The problem with asking what the biggest surprise will be, of course, is that it’s self-defeating: if I tell you what the biggest surprise will be, and I’m write, you won’t be surprised after all. So the short answer is “the biggest surprise will be something completely unexpected.”
I can tell you some things that will be surprises and shouldn’t be:
Anthropogenic Climate Change
We will continue to hear about how global climate change is happening, is important, is a crisis, and must be handled by massive government intervention, transferring money from rich countries to poor countries through the UN. We will also discover that many of these solutions will involve transforming low-margin commodities into high-margin high-tech products from companies owned by the politically connected.
Health Care
There will be no case whatsoever in which we will see a clear positive effect from the Affordable Care Act, but we will see an increasing number of explanations for why it’s not the fault of the law that none of the effects were good. This ought to be a surprise, because you’d think just by random chance something in a 2700 page bill would have to be useful.
Science
New exciting things will be discovered, in medicine, in physics, and in nanotechnology. For each one, there will be a learned op-ed explaining why this advance will lead to economic crisis, the collapse of civilization, the end of the world, or the destruction of the universe.
The New York Times…
…will authoritatively report that in fact Hillary Clinton has been retired for the last five years, and was never associated with the Obama Administration in any way.
Punditry
Every pundit will write at least one article explaining how everything would be better everywhere if the pundit were King of Everything. This includes me.
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illustration courtesy shutterstock / AlenD
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