Once again, readers prove smarter than the columnist when it comes to predicting the news. But there’s always next year!
I’m all about looking forward as a new year is about to dawn.
Really, now, would it do any good to review my predictions for 2019? To refresh your memory that, in early January, I predicted that Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza would be elected mayor of Chicago (she finished fifth in the primary), that the General Assembly would not legalize recreational pot or a Chicago casino (it did), and the leading Democratic presidential hopeful going into 2020 would be former Texas U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke (who suspended his pathetic campaign Nov. 1)?
Would it be in the least illuminating to note that, out of 37 questions in my annual predict-the-news online survey, the hive mind of readers got 23 right and I got just 14 right, giving readers a 6-to-4 advantage over me since 2010, which is as far back as my records go?
Or to point out that just 3% of readers correctly picked Lori Lightfoot to win the mayor’s race, while 80% of them joined me in predicting that President Donald Trump would pardon at least one person indicted or implicated in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation (he hasn’t done so … yet)?
Well, yes, I suppose it would. But only for the limited purpose of issuing the increasingly unnecessary reminder that the news is by and large unpredictable and the real reason to indulge in these sorts of exercises is to remind us to remain humble as we pause to contemplate the known unknowns that lie ahead.
A year from now we’ll know if Trump was reelected, thus cementing conservative control of the judiciary for generations. We will know if Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx survived the Jussie Smollett scandal and if voters approved Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s proposed constitutional amendment to allow the state to impose graduated income taxes.
We’ll have a far better idea of the scope and the targets of the federal investigation into political corruption in Illinois. We might even have a verdict or some other resolution in the case against Ald Ed. Burke, 14th, who was indicted by a federal grand jury on May 30 and is still awaiting trial.
We’ll know if Trump pardoned or commuted the sentence of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, as he frequently promises/ threatens to do, and we’ll know if the economy has entered the recession that economists have long been forecasting.
Closer to home for me, we’ll know if
Alden Global Capital acquired a controlling share of Tribune Publishing. The hedge fund now owns 33% of the company and is known for making deep cuts in the staffs of the newspapers it acquires.
What do you think’s going to happen? I’ve posted a link to more than 30 multiple-choice questions about the news of 2020 at chicagotribune.com/zorn, where you can register your guesses — “predictions” has come to sound a bit presumptuous under the circumstances — on everything from politics to sports.
I’ll compare your answers with mine in an upcoming column, and if the fates and hedge funds allow, we’ll reconvene here in a year to marvel at what we didn’t see coming.
Readers weigh in on decade to come
And what of the 2020s? A week ago in this space I hazarded a selection of guesses — fears and hopes — about life 10 years from now, and invited reader contributions. Here are a few:
■ Eleanor Hall: More and more states will permit doctor-assisted suicide.
■ John Francis: Former South Carolina Republican Gov. and United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley will become our first female president.
■ Mark Stang: As regulators continue to allow paralegals and other professionals to offer services now performed by attorneys “the number of lawyers in the U.S. will drop by at least 25% from the current number of 1.3 million to less than 1 million.”
■ Eileen Burke: The frequency of postal home delivery will drop to “a few times a week.”
■ Jens Zorn (my father): Implantable devices will “communicate nerve impulses from one person to another,” allowing for exact synchronization of movement that will have impact in the arts, sports and even law enforcement.
■ Mary Kay Buysse: As members of the leading edge of the baby boom generation hit their mid-80s the needs of this graying cohort will “put enormous pressure on all of our social, medical, financial and governmental systems. And we are not prepared for any of it, both as individuals and as a society.”
■ Jim Strickler: The National League will get the designated-hitter rule, and an amendment to the U.S. Constitution will limit Supreme Court justices to single 18year terms.
■ Terry McGoldrick: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will not stage an unprovoked attack on another nation but will remain in power. Kids in 2029 won’t even know what the words “cable TV” mean.
■ Steve Schade: New helmet technology will virtually eliminate concussions in all sports. Ink-on-paper reading will make a comeback. Congress will reinstate a ban on assault weapons. The U.S. will rejoin international climate and nuclear treaties.
■ Kathy Nellis wrote to disagree strongly with my prediction that medical science won’t make much progress on fighting the ravages of dementia-related illnesses, saying “continued funding and education about these diseases will certainly lead toward success in reaching this goal.”
■ With similar confidence, Charles Gradle wrote to counter my weary resignation about the continuation of mass shootings. “As these mass shootings continue, the majority of the American people will come to be fed up with nothing being done about them,” he wrote. “The voting public, especially with a Democratic president and Senate, will finally defeat the NRA.”
I hope Nellis and Gradle are right (and Schade and Strickler, too, for that matter).
And I hope I’m right with my additional forecast that Major League Baseball will begin using electronic umpires for balls, strikes and plays at first base, that the Division I College Football Playoff will expand to eight teams and that college athletes will at last be allowed to cash in on the value they bring to their institutions.
I also hope I’m right that 5G broadband networks and beyond will become pervasive and make our current 4G networks seem like dial-up connections in retrospect, that the increased availability of delicious imitation meat will dramatically reduce the environmental harms caused by raising animals for food and that our phone giants will figure out a way to kill robocalls once and for all.
And I hope I’m wrong with my additional forecast that we won’t get to 2030 without a major drone-enabled terrorist attack, that Chicago will have only one print newspaper at the dawn of the next decade and that certain social media sites will begin charging us — just a tiny bit at first — for maintaining the vast personal digital archives we have uploaded to them.
Re: Tweets
The winner of this week’s reader poll to select the funniest tweet was @JoshMalina with “My most boomer thing is my ardent desire to stick a comma into ‘Ok boomer.’ ”
You can find the newly minted top 40 tweets of 2019 at chicagotribune.com/zorn