“Predictions are hard, especially about the future” (so says the Danish proverb), but still we make them, especially when we care about the future.
Here are some about the future of the United States in the next three and a bit years, expressed as probabilities, although you should not trust the numbers.
We can, for example, calculate the probability that a person will die within X years if we know their age, their sex and a few other details. According to U.S. actuarial tables, a 79-year-old male American with a body mass index of around 30, like Donald Trump, stands a 10 per cent chance of dying before the end of 2028. But the tables can’t tell you if Trump is in that 10 per cent.
