Everyone knows austerity is not working

November 15, 2012

Great quote from Paul Krugman today about the coming US “fiscal cliff” (he calls it the austerity bomb

“Everyone who shrieks about the dangers of the austerity bomb is in effect acknowledging that the Keynesians were right all along, that slashing spending and raising taxes on ordinary workers is destructive in a depressed economy, and that we should actually be doing the opposite.”

So why does the UK government continue to pursue austerity? It certainly is not working in Europe, where unemployment – the real price of austerity – is climbing northwards. 

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Meet Nate Silver, the pollster who correctly predicted who would win every state in the US election

November 7, 2012

Nate Silver is a writer and statistician who maintains a blog, FiveThirtyEight, currently licensed by The New York Times.

Where most pundits predicted a down-to-the-wire no-clear-favourite race between Obama and Romney, Silver gave Obama a 91 percent chance of winning on election day, and correctly forecast every state outcome as well.

Silver’s “secret” is a proprietary statistical model of presidential elections. He runs the model thousands of times every day, using the latest numbers — polling figures and economic data, mostly — and watching who wins more often, and how frequently.

And it works. On the day before the election, 20 percent of visitors to the Times website visited FiveThirtyEight. And his 50 for 50 record speaks for itself.

But perhaps the real winner is data-driven political analysis.

Data is the new oil, after all.

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All polls say Obama will win

November 6, 2012

All of the poll aggregators — Nate Silver,  Sam Wang, electoral-vote.com, Drew Linzer, Pollster, Talking Points are showing an Obama advantage in today’s Presidential election.

The data above is from a poll agregated by right-leaning website Real Clear Politics. It shows Obama has a lead in the crucial state of Ohio.

As Paul Krugman points out, if Romney wins the election it will be because the polls are wrong.

End of.

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