shurlock

Either way, he comes across as a complete sociopath.

Great to see you make a clown of yourself over somebody else's battles. It was a single fake report, based on a dodgy tweet - that should have been dismissed out of hand. Not like you don't already have enough on your plate, Les, my grizzly old codger. You continue to bring life to Mark Twain's saying that “It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled". The magic beans are still available

Who's blaming Brexit? Conclusion: you are a bit dim.

Ostensibly political muderers, pal? Needless to say you're not so dim as to not the understand the difference.

Like what pal? You mean this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/14/googles-top-news-link-for-final-election-results-goes-to-a-fake-news-site-with-false-numbers/ You're a sucker for anything Les. Wanna buy some magic beans off me

Which articles are those Les? Not more of your online conspiracy fodder I hope

Apologies - yes it was meant for jamie aka batman.

Where do you hear Trump was winning the popular vote?

Where did you hear Trump was winning the popular vote?

Nobody is disputing there has been a rise in discontent: the question is to what extent it is attributable to economic or cultural grievances -or indeed idiosyncratic, institutional factors, the weighting between them and how empirically you go about disentangling them. For instance, Morris Fiorina and colleagues have done a good job of debunking the myth of a cultural war in the US - instead showing most Americans care about leadership and security. Their findings still hold today and are perfectly consistent with the rejection of Clinton/support for Trump.

Inglehart's work has been disputed for years, dear Les. I guess you wouldn't know that as you probably hadn't heard of it thirty mins ago. There is some truth in it; but in many places it verges on caricature -and it is riddled with measurement issues as well as reverse causality and omitted variables. On a simple level, it would help if Inglehart had actually used data on those who voted for Trump and Brexit

Trump didn't make a huge deal about culture and civil rights during the election: indeed Trump is pretty liberal on social issues - a charge that Ted Cruz tried to attack him with during the primaries and one reason why Trump repeatedly tripped up on issues such as abortion. Relatively speaking average Americans who voted for Trump don't particularly care for this agenda either. The swivel-eyed alt-right is not yet the mainstream. Far more important were issues such as trade, jobs and wages. The US prides itself on the dynamism and flexibility of its economy yet has the second lowest labour force participation rate among prime-age men (25-54) in the OECD. Only Italy has a lower rate. Nothing speaks more to dysfunction in the US than changes in the labour force participation (as distinct from the unemployment rate which tends to get all the airplay). I don't doubt that some of Trump's economic populist impulses are sincere: a trillion-dollar program to rebuild highways, tunnels, bridges and airports and designed to create a million jobs was a key campaign promise, though there is nothing particularly friendly to the working classes in lavish tax cuts or deregulation of financial markets. More cynical has been the alt-right's discovery of this agenda: after all, congressional republicans spent most of the last eight years blocking Obama's infrastructure proposals (arguably when spending would have made a bigger difference given where the US was in the economic cycle).

They've attracted over £5bn in private equity funding.

Rabid social justice warriors Almost as amusing as the hordes of 'gender benders'. You ever tried poetry pal? You have such a flair for words and make-believe.

She's the daughter of the founder and part owner of Lander.

Any half-credible Democratic politician other than Clinton would have beaten Trump. To non-Americans like Brand and yourself, its hard to understand these contingencies.

Nobody is denying there was a shift but let's not overstate it - it remains that lower income groups (leaving aside the race dimension) still overwhelmingly favoured Clinton and those on higher incomes favoured (albeit by a small margin) Trump. None of this is acknowledged by Brand's manichean, reductive posturing.

Those on lower incomes -whether defined as those under $30,000 and $50,000 a year favoured Clinton by double-digits. Sorry pal if the facts don't sit well with your preconceptions.

It would be OK if it was accurate pal. Exit poll data show that as a whole those on lower incomes (whether defined as under $30,000 or $50,000 a year) favoured Clinton (52%-41%). By contrast, every income group above $50,000 a year, including those on more than $250,000 favoured Trump. A defining factor was race i.e. being white. Trump drew support from not only noncollege educated whites but also college-educated whites. None of this squares easily with Brand's argument that those who had nothing to lose voted for Trump. A simple message for simple minds.

??? First-past-the-post also means that a government can form without a majority of the popular vote.

This is such addled analysis that it makes your Frazier Richardson/sweeper stuff look positively informed.

A bit simplistic more like. We can't just cut a player who's under contract as we'll owe them compensation. Players get the best of both worlds: they can rail for a move when they feel they've outgrown the club while they can sit tight and pick up a paycheque should their form dip.

Yep don't get me started on FiveThirtyEight's Against The Spread picks for the NFL

Because I'm a firm believer of Keynes maxim that it is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong - and think there are alot of perverse incentives encouraging spurious precision. Indeed heuristics can often be more informative: http://www.bis.org/review/r120905a.pdf Nate Silver has got very rich on the basis of the supposed accuracy of his forecasts - by extension there's no reason why his failures shouldnt also be highlighted.

I work with probabilistic models everyday. Nobody said is forecasting is easy -and that's why many don't bother with it or just stick to broad directional estimates. But just because their forecasts weren't as bad as some others doesn't vindicate or change the fact that they look to be badly wrong -and certainly worse than many average punters who bet the other way. They gave her a 71.4% chance of not only winning the election but also winning 302 electoral votes. Indeed they grew more bullish at the 11th hour, so were actually diverging with what has gone on! Let's see how close she gets - leaving aside the result of the popular vote.