What we got right (and wrong) in 2025

From the economy to Trump, here's what team Future Perfect predicted.

View this email in your browser    👋  Did this email get forwarded to you? Sign up here to get Future Perfect in your inbox every Wednesday and Friday. Hey readers, Bryan Walsh here. 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. Our 2026 predictions will hit your inbox Friday morning. Celia Jacobs for Vox The World Health Organization (WHO) will declare H5N1 a pandemic in 2025 (25 percent) — CORRECT CALL   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. —Bryan Walsh   There will be a ceasefire in Ukraine (75 percent) — INCORRECT CALL   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 Donald 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   California's animal agriculture law Proposition 12 will not be overturned by Congress (65 percent) — CORRECT CALL   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. —Marina Bolotnikova, deputy editor   Read the rest of our revisited predictions here. Meet us on Patreon! The Vox Membership program is getting even better with access to Vox's Patreon, where members can unlock exclusive videos, livestreams, and chats with our newsroom. Become a Vox Member to get access to it all. JOIN VOX ON PATREON   ICYMI: Zohran Mamdani on his mayoral transition and what comes next. The New York mayor-elect sat down with Vox's Astead Herndon to talk about his top priorities. The year measles came back. Sigh... Want to donate to charity before the end of the year? Here's how to break free of "money dysmorphia" — and 3 other tips on generosity. THE BIG STORY ➠ We need to grow the economy. We need to stop torching the planet. Here's how we do both. Let's fix the two massive efficiency sinks in American life. With this story, I finally consummated a long-held dream to combine two of the things I care about most — factory farming and being mad about car dependence. As I see it, high levels of meat and dairy consumption in the US, plus our total dependence on cars, are like the two great resource black holes in American life. They give us things we need — food and transportation — but they do so extremely inefficiently relative to the alternatives, and we could go a long way toward fixing our planetary crises by simply being less reliant on them. Easier said than done, of course.  I was delighted to be able to write this for Vox's package on the case for growth because I think it's among the most straightforward cases to be made that we can decouple economic growth from humanity's footprint on our planet — including not just greenhouse gas emissions, but other vital measures, like how much of the Earth's surface is consumed by human activity rather than forests and wildlife.  Every choice we make in our economy is a tradeoff against something else, and I don't think extreme meat and car dependence are worth that trade: They aren't essential to our continued growth, they're wrecking the biosphere on which we all depend, and they squander the resources that could be used to make modern prosperity sustainable for everyone. This is admittedly a very hard case to make in America, but it deserves to be made nonetheless. Give it a read and let me know what you think! —Marina Bolotnikova, deputy editor READ THE STORY ⭐ ONE WAY TO DO GOOD THIS WEEK I've been thinking about finally taking the plunge. My friends and my partner have tried to talk me out of it — "you're always cold!" — but there's just something about the allure of the Coney Island Polar Bear Plunge on New Year's Day.  After all, it's for a good cause. Many plungers fundraise for local nonprofits, and some events raise up to millions of dollars each year. In fact, all of this got me thinking about where charity's obsession with cold plunges comes from and whether icy water demonstrably makes people more generous.  And to my astonishment, it actually does. A group of researchers found that people who placed their hands in very cold water for one minute — and in return, had their donation matched — opted to give nearly 25 percent more than those who abstained from the discomfort. And when asked to donate to a charity picnic (cute!) or a charity 5-mile race (torturous!), they gave three times as much to run.  Hilariously, this phenomenon is called the "martyrdom effect." We're simply more generous when we suffer for something — or at least put in a bit of effort. So when you think about your resolutions this year, think about how giving back could sweeten the deal. Sign up for that charity run. Donate some of the money you save from Dry January. Volunteer early in the morning for your local food bank.  Or, if you're feeling particularly brave tomorrow, then by all means, take the plunge! I may or may not see you there. —Sara Herschander, Future Perfect fellow 📲 Send us your questions! If there is a topic you want us to explain or a story you're curious to learn more about, fill out this form or email us at futureperfect@vox.com.   Want more Future Perfect in your inbox? Sign up for more newsletters here. Need advice? Submit a question to Sigal Samuels's advice column Your Mileage May Vary. Today's edition was edited and produced by Izzie Ramirez. We'll see you Friday! Enjoy the New Year! Access the web version of this newsletter here.   This email was sent to aymentanaze.news@blogger.com. Manage your email preferences or unsubscribe.   View our Privacy Notice and our Terms of Service.   Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Floor 12, Washington, DC 20036. Copyright © 2025. All rights reserved.