A public record of predictions made by well-known people: their exact words, when they said them, and how things turned out.
| Person | Category | Predictions | Scored | Accurate | Late | Partial | Wrong | Accuracy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Al Gore | Politician | 12 | 8 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 5 | 31% |
| Allan Lichtman | Academic | 10 | 8 | 6 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 81% |
| Bill Ackman | Investor | 9 | 6 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 50% |
| Bill McKibben | Commentator | 9 | 5 | 4 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 90% |
| Gary Marcus | AI researcher | 18 | 15 | 11 | 0 | 3 | 1 | 83% |
| Gordon Chang | Commentator | 10 | 6 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 42% |
| Ian Bremmer | Commentator | 11 | 11 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 82% |
| Jim Cramer | Commentator | 18 | 17 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 14 | 15% |
| John Mearsheimer | Academic | 11 | 9 | 7 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 78% |
| Nate Silver | Commentator | 11 | 7 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 57% |
| Nouriel Roubini | Economist | 25 | 20 | 6 | 0 | 2 | 12 | 35% |
| Paul Ehrlich | Scientist | 13 | 11 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 10 | 5% |
| Paul Krugman | Economist | 22 | 19 | 8 | 0 | 2 | 9 | 47% |
| Peter Schiff | Investor | 27 | 23 | 4 | 3 | 0 | 16 | 24% |
| Peter Zeihan | Commentator | 16 | 8 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 6 | 19% |
| Robert Kiyosaki | Commentator | 14 | 12 | 2 | 4 | 0 | 6 | 33% |
| Thomas Friedman | Commentator | 7 | 7 | 4 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 64% |
Accuracy counts accurate as 1, late or partial as ½, inaccurate as 0. Pending predictions don't count.
“U.S. Hard Landing and Recession Steaming Ahead: Now More Likely Than a 70% Probability”Economy
“If history is any guide, housing prices have got a long way to fall and the housing industry is going to go through a long drought.”EconomyMarketsBanking
“And what's going to happen is the American consumer is basically going to stop consuming and start rebuilding his savings, especially when he sees his home equity evaporate. And when you have the economy 70 percent consumption, you can't address those imbalances without a recess…”Economy
“I don't want to jinx her, but she's going to win overwhelmingly.”Elections
“Within less than 50 years, it will be here,”Climate
“Within 15 years this will be the park formerly known as Glacier”Climate
“Within the decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.”Climate
“Improv time is over. This is crunch time. Iraq will be won or lost in the next few months.”Geopolitics
“Based on the consequential events of the past four years, President Bush is the predicted winner of the popular vote for 2004, barring a shocking reversal of fortune at home and abroad.”Elections
“My prediction is that politicians will eventually be tempted to resolve the crisis the way irresponsible governments usually do: by printing money, both to pay current bills and to inflate away debt. And as that temptation becomes obvious, interest rates will soar.”EconomyMarketsPolitics
“Nor is the Northern Alliance likely to deliver victory.”Geopolitics
“The end of the modern Chinese state is near. The People's Republic has five years, perhaps ten, before it falls.”Politics
“Election 2000: The Keys Point to Gore.”Elections
“China's going to have a free press”Politics
“And we will keep doing so until this period is over – and it is very far from ending”MarketsTechnology
“The deal arranged by Richard Holbrooke is likely to fail sooner rather than later.”Geopolitics
“By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.”TechnologyEconomy
“All these factors combine to make it likely that other states will follow in India's footsteps.”Geopolitics
“That is, I predict (OK, guess) that there will be an extended workout, in which countries will be obliged to keep negotiating with their creditors for delays in repayment, but that the situation will gradually improve. I don't think Asia is headed for a Latin-America-in-the-80s …”EconomyBanking
“So standard economic analysis suggests that we cannot look forward to growth at a rate of much more than 2 percent over the next few years.”Economy
“barring a catastrophic political upheaval, it is likely that growth in East Asia will continue to outpace growth in the West for the next decade and beyond. But it will not do so at the pace of recent years.”EconomyGeopolitics
“Ukraine is likely to keep its nuclear weapons, regardless of what other states say and do.”Geopolitics
“since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”Climate
“before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity”Economy
“By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”PoliticsEconomy
“The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”Health
“air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”Health
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make”HealthEconomy
“Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come”ClimateHealth
“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born”Health