Recently, I claimed that fivethirtyeight.com is too cautious when correcting polls for house effects. Multiplying their correction by 4/3 gives lower volatility of generic congressional ballot polls (and for the past 100 days multiplying by 3/2 works even better). I think the are conservative, because adjusting or correcting polls is bound to be controversal and […]

Ian Millhouser correctly denounces not only Trump’s assault on the 14th amendment but also reporters who print absolutely false assertions. The issue is Trump’s clearly false claim that he can eliminate birthright citizenship by executive order. In fact “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens […]

Or not enough. Nate Silver has long performed fairly complicated calculations with (lots of) raw data. Even back when he was Poblano at DailyKos this was highly controversial. Now that he leads a huge team at fivethirtyeight.com, it is almost necessary just to decide whether to trust them, because it is very time consuming to […]

This is a somewhat late 10th anniversary of the Lehman failure post. I am not going to write much that is new, but will restate an argument I have been making for years (following John Quiggin and Miles Kimball). It is trivially easy for the US Treasury (and other treasuries) to make huge profits on […]

I try to avoid forcasting, but I confidently forecast that, in the future, I will continue to try and try to find cases on which I disagree with Paul Krugman. In The Economic Future Isn’t What It Used to Be (Wonkish) Krugman notes that forecasts of potential output of the US and the EU are […]

As I write, Brett Kavanaugh is not yet a Supreme Court Justice. I assume he will be one soon. I am going to argue that this is the best of the bad possible outcomes. Yes this is making the best of a bad situation and pathetic motivated reasoning. Yes Collins’s speech drove me into an […]

Two bits of news from Twitter. The GRU employed 305 morons who have been identified as GRU operatives, because they registered their cars at a GRU office address to intimidate the traffic police. In theory automombile registries are not available to the public. In Russia everything is available for a price. Click the link and […]

My understanding is that Bret Kavanaugh presents himself as a textualist, following Antonin Scalia he argues that words in the constitition and laws should be interpreted using their conventional meanings when they were written. This is in contrast to the different approach based on considering legislative history (which is impossible for the main body of […]

Paul Krugman put many of his thoughts together here “What Do We Actually Know About the Economy? (Wonkish)” Basically he concludes that some economists are confused but Paul Krugman knows a lot (no one has ever accused him of being diplomatic). Of course I agree with him. However, I am very pleased to note that […]

I have to link to this column, which is better than Krugman’s average. It is mostly Krugman’s usual shrill praise of fiscal stimulus. I find two things notable. One is that he has no time or column inches for unconventional monetary policy. He’s back to “monetary policy was ineffective because we were at the zero […]