very challenging year for Argentina’s economy, after a surprisingly strong 2024. Inflation is far below where it was when the populist Kirchners were in charge, but swaggering libertarian president Javier Milei’s reforms have also led to high unemployment and voter discontent. That led to a defeat in Buenos Aires elections in September, which led currency, stock, and bond markets to fret over the country’s prospects. This culminated in the US government offering to buy up to $20 billion in Argentinian pesos so Milei’s government had an adequate supply of dollars and could maintain a viable exchange rate.
Having the world hegemon bail you out is, it turns out, good politics: Less than two months after the bad Buenos Aires results, Milei won national midterms in a landslide, giving him much firmer support in Argentina’s National Congress for his reforms.
That’s all background to the question here: inflation. I predicted that inflation would continue to fall but not below 30 percent; I relied in part on an IMF forecast of 45 percent inflation. The most recent data as I write this comes from October, where prices were 31.3 percent higher than October 2024. That implies an annual inflation rate just above our 30 percent cutoff. We’ll have to see what the January numbers say, but there’s a very good chance I was wrong here and underestimated Milei and the Argentinian economy. Regardless of which side of 30 percent we land on, I was much too confident. —DM
When I made this call, I thought the logic was straightforward. The war was grinding into its third year, both sides had taken appalling losses, and Trump was about to take office with little interest in writing Ukraine a blank check. It seemed reasonable that Moscow and Kyiv would fight hard for marginal gains in early 2025, then accept a ceasefire that froze the lines.
That is not the world we’re in. As 2025 ends, the conflict in Ukraine remains the largest war in Europe since World War II, with well over a million people killed or wounded and Russia still occupying roughly a fifth of Ukrainian territory. There have been brief truces — measured in dozens of hours or a few days at most — but nothing that qualifies as the “durable pause in the fighting” I had in mind.
Instead, we have diplomacy without peace. The Trump administration is pushing a plan that would freeze the front lines and lift some sanctions; Russian and American officials are shuttling between European capitals and Miami hotel conference rooms; and Ukraine, Europe, and the US have reportedly agreed on most of a peace framework. The sticking point is exactly what you’d expect: territory and legitimacy. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy still refuses to recognize Russia’s land grab in the east and south, while Putin insists that any ceasefire ratify his conquests.
In retrospect, I overweighted “war-weariness” and underweighted how much the key actors care about not losing. I implicitly assumed a Korean War-style ending: a bloody stalemate capped by an ugly armistice. What we actually got was the stalemate without the armistice, and one that is set to continue into the new year. —BW
This was the prediction where I tried to be precise about definitions. I wrote that “getting nuclear weapons” didn’t mean a test or a declared arsenal, but Iran producing enough fissile material to fuel at least one bomb. Building and deploying an actual warhead, I argued, could take months or years beyond that. So instead, I staked this prediction on a key nuclear benchmark: Iran enriching uranium to weapons-grade (~90% U-235) in sufficient quantity for at least one device.
Not long after I made the prediction, Iran was already enriching uranium to 60 percent at its Natanz and Fordow facilities, and outside experts thought its “breakout time” — how long it would take to produce weapons-grade uranium for one device — was down to perhaps a week.
In 2025, the enrichment problem got dramatically worse. A February International Atomic Energy Agency report found that Iran’s stockpile of 60 percent-enriched uranium had jumped to about 275 kilograms, up roughly 50 percent from late 2024. By May, the agency was estimating some 408.6 kilograms of 60-percent material — and a June update put the figure at around 440.9 kilograms, which its own yardstick says is enough, if further enriched, for roughly nine or 10 simple fission weapons. Then came a 12-day US-Israeli air and covert campaign that killed senior Iranian nuclear scientists and wrecked parts of the program, but even Israeli and US officials concede it did not eliminate Iran’s ability to rebuild.
While all highly enriched uranium — anything above about 20 percent enriched — is in principle weapon-usable, watchdogs note that Iran has not been publicly observed enriching to the classic weapons-grade threshold of 90 percent, nor is there evidence of an actual tested device.
So did Iran “get nuclear weapons” in 2025? The answer remains no, although it comes with the additional confounding factor that, with international inspections suspended, the true state of Iran’s nuclear program may be murkier than ever. Which is why you can expect this question to continue to haunt international politics in 2026 and beyond. —BW
I’ve been covering the H5N1 bird flu virus since the spring of 2003 in Hong Kong, when there was some suspicion that the unknown illness spreading in southern China at the time might be bird flu finally transmitting human to human. It wasn’t — it was something entirely new called SARS-CoV-1, though back in those pre-Covid days we didn’t have the “1.”
Every January since, I’ve been wondering if this is the year we finally get our dreaded bird flu pandemic. And every year, including 2025, it hasn’t been.
Instead, we got a year that underlined the basic tension of H5N1: It keeps looking terrifying on paper, while acting more like a slow-burn animal disaster than a human pandemic. H5 bird flu is now entrenched in wild birds, poultry, and US dairy cattle. The US experienced its first US H5N1 death early in the year and nearly 70 US infections since April 2024, mostly among workers around infected herds and flocks.
On the animal side, the picture is much worse. A major Nature perspective described a true H5N1 “panzootic” across bird and mammal species, including mink, marine mammals, and cattle, with clear evidence of mammal-to-mammal spread in some settings and worrying adaptive mutations. What we’re seeing adds up to an unprecedented number of mammalian infections, severe neurological disease in animals, and growing uncertainty about how close this virus is to efficient human transmission.
There is some good news on preparedness. Health agencies still classify the overall public health risk from current H5 viruses as low, and vaccine work is accelerating. In December, Moderna and CEPI announced funding for a late-stage trial of an mRNA bird flu vaccine.
So, once again, no H5N1 bird flu pandemic in humans. After 22 years of covering this virus I’m tempted to just say that pandemic will never happen, but I’m not quite that foolhardy. When it comes to H5N1, we’ve been more lucky than we’ve been good. —BW
There is a lot of hype and boosterism in the world of AI. The firm Anthropic has publicly predicted they’ll get to artificial intelligence systems “matching or exceeding that of Nobel Prize winners across most disciplines” by 2027. Elon Musk, meanwhile, has tweeted, “My estimate of the probability of Grok 5 [his firm xAI’s next model] achieving AGI is now 10 percent and rising.”
But Grok 5 isn’t out yet, and it’s 2025, not 2027. I made a very long list of Western companies that could even theoretically be in the running to build AGI (including, like, Netflix, which is not trying to do this at all). Foolishly, I didn’t include Chinese firms, failing to anticipate the “DeepSeek shock” at the start of 2025.
In any case, nobody claimed AGI this past year, whether in the US or China. I’d be surprised if anyone does in 2026, either. Then again, AI as a field is always able to surprise me. —DM
So, I was right here, but I may be wrong in spirit. Electric cars made up 10.5 percent of new car sales in the third quarter of 2025 — but that was probably only because people who wanted an EV anyway were rushing to buy one before the federal government’s $7,500 tax credits for new EVs, which were killed by Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill expired at the end of September. US electric car sales are expected to dip significantly as a result.
Beyond ending that subsidy, which was critical for EV adoption, the Trump administration is trying to go after every other pillar that makes electric cars viable. They’ve proposed significantly weakening Biden-era fuel economy rules and hamstrung the buildout of EV charging stations. Oh, and half the country hates Elon Musk now, so Tesla sales, which once made up the overwhelming majority of the US electric car market, have taken a big hit. Americans also just seem wary of electric cars because of vague cultural vibes and societal malaise. The US is way behind the rest of the world in EV adoption — a lag that Trump seems determined to turn into a permanent technological deficit. —MB
Funny enough, as a bit of a bitcoin skeptic, I bought into the bitcoin hype — only to be disappointed. I thought for certain after crypto bros helped put Trump into office, he’d reward the best-known cryptocurrency around with astronomical growth. When Trump was sworn in, bitcoin was already hovering near its all-time high value, a little over $100,000. The sky was the limit.
But then, uh, Trump happened. Rather than building on the record 2024 gains that made me so optimistic, bitcoin endured a turbulent year. Uncertainty around Trump’s tariffs, the AI boom and its own unpredictable economic impact, and other economic variables (interest rates) sent the bitcoin price plummeting, then soaring, and back again. Bitcoin did reach a new record high briefly back in October, at more than $125,000, but it fell far short of my projection — and as of this writing on December 29, it’s back well below where it was at Trump’s inauguration. Whoops. —Dylan Scott
The Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index has seen some fascinating shifts over the past year. There are now 18 billionaires worth at least $100 billion each, including three members of the Walton family. Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google each added about $100 billion to their tally as Alphabet stock rallied. But the same guy remained at the top, buoyed by the persistently high price of Tesla stock: Elon Musk. As of December 29, he’s worth $638 billion, or more than twice Page, who’s currently in second with $270 billion.
But you know what’s cooler than half a trillion dollars? A trillion dollars, which Musk got Tesla stockholders to agree to pay him if the firm hits key targets over the next 10 years. I guess one of these years we’ll have to add a “the world gets a trillionaire” prediction. —DM
After last year’s brouhaha with Lykos Therapeutics — the organization that tried (and failed) getting MDMA-assisted therapy approved by the FDA — we didn’t have the highest confidence here. In order to have an application ready for review, you need Phase 3 trials. And those take years to accomplish — and neither Compass Pathways nor the Usona Institute, the two companies mayhaps the furthest along in psilocybin depression treatment, submitted.
But! Oshan Jarow’s initial prediction also accounted for the possibility of the FDA using emergency use authorization to temporarily reschedule certain psychedelics. That didn’t happen either. Fingers crossed for 2027? —Izzie Ramirez
If this were a normal year, the new dietary guidelines that will shape the next five years of food policy would have already been released. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had even promised to release them ahead of schedule, well before August, and with everything we need to know to guide nutritional choices condensed into just four pages!
Of course, that didn’t happen, and the new guidelines have now been delayed until January. It turns out that nutrition science is actually quite complicated and can’t just be reduced to aphorisms like, as Kennedy puts it, “eat whole foods.”
My prediction had totally underestimated how incompetent and unmoored from expert consensus the second Trump administration would turn out to be. Once the guidelines come out, I now do expect that they’ll probably make confusing and misleading claims about so-called ultra-processed foods, along with other bad advice, which I thought unlikely a year ago. And, lesson learned, I’m going to avoid making predictions that rely on the timely release of federal government information for the foreseeable future. —MB
Sometimes you can be “right,” and yet still miss the mark. I really underestimated how dramatically antibiotic sales for use in livestock production would increase in 2024. I predicted, with a timid 55 percent probability, that sales would increase by at least 0.5 percent. But in 2024, they shot up by an astonishing 15.8 percent.
That should worry you because antibiotics use in livestock production is a pressing public health problem. Here’s why, from my prediction last year:
Most of the antibiotics used in human medicine are actually sold to meat companies, which put them in animals’ feed to make them grow faster and prevent disease outbreaks in factory farms. But some bacteria on farms are becoming resistant to these antibiotics, giving way to new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that make the drugs less effective in treating humans.
For years, US meat companies and trade groups — along with the US Food and Drug Administration — pledged to be better “stewards” of these precious drugs, namely by reducing their use. It appears that it was mostly hot air. There were steep declines of antibiotic use in the mid-2010s, thanks to FDA rules, but sales have since stabilized and are now increasing. The vibes are shifting on antibiotics in meat production, and that’s bad news for the future of these lifesaving medicines. —Kenny Torrella
This current bird flu outbreak has been dragging on for nearly four years, and 2025 was one of the worst yet, with nearly 54 million birds culled as of December 12.
The virus hit egg farms particularly hard in late 2024 and early 2025, resulting in egg shortages and massive price spikes. Some grocery stores even restricted the number of cartons each customer could purchase.
The egg industry, which has been damaged the most by the bird flu, is ready to start vaccinating its birds. But the US Department of Agriculture won’t let it, for fear it’ll severely disrupt the trade of chicken meat — an entirely different sector of the animal agriculture sector. It’s a long and complicated story, which I went into detail on a couple of months ago; check out the story here.
I have little hope common sense will prevail in 2026, so we’re likely in for another bad year of dead birds, higher food prices, and unused vaccines. —KT
I should, if anything, have predicted this with higher probability. The only somewhat surprising part is that Congress still hasn’t passed a new Farm Bill to replace the one that expired more than two years ago, which is really behind schedule even by today’s chronically late legislative standards. (The coalition that made the last century of farm bills possible is breaking down, as Republicans demand steep cuts to SNAP and an end to “climate-smart” provisions in ag funding.)
In theory, that still gives them the chance to kill Prop 12 in the Farm Bill that eventually passes, but the longer that the animal welfare law remains in place, the less likely the pork industry is to continue campaigning against it, and the less likely it is to be nullified — and thank God for that. —MB
This is another case of being technically right while far underestimating reality. I predicted at least one state would ban the production and sale of lab-grown, or cell-cultivated, meat in 2025, but three to five did, depending on how you look at it: Mississippi, Montana, and Nebraska passed indefinite bans, while Texas and Indiana passed two-year bans.
Prior to 2025, only Florida and Alabama had banned it.
The movement is primarily driven by Republican state lawmakers, including some who are ranchers and farmers themselves, which represents a form of “government protectionism” for the meat industry, according to one Nebraska cattle rancher who opposed the bans (so too did several state-level Nebraska farm groups, along with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association).
In the short term, the bans have little impact, as no cell-cultivated meat company has scaled up their production enough to sell large amounts of the product. Several companies now have government approval to do so, but Wildtype — the San Francisco-based startup that makes cell-cultivated salmon — is the only one that’s managed to get into numerous restaurants; two in California, one in Oregon, and one in Washington state, which are unlikely to pass bans. If you have the chance to try them, I recommend it — I did a few years ago and thought it was delicious. —KT
Okay, technically, Emmanuel Clase, the Cleveland Guardians star closer and three-time All-Star, is on “nondisciplinary paid leave” but for the purposes of this prediction, we’re going to call it suspension by another name. Clase and his teammate Luis Ortiz were arrested in November on charges of illegally conspiring in a scheme to rig their pitches in order to pay out prop bets made by their associates. You can now find all kinds of videos detailing how Clase would throw his first pitch in the dirt after entering a game; as it turns out, his co-conspirators were allegedly betting that first pitch would be a ball.
However, based on the rules of our prediction contest, since I put less than 30 percent probability, this technically comes up “wrong.” But I was onto something. Legal gambling continues to creep into every facet of professional sports, with the happy collaboration of the leagues, and the scandals have followed. Clase wasn’t alone this year: Former NBA All-Star, current Portland head coach, and once-presumed future Hall of Famer Chauncey Billups was implicated in a separate sports betting scandal this year. Unless something changes, I suspect neither of them will be the last. —DS
Sigh. Okay, so in any ordinary year, I would have put Verstappen, the four-time champion driver for Red Bull, at an 80 percent likelihood of winning. He’s a menace. Can drive from the back of the grid all the way to first. But things were rocky at Red Bull, from second driver woes to full-on company culture shifts. The 2025 Red Bull car was — and this is as nicely as I’ll put it — underperformed. All the while, McLaren’s Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri were gaining points weekend after weekend.
For most of the year, I was thinking about this prediction. Was I too generous? He wasn’t a contender for the first half of the season. But it’s Verstappen we’re talking about — he made a legendary 104-point comeback, essentially unheard of in F1. Then the last few races were total nail-biters, with the three drivers so close to each other in points. I was even thinking about hiring an Etsy witch so I could say I was right for this silly little article.
Anyway, Verstappen ended up winning the season closer in Abu Dhabi, but Lando Norris took the championship title by 2 measly points. Yes, I’m upset about it. —IR
And…water is wet. Last year, I kept my prediction intentionally open, hence the high percentage confidence here. Out of the eight nominations she received, she won three Grammys: Best Dance Pop Recording for “Von Dutch,” Best Recording Package, and Best Electronic Dance/Electronic Album. While I hoped she would have won for Best Album, she’ll always be No. 1 to me. —IR
2025-12-31 00:15:00
2025年12月1日，密歇根州农村居民抗议计划在东南密歇根州农田上建设的70亿美元Stargate数据中心。一些民主党人士和评论员认为，美国民众普遍憎恨人工智能行业，因为它正在消耗水资源并推高电费，同时威胁就业。他们呼吁民主党坚定地、毫不保留地反对人工智能。然而，这种观点基于对民意的片面解读。实际上，美国公众对人工智能的态度更为复杂，既不完全反对也不完全支持。例如，有调查显示，40.1%的美国人对人工智能持乐观态度，而35.6%则持悲观态度。此外，79%的美国人认为拥有世界上最先进的AI技术对美国很重要，56%支持增加政府对人工智能研究的投入。因此，一个政党若要毫无保留地反对人工智能，同时又希望获得选民支持，似乎并不现实。目前，人工智能并不是普通美国人的首要关注问题。最近的民意调查显示，只有3%的选民将技术、AI或社交媒体列为2026年政府应优先处理的问题。同时，75%的选民表示他们对社区内新建的数据中心知之甚少。尽管如此，民主党仍可能明智地采取更对抗的态度，因为选民对AI技术感到担忧，并支持对其加强监管。如果未来数据中心过度投资引发金融危机，或者AI真的导致大规模失业，公众对人工智能的反对情绪可能会加剧。但目前，无论是民主党还是共和党，通过毫无保留地宣称“反AI”来大幅增加支持率的可能性仍不明确。
A widely despised industry is slurping up Americans’ water — and driving up their electricity bills — as part of a nefarious plot to take their jobs. Voters are begging for their political leaders to take a stand against these accursed corporations. Yet the Democratic Party can’t decide whose side it’s on.
Or so some Democratic operatives and commentators suggest.
This week, Politico published a report titled, “Americans hate AI. Which party will benefit?” In it, a diverse array of Democratic lawmakers and political professionals call on their party to be, in Politico’s words, “proudly, loudly, without reservations, anti-AI.”
Their case is simple: AI development is deeply unpopular. Voters are alarmed by the data center construction spree, fearing that it’s driving up energy costs and despoiling the environment. And they’re worried that AI is going to put them out of work.
The Trump administration is too wedded to the tech industry to speak to this anti-chatbot fervor, the operatives reason. Democrats therefore have an opportunity to claim ownership of a winning issue — one that unites a broad, populist coalition of both blue-collar and white-collar workers.
To effectively do so, however, it’s not enough to “minimally regulate” artificial intelligence while signaling a “a friendly stance toward tech companies building AI.” Rather, the party must define itself in opposition to the technology itself.
This may prove to be sound political advice. But it is nonetheless premised on a skewed reading of public opinion data. In reality, Americans’ feelings toward AI are more complicated than progressive consultants and pundits tend to suggest.
There is no question that US voters are anxious about AI in general and increasingly of the data center buildout in particular. To name a few recent poll results that illustrate this unease:
As one would expect in light of these figures, Americans support the general concept of more heavily regulating the AI industry:
All this said, Americans don’t seem to feel “hate” for AI, so much as unease and ambivalence about it.
In a recent poll from the Democratic data firm Blue Rose Research, 40.1 percent said they were “optimistic” about artificial intelligence compared to just 35.6 percent who said they were pessimistic (with the rest unsure).
A December survey from the left-leaning pollster Navigator produced similar results, with 49 percent of voters saying they had a favorable view of AI, while only 41 percent said they had an unfavorable one.
Meanwhile, in Gallup’s polling, 79 percent of Americans say that it is “important” for the United States to have the world’s most advanced AI technology, while 56 percent favored increasing government spending on artificial intelligence research. It is hard to see how a political party could be anti-AI “without reservations,” while still advancing these preferences.
In any case, for the moment, AI still isn’t a top concern for the typical American. This month, an Associated Press-Norc poll asked voters to name five problems they wanted the government to prioritize in 2026 — only 3 percent mentioned anything to do with technology, AI, or social media.
Likewise, in Navigator’s survey, only 7 percent of voters named AI as a top-five issue. Meanwhile, 75 percent of voters said they had heard “little” or “nothing” about new data centers being built in their communities.
Notably, some surveys cited by anti-AI populists are actually consistent with these findings. Politico’s piece referenced a Pew study showing that “only 17 percent of Americans think AI will have a positive impact on the US over the next 20 years.” The liberal commentator Josh Marshall cast this as evidence that “AI is running only slightly ahead of child molesters in the public imagination.”
Yet in Pew’s poll, only 35 percent said that AI would have a negative impact on the United States. In other words, two-thirds of the public said the technology would have either positive or neutral implications for American life. The share of voters who would say the same about child molesters is, presumably, quite a bit lower.
Democrats might still be wise to take a more adversarial posture toward AI. Voters are worried about the technology and support greater regulation of it. And they are increasingly sympathetic to the argument that data centers are driving up their electric bills.
Further, the public could plausibly become more opposed to artificial intelligence in the near future. If overinvestment in data centers triggers a financial crash — and/or, if AI actually generates mass unemployment — backlash to the technology would surely grow.
For the moment, however, it’s far from clear that either party can dramatically increase its popular support by declaring itself, unreservedly, “anti-AI.”