President Obama Re-Elected - Page 1286

No, not the election as a whole — the stakes are huge: whether near-universal health care finally comes to America, whether we get any kind of tightening of financial regulation after the bankers destroyed the world economy. But there are a couple of trivial things I probably shouldn’t care about given the really important stuff, but can’t help thinking about.

One is the battle of the nerds versus the traditional pundits. The outpouring of Hate for Nate has been awesome to watch; much of it is coming from the right, but a fair bit also from mainstream pundits who rely on their ineffable sense of “momentum” or whatever rather than polls.

Obviously I side, professionally and temperamentally, with the nerds here — not just Nate Silver, but Sam Wang, Drew Linzer, Pollster, and more. I’d like to think I’d be on their side even if the numbers were pointing the other way.

The point is that relying on data rather than hunches is my style; I’d hate, professionally, to see the voices in the air people get this right, simply because the polls were wrong.

The other trivial stake involves economic analysis. I’ve written a lot about freshwater versus saltwater, but that’s not on the ballot today. What is on the ballot, sort of, is the attempt by a number of Romniac economists — economists who have a basically saltwater, Keynesian view of macroeconomics — to deny that there’s anything special about economies trying to recover from a severe financial crisis that pushes monetary policy up against the zero lower bound, to insist that if only Obama weren’t looking at business funny we’d be having a recovery just like the recovery from the Fed-induced recession of 1981-2.

This seems to me to be an obviously cynical move; basically, I think these guys have to know better, since their own textbooks should at the very least tell them that the zero bound matters a lot. And I’d hate to see this kind of cynicism rewarded.

Trivial stuff compared with the tens of millions who will have to live — and, in a number of cases, die — without health insurance if the polls are wrong. But I never said that I’m free from petty motivations.

Source: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/trivial-stakes/

On November 07 2012 12:05 dAPhREAk wrote:
romney took utah!!!

On November 07 2012 12:04 Mindcrime wrote:
The Ohio senate race has been called for Brown.

Yeah, this shit is over. If Brown wins, there is no way that Obama loses.

On November 07 2012 12:05 dAPhREAk wrote:
romney took utah!!!