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.”
2025-12-30 20:00:00
参议员乔什·霍利（R-MO）、他的妻子艾琳·莫罗·霍利和女儿艾比盖尔·霍利于2025年1月3日在美国华盛顿与副总统卡玛拉·哈里斯会面。| 阿列克斯·旺/Getty Images
关键要点：
过去几个月，共和党立法者和保守派思想家提出了多项法案和建议，旨在帮助更多父母留在家中照顾孩子。但正如Vox记者安娜·诺斯所指出的，这些措施不太可能促使大量母亲从办公室辞职，转而进入厨房。
当诺斯询问婴儿奖金或更大的儿童税收抵免是否能说服女性放弃多年来的带薪工作时，诺贝尔经济学奖得主克劳迪娅·戈尔丁冷淡地回答：“我们是不是要给他们一百万美元？”尽管如此，保守派仍不应放弃这一梦想。如果他们希望更多父母留在家中，最有效的方式可能是集中资源，向低收入父母提供支持。
我的家庭相关报道多次指出，低收入父母，尤其是受教育程度较低的母亲，她们可能更愿意减少工作时间以照顾孩子，如果有机会的话，而且一点点投资就能带来很大改变。这种投资可以帮助缓解婴儿照护短缺，促进儿童发展，并创造更家庭友好的工作环境和更活跃的社区。
我们对贫困母亲工作的固有偏见： 当然，这个想法有一个明显的障碍：历史上，美国立法者最希望看到的是贫困父母，尤其是少数族裔的单亲母亲，能够外出工作。前美国法律与社会政策中心（CLASP）成员、家庭政策专家伊丽莎白·洛瓦-巴施（Elizabeth Lower-Basch）表示：“有很多人表面上支持母亲应该在家照顾孩子，但似乎并不认为这适用于收入极低的家庭。”
现金援助政策曾主要面向白人寡妇和被遗弃的母亲，而工作人员常常歧视非裔和其他少数族裔的母亲，认为她们应该工作，而白人母亲则不应该。在民权运动之后，福利政策扩展至所有需要的家庭，但立法者迅速对寻求经济援助的父母施加了严格的就业要求和时间限制。
即使是在以进步著称的城市如纽约，母亲们通常被鼓励尽快找到第一份工作，无论通勤时间多长、工作时间多晚或薪资多低。虽然克林顿时期的改革成功地迫使新妈妈们进入职场，但她们的婴儿和幼儿却因此受到负面影响。一项研究发现，被强制返回工作的母亲们在情感支持方面对年幼子女的影响显著且负面。另一项研究则发现，福利资格母亲的工作导致孩子与父母共处的高质量时间减少，这些孩子更少被阅读，行为问题也更多。
亚利桑那大学的经济学家克里斯·赫尔布斯特（Chris Herbst）告诉我，问题不在于母亲们工作本身，大多数研究表明，女性的工作对幼儿的发展没有影响。赫尔布斯特认为，福利改革研究的发现源于三个因素：
（母亲们通常被鼓励使用他们能获得的任何育儿安排，而赫尔布斯特之前的研究则发现，补贴的育儿服务与幼儿园阶段儿童较低的认知成绩和更多行为问题有关，尽管这些影响在一年后大多减弱。）
最隐秘的遗产是意识形态上的： 福利改革的最隐秘遗产是意识形态上的。规则允许母亲通过照顾他人孩子来满足就业要求，但不允许她照顾自己的孩子。这将父母责任仅定义为经济支持，认为育儿本身不是劳动，历史学家兼《育儿工资：一场运动、一个理念、一个承诺》一书的作者艾米丽·卡拉奇（Emily Callaci）表示。
卡拉奇在谈到新出现的保守派思想家挑战这一传统时，语气时而怀疑，时而谨慎乐观。他们认为育儿本身对整个经济至关重要，有些甚至开玩笑地称自己的孩子为“未来的纳税人”。
尽管有些保守派希望利用这一观点来削弱女性在职场上取得的诸多进步，但另一些人则真正希望奖励和认可无偿育儿。他们理解高质量育儿服务的高昂成本，以及低质量育儿服务的危害，也意识到婴儿出生后的最初几个月是儿童发展最脆弱的阶段，许多希望留在家中照顾孩子的父母却无力承担。
一点投资可能带来巨大回报： 如果保守派将重点放在低收入父母身上，可能会带来巨大回报。贫困母亲，尤其是受教育程度较低的母亲，她们的工作可能更具有剥削性而非赋权性，因此更有可能在获得额外资金后减少工作时间以照顾婴儿。帮助低收入父母减少工作时间，包括单亲母亲，可以缓解婴儿照护短缺，尤其是在贫困社区中更为严重。
这也可以让母亲们等待适合她们家庭的工作和育儿服务。洛瓦-巴施告诉我，这正是那些取消新父母就业要求的州中父母的行为。“这并不意味着这些父母一年内不会重返职场，但允许他们等待一个更符合新生儿父母身份的工作。”她说。
反过来，这可能会促使雇主为了吸引员工而创造更家庭友好的工作环境。同时，贫困社区可能因有更多父母而受益，例如在孩子们上学途中提供更多的看护。
例如，伊利诺伊州的家长领袖温迪·马莫拉（Wendy Mamola）在生了双胞胎后，暂停了餐厅工作，开始在她较大的孩子学校做志愿者，并加入了一个家庭倡导组织。这让她“不仅能够照顾自己的孩子，还能为所有孩子的未来发声。”
尽管这听起来对美国人来说可能很激进，但为所有收入阶层的父母在孩子出生后的几个月内提供一定的经济支持，其实已有先例。大多数发达国家都提供育儿津贴和带薪育儿假。一些政策对单亲家庭给予更多资金或时间，还有一些规定了父母在暂停工作照顾婴儿时的最低收入保障。
然而在美国，获得育儿津贴通常只适用于收入较高、有带薪育儿假工作的父母。虽然一些州已经推出了带薪育儿假计划，但这些计划对贫困家庭往往效果不佳。例如，在加州，新父母在育儿假期间获得的工资替代金额不足以让许多低收入父母暂停工作照顾新生儿。洛瓦-巴施在电子邮件中表示，这意味着这些家庭虽然参与了该计划，却无法真正使用它。（加州后来提高了育儿假期间的津贴金额。）
一些专门为贫困家庭设计的创新计划未能获得广泛支持。在福利改革初期，蒙大拿州和明尼苏达州曾尝试向符合条件的母亲支付留在家中的工资，金额大致相当于原本用于补贴育儿服务的费用。然而，这些计划在最初几年内服务了数百个家庭，但都没有找到稳定的资金来源。
自那时以来，民主党人和共和党人都曾提出针对低收入父母的类似计划，但大多因政策制定者难以将其归类而未能取得进展。Niskanen中心的社会政策主任乔舒亚·麦卡贝（Joshua McCabe）在电子邮件中表示：“这既不是育儿服务，也不是带薪育儿假，也不是福利，因此没有像其他政策那样有强有力的支持者。”
这样的计划如何运作？ 那么，什么样的计划才能获得支持？大多数专家建议提供一个既不鼓励也不阻止父母外出工作的计划，而是让他们有选择的自由。许多专家建议，应将全国性的带薪育儿假计划与无附加条件的现金补贴相结合，类似于其他国家为育儿提供的一般性补贴。
（尽管共和党立法者提出了各种形式的现金援助，但他们对全国性的带薪育儿假计划并不那么热衷。）
这类现金援助计划让父母能够自由使用资金，非常有效地减少了儿童贫困。由于低收入父母为了同样的收入需要工作更多小时，因此可以合理地假设，向所有家庭提供额外资金将使一些父母能够选择留在家中。研究支持这一观点；在疫情期间，儿童税收抵免暂时扩大，为有年幼孩子的父母每月提供约300美元，结果发现，未婚且受教育程度较低的母亲最有可能利用这笔额外资金，选择留在家中照顾孩子。
因此，永久提高儿童税收抵免金额，可能让更多的低收入员工减少工作时间以照顾孩子。此外，已为低收入和中等收入工人设立的更慷慨的收入税抵免政策，也可以重新设计，以包括在家育儿的父母，一些民主党政客已经提出了这一建议。
但无论金额多少，现金援助必须以一种不被视为施舍的方式提供，而是作为对父母贡献的补偿，使父母能够以更有力量的状态进入职场。卡拉奇告诉我：“这应该是一种补偿，让父母能够‘以更有力量的状态’进入职场。”
赫尔布斯特补充说，目标必须始终是赋予父母对一系列关键决策的控制权：“是否工作、何时开始工作、是否选择育儿服务、选择哪种育儿服务以及如何支付这些费用。”
多年来，立法者对低收入家庭采取了大量家长主义的态度，而高收入家庭则获得了更多的选择权。赫尔布斯特表示，这种双重标准“对政策制定和对社会都不利。”
马莫拉也同意这一观点。她谈到自己在儿子出生仅三周时就重返餐厅工作，夜班结束后还要把他叫醒喂奶。几年后，当她生了双胞胎时，他们家的房贷已经还清，让她和伴侣能够暂停工作。她的伴侣在她产后抑郁期间给予了她支持，她得以完全母乳喂养，这正是她一直以来的愿望，也能为婴儿提供“皮肤接触”等基本需求，而这些是育儿工作者“法律上无法提供的”。
她说：“这真是美妙，美丽。”她认为所有父母都应该拥有这样的选择。
• Conservative policymakers say they want more parents to stay home with their children, but it’s not clear that approaches like baby bonuses or bigger child tax will work.
• One possibility is to pay lower-income parents to stay home, potentially by pairing a national paid parental leave program with no-strings-attached cash allowance for new parents. Such a policy would also help to address infant care shortages.
• The focus of any plan to pay parents to stay home should be on providing a choice, not incentivizing one option or the other.
MAGA thinks the country needs more stay-at-home parents, especially mothers. The goal isn’t just to boost plummeting birth rates, but to help children and families with policies that are more family-focused than work-focused. “It’s not just about increasing the total number of children,” Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri told the New York Times. “It is increasing the number of families, mothers and fathers, and the ability of the family to spend time together.”
Over the past several months, Republican lawmakers and conservative thinkers have offered a number of bills and ideas to help more parents stay home with kids. But as Vox journalist Anna North noted, none are likely to trigger a stampede of moms from cubicles to kitchens. When North asked whether baby bonuses or heftier child tax credits could persuade women to give up the benefits gained through decades of paid work, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin deadpanned: “Are we giving them a million dollars?”
Still, conservatives need not give up the dream. If they want more parents at home, the most effective way may be to focus their efforts and pay on low-wage parents.
My reporting on families has pointed repeatedly to this group of parents as one especially willing to reduce paid work to spend more time with their children, if given the chance, and for whom a little investment could go a long way. Such investment could help address the child care shortage, bolster child development, and create more family-friendly workplaces and more vibrant neighborhoods.
Of course, there is one very obvious hurdle to this idea: historically, poor parents — and especially single mothers of color — are the group that US lawmakers have been most eager to see working for pay.
“There are a lot of folks who pay lip service to believing moms should be home with their kids, but don’t seem to think that applies to people with very low income,” said Elizabeth Lower-Basch, formerly of the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) and an expert on public benefits.
Take cash assistance for low-income parents. For decades, the so-called mothers’ pensions were available primarily to white widowed and abandoned moms. Caseworkers routinely discriminated against Black and other nonwhite mothers, often presuming they should work while the white moms shouldn’t. After the civil rights movement made welfare available to all parents who needed it, lawmakers quickly imposed stringent work requirements and time limits on parents seeking financial help. Even in proudly progressive cities like New York, mothers were routinely pushed to take the first job they found, regardless of how long the commute, how late the hours, or how low the pay.
While the Clinton-era reform succeeded in forcing new moms into paid work, their babies and toddlers suffered. In one study, mothers who were pushed into work showed “significant and substantial negative effects on… provision of emotional support” toward their young children when compared to similar mothers in states that had not yet implemented the reform. Another study found that, among young children of welfare-eligible mothers, a mother’s employment led to the child spending less quality time with parents. Children of these working moms were also less likely to be read to, and had more behavioral issues, such as needing constant attention or struggling to fall asleep, as reported by their mothers.
Chris Herbst — an economist at the University of Arizona who conducted the second study — told me that the problem wasn’t that the mothers worked. Most research shows that women’s work has no impact on young children’s child development, he said.
Herbst attributes the welfare studies’ findings to three factors:
But perhaps the most insidious legacy of welfare reform was ideological. The rules allowed a mother to meet her work requirements by caring for other people’s children for pay, but not for caring for her own. It defined parental responsibility solely in terms of financial support, presuming that parenting itself is not labor, Emily Callaci, historian and author of Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise, said.
Callaci sounded alternately skeptical and cautiously optimistic when we spoke about the new conservative-leaning thinkers who are challenging this legacy by arguing that parenting itself is crucial to the entire economy — some referring jokingly to their own kids as “future taxpayers.”
While there are certainly some conservatives who hope to leverage this framing to undo the myriad advances women have made in the workplace, others seem genuinely interested in rewarding and recognizing unpaid caretaking. They understand that high-quality child care is expensive, that low-quality child care can harm, and that the first year of life is a singularly fragile developmental window when many parents who would like to stay home with their children cannot afford to.
Were conservatives to focus their efforts on low-earning parents, it could pay off big.
Poor mothers — and especially those with minimal education, for whom work may be more exploitative than empowering — may be the parents most likely to reduce hours to care for a baby if given more money. And helping low-income parents work less, including single mothers, could alleviate the shortage of infant care, which is especially pronounced in poorer neighborhoods. This could also allow mothers to wait for jobs — and child care — with the hours, location, and set-up that works for their families.
Lower-Basch told me that this is exactly what parents do in states that waive work requirements for new parents. “It’s not necessarily that the parents don’t go back to work within the year, but it lets them hold out for a job that fits better with being the parent of a newborn,” she said.
That, in turn, could prompt employers to compete for workers by creating more family-friendly work environments. Under-resourced neighborhoods, meanwhile, might benefit from having more parents to, say, keep an eye on children as they make their way to and from the school. For example, Wendy Mamola, a parent leader at Raising Illinois and mother of four, began volunteering in her older children’s school and at a family advocacy organization after taking time away from restaurant work following the birth of her twins. This allowed her “to not only be there for [her own kids], but to advocate for everybody’s babies.”
Radical as this might sound to Americans, giving parents of all incomes this kind of breathing room during their children’s first few months has plenty of precedent. Most developed countries offer child allowances along with paid parental leave to care for new family members. Some policies allot more money or time off for single parents, and have floors for how little a parent can get paid when pausing work to care for a baby.
But in the United States, receiving money to stay home with a baby is an option typically available only for wealthier parents with jobs that offer paid parental leave. And while a handful of states do offer paid parental leave programs, they often haven’t worked well for poor families. In California, for instance, the wage replacement given to new parents taking leave was not enough for many low-earning parents to take time off to care for their newborns. This meant these families paid into the program, but then couldn’t afford to use it, said Lower-Bash in an email. (California has since upped the amount it gives parents on leave.)
A handful of innovative programs designed specifically for poor families have failed to gain traction. In the early days of welfare reform, Montana and Minnesota experimented with paying welfare-eligible mothers to stay home — disbursing to parents about the same amount that would have otherwise gone towards subsidizing their child care.
In its first few years, Minnesota’s program served hundreds of families, but neither of the programs ever found reliable funding. Similar programs for low-income parents have been proposed by both Democrats and Republicans in the years since, but have also faltered in large part because policymakers have trouble categorizing them, Joshua McCabe, director of social policy at the Niskanen Center, said in an email. “It’s not quite childcare, not quite paid parental leave, and not quite welfare so doesn’t have a strong set of champions relative to the more established groups pushing for these other policies.”
So what kind of program would rally support?
Most experts I spoke with recommend offering parents a program that neither incentivizes nor discourages working out of the home, but lets parents choose.
Many suggested that a national paid parental leave program — with a floor specifying a minimum amount that parents be paid — should be coupled with a no-string-attached cash allowance for new parents, similar to what other countries offer for raising children generally. (While Republican lawmakers have suggested forms of cash assistance, they have not shown the same enthusiasm for a national paid leave program.) Such cash assistance programs offer parents the flexibility to use funds as they see fit and are very effective at reducing child poverty. Because low-wage parents must work more hours for the same pay as higher-wage workers, it’s reasonable to assume that extra cash given to all families would enable some parents to spend more time home. Research supports this; when the child tax credit was temporarily expanded during the pandemic to give parents with young children about $300 a month, unmarried mothers with young children and low levels of education were the ones most likely to use the extra cash to spend more time at home.
A permanent increase to the child tax credit, then, could allow more low-wage employees to work less in order to take care of their children. The more generous earned-income tax credit, which is already earmarked for low- and middle-income workers, could also be reworked to include at-home caretakers, including parents, as a few Democratic politicians have proposed.
But to give low-wage parents with newborns more choices, tax credits of any kind must be made fully-refundable so that families with no income, or very low incomes, can receive them, instead of only those who owe taxes. In addition, they need to be made available to families as soon as a baby arrives, so that parents need not wait out the tax year for the money. Otherwise, the funds have less benefit for families without savings to draw from. And any cash assistance program must be generous to single parents, a group that Republican proposals often neglect, and sometimes penalize.
The verdict is still out on exactly how much cash it will take for low-income parents to have the choice to work less. Baby’s First Years, a cash allowance pilot that gave new, low-income mothers about $300 a month, did not impact parents’ employment generally. But it did reduce the time mothers spent working for pay during the peak of the pandemic — a time when parents also received additional funds from the expanded child tax credit.
On the other hand, one study in New Hampshire linked “generous” increases in cash benefits for low-income single- parent families — where a parent with one child received more than $800 a month — to families not only having more food in the fridge, but parents working less. All of this suggests that $300 a month is not enough for a single parent with a new baby to spend more time home, but $800 could be. Families with more children at home would likely need more, while low-income families with two parents might choose to reduce paid work with less generous cash assistance.
Whatever the payment amount, money must be offered not as a handout, but as compensation recognizing parents’ contributions, allowing parents “to enter the workplace in a more empowered position,” Callaci told me.
Herbst, the economist, added that the goal must stay focused on giving parents “power over a bunch of critical decisions: whether to or not to work, when to start working, whether to choose child care, and what kind of child care, and how to pay for it.” For decades, lawmakers have treated low-income families with “a lot of paternalism, whereas high-income families are the ones who get all the choices,” Herbst said, adding that this duality “is not good for policy making, and not good for society.”
Mamola, the mom of four, agrees. She still chokes up talking about how she returned to restaurant work when her son was just three weeks old, waking him after night shifts to nurse and be close. Several years later, when she had twins, their home’s mortgage had been paid off, letting her and her partner take time off work. Her partner was there to support her through postpartum depression, and Mamola was able to breastfeed exclusively, as she’d always wanted, and provide “even just the basic things” like lots of skin-to-skin contact, which babies thrive on, but child care workers “legally cannot provide.” It was “wonderful,” she said, “beautiful.” It’s a choice she thinks all parents should have.
2025-12-30 20:00:00
Tracee Ellis Ross通过她的节目《Solo Traveling With Tracee Ellis Ross》挑战了关于“老处女”的刻板印象，展示了她精彩独立的生活方式。近年来，“去中心化男性”这一概念在TikTok上迅速流行，许多女性通过分享内容，鼓励其他女性不要将寻找伴侣作为优先事项，或提供如何在没有浪漫关系中生活的建议。此外，“离婚他”也成为了已婚女性在讨论关系问题时的常见建议。
这一趋势与韩国的“4B运动”有相似之处，该运动要求参与者远离与男性相关的四项活动（婚姻、约会、性、生育），以对抗父权制社会结构和苛刻的审美标准。该运动最初由美国的女性主义者在2017和2018年发起，正值韩国的#MeToo运动期间。与美国主流女性主义运动相比，它更具激进性。
尽管“去中心化男性”听起来像是对男性的批评，但其创造者Charlie Taylor表示，这并不意味着放弃浪漫关系或亲密接触，而是不再让男性成为生活的中心。随着现代约会变得越来越困难，尤其是对Z世代而言，单身生活逐渐被重新定义，变得更加积极和自由。TikTok上许多年轻女性公开表达自愿单身，不再担心被贴上“老处女”或“疯狂猫女”的标签。
社会科学家Bella DePaulo认为，单身生活带来了更多的实际好处，如财务自由和减少家庭责任。她指出，单身生活并不意味着生活更小或更不完整，反而可能更加丰富和心理上更有益。单身者可以自由地与各种人交往，而不必担心伴侣认为这些时间属于自己。
I can’t tell you the exact moment every other woman on my TikTok feed decided they were “decentering men,” but I’ve never heard the phrase uttered more than this past year.
The term was originally coined in 2019 by content creator and author Charlie Taylor in her book Decentering Men: How to Decenter Men, but it seems to have caught on in 2025.
The term has inspired a lot of content on TikTok — women posting videos encouraging their female followers to deprioritize finding a mate or giving tips on how they can thrive outside of romantic relationships. For a while now, the phrase “divorce him” has also become the go-to advice for married women discussing even the smallest relationship issues online.
So, it wasn’t a shock when a Vogue column titled “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” instantly blew up on TikTok in October. Chanté Joseph’s piece highlighted several influencers who were hesitant about posting their partners on social media, as having a boyfriend has been considered regressive, even “Republican” to some — sometimes, resulting in angry comments. We’re in a moment in which singlehood has never been more celebrated and heterosexual relationships have been deemed uncool — according to the internet, at least.
Elsewhere in pop culture, several famous women, like actresses Julia Fox and Charlize Theron, have been open about their experiences embracing singlehood. Ross, 53, has played a role in reversing reductive notions around the “spinster,” documenting her jetsetting lifestyle on the popular Roku series Solo Traveling With Tracee Ellis Ross and going viral for her thoughtful nuggets about single living. “Not having long relationships, not having children has allowed me to explore things of my own humanity,” Ellis said in one episode.
The “decentering men” trend has traces of South Korea’s 4B movement, which gained more exposure in the United States following Donald Trump’s reelection — and maybe, not a coincidence that the phrase has gained traction online this year. The Lysistrata-esque boycott requires that participants abstain from four social activities with men — marriage, dating, sex, and childbearing — to combat South Korea’s patriarchal social structure and oppressive beauty standards.
The niche but renowned protest was developed by feminist Twitter users in 2017 and 2018, around the time of South Korea’s #Me Too Movement. It’s notably more strict in its directives than anything the mainstream feminist movements in the US around that time suggested. One of the critiques of the US’s Me Too movement was that it didn’t have concrete political aims or agreed-upon methods to attain them. The fact that Google searches for “4B” spiked after the election exhibits a curiosity for a more radical and plain approach to achieving gender equality.
But “decentering men” also taps into other recent veins of criticism of so-called male-centered women and “pick me’s” — terms used to describe women whose entire existence is about attracting men.
It’s hard to view these anti-men sentiments as anything but a natural response to a tough dating landscape and a world increasingly influenced by misogynistic, far-right politicians and influencers. But, is it a bad thing to watch so many women descend into heterofatalism? Whatever one’s reasoning for “decentering men” might be, it’s striking that being a single adult woman is no longer a death sentence but an increasingly normalized lifestyle choice.
For example, a 2023 Pew Research Center study found that only 34 percent of single women in the US are actively seeking romantic relationships, compared to 54 percent of single men. The notion of “decentering men” has become a useful way to discuss this more pessimistic approach to dating.
But, according to the term’s creator, it isn’t as radical or anti-relationship as it may look on paper. In a blog post titled “Decentering Men: Why You Need To Let Go of Men,” Taylor encourages to let go of the “idea of men” as the ultimate prize but says this doesn’t mean “forgo[ing] romantic relationships, pleasure, or touch because those things are essential for the human experience.” While the phrase has seemingly given women permission to live a life free from men, it literally just means not making men the center of your universe.
Still, the idea of decentering men has provided some young women an exit ramp out of the dating world, which has proven to be particularly dire for Gen Z.
TikTok has essentially become a documentary about the horrors of heterosexual dating for young people. On any given scroll, you can find women recounting their awful dating experiences or sharing screenshots of their weird interactions on Hinge. It’s also become normal for users to expose people who they’ve caught cheating on the platform or expose men for talking to multiple women at the same time. There are also plenty of sentiments about Gen Z men and women sabotaging their own dating lives, with safety apps like Tea that are mostly used for gossip and arbitrary demands and red flags for potential partners.
The “decentering men” movement coincides with some studies that show some members of Gen Z simply have less romantic experience or desire to seriously date than previous generations.
Women are also opting against a relationship during a politically fraught time. For example, an NBC News poll in April found the partisan divide between men and women ages 18 to 29 to be wider than that of any other age range, with 53 percent of Gen Z women identifying as Democrats, compared to just 35 percent of Gen Z men. In addition to young men identifying as more conservative, they’re interacting with a digital landscape that’s pushing misogynistic content and has seen the mainstream rise of the “manosphere.”
As young women on TikTok proudly announce their voluntary singlehood, there doesn’t seem to be as much of a fear of being labeled an “old maid” or the “crazy cat lady” for not settling down with a man.
It’s a far cry from the days when Americans “feared for single women’s safety and psychological health when they chose to delay marriage or reject it altogether,” according to Albright College professor Katherine J. Lehman, who wrote the book Those Girls: Single Women in Sixties and Seventies Pop Culture.
“At least in post-World War II America, we have been taught to see the nuclear family as the primary social unit, and have encouraged women to prioritize marriage and motherhood for both their own well-being and societal stability,” Lehman says.
While some of this stigma has lessened over time, Lehman adds that “single women who pursue independence” are “still warned about losing their femininity or facing loneliness.”
For a lot of Gen Z, though, it seems like women have a collective understanding of finding a partner as a difficult and potentially humiliating pursuit.
Overall, this has allowed many young women to discover the more practical benefits of being a single person, including financial freedom and a lack of household responsibilities that can come with being partnered, says social scientist Bella DePaulo, author of the book Single at Heart. Most of all, there’s the endless possibilities of one’s time solely belonging to themselves.
“Contrary to stereotypes, single life, rather than being a smaller or lesser life, can be a more expansive and psychologically rich life,” she said. “Rather than putting a romantic partner at the center of your life and demoting everyone else, single people can spend as much time as they want with as many different people they want, without worrying that a romantic partner thinks that time belongs to them.”