New Year’s Day is an artificial timestamp. It is unassociated with any natural event such as a solstice and celebrated at the whim of different cultures. It was finally nailed down by an Italian pontiff, Pope Gregory XIII, in the 16th century. His calendar was gradually adopted over the world, mostly because this was the heyday of Italian banking dominance in Europe. People needed to calculate interest the same way as their lender, of course.
This New Year’s Day strikes me as a good example of the arbitrary nature of our chronological mile markers. Time is an ever-rolling stream, as the hymn describes it, not a series of chapters. Much of what made 2022 memorable will likely be noteworthy in 2023, which I’ll talk about shortly. Here is some of the unfinished business from the past twelve months that had impact and I think we’ll see again.
First, COVID of course – the virus that won’t quit. Evolving with a remarkable speed and finding the sweet spot between fatal and fickle, this tiny adversary reshaped politics, social behavior, and international relations in 2022 around the globe. The human response to the pandemic hobbled our economies and throttled our expectations during year we thought would see it gone.
Solar energy quietly overtook coal as the top source of U.S. electricity even as the world used more coal than ever. Although predicted, this is years earlier than predicted just a decade ago.
This year we discovered unemployment is less politically toxic than gasoline prices. In a world awash in wealth, many of our trusted economic rules of thumb fumbled the ball, perplexing investors and governments. Russia decided to reaffirm the stupidity of war.
Relatively large interest rate increases by the Fed have provoked less response than anticipated and often in the opposite direction. The yield curve – an upcoming Agsplainer topic – is tilting the wrong way, for example.
Cryptocurrency proved utterly cryptic. Even after some kinks were unwound, the supply chain for too many products remained slack.
Video streaming showed signs of overproduction; more people left more churches; colleges scrounged for ever-fewer students whose learning skills and knowledge levels were scarred by pandemic disruption. 2022 was the year the rivers actually ran dry, voiding many romantic promises.
Farmers as a whole had an epic economic year following an epic-er year in 21. Which makes us superstitiously edgy about 2023.
