Tag Archives: justin-wolfers

Brexit Now Looking Like It Will Probably Fail

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Peter Eavis says that Brexit is likely to lose and Britain will remain part of the EU:

Asking people to predict a result of an election has, over time, provided more accurate forecasts than asking people their voting intentions, according to a study by Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan economist and an Upshot contributor, and David Rothschild, of the Microsoft Research and Statistics Center.

When Survation asked, “Regardless of how you plan to vote, what do you think the result will be?” just shy of 40 percent of people said the “remain” camp would win. Only 26 percent said that “leave” would prevail.

The betting markets agree:

The betting odds for the EU referendum changed direction over the weekend and now firmly favour a Remain vote with just three days to go….Ladbrokes has given just a 27% chance of a Vote Leave while William Hill has it as 28.5%. Ladbrokes added that 95% of betting on was a Remain vote on Monday.

My sense—though I’d prefer actual data if anyone has collected it—is that secession votes usually follow a pattern: the leavers get an upward bump a few weeks before voting day, but stayers get a bump in the few days before voting day. A fair number of people flirt with the idea of leaving, but then get scared at the last minute and decide to vote for the status quo instead. Basically, in any secession referendum, I figure that Leave needs to be polling at 55 percent or higher to have a realistic chance of winning.

As of today, the polls are still tied, so my guess is that Brexit will fail on Thursday. If I’m right that about 5 percent of the leavers will get cold feet and change their minds, the final tally will be something like 53-47 percent in favor of remaining in the EU. We’ll find out in a couple of days.

Read article here:

Brexit Now Looking Like It Will Probably Fail

Posted in Brita, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Brexit Now Looking Like It Will Probably Fail

Email Newsletters Are a Blight on Mankind

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Justin Wolfers is annoyed by the email newsletter bubble. Brad DeLong comments:

Authors seeking both eyeballs to sell to advertisers and a committed, engaged audience with which they can conduct a conversation are now trying to ride two horses—a clickbait audience served by self-contained pieces, and a newsletter audience with which they can interact and converse. I don’t think it is working very well.

Is that what’s happening? I’ve always thought there was something different going on: the professionalization of the blogosphere has, ironically, made blogs too stuffy and corporate. If you want to write a post complaining that the local supermarket doesn’t carry the brand of peanut butter you like, you can hardly do this at Vox.com or 538 or the Washington Monthly.1 Those sites are reserved for serious commentary. So if you still want to write that kind of stuff, you do it in a newsletter that’s all yours and nobody else controls.

But Brad is suggesting that the real motivator is a desire to—what? Avoid the trolls? (Who cares about trolls?) Write in a more interactive space? (How are newsletters more interactive than blogs?) Write in a more private space where you can toss out weird ideas with less potential for blowback? (Cowards.) Create “added value” for subscribers who will hopefully donate money to you/your employer? (You corporate shill, you.)

I think we should toss this question to the newsletter writers. What’s the deal? If you need a second writing space, why not a quick-and-dirty blogspot blog or Tumblr or Medium? Why the throwback to email?

1I typically solve this problem by writing this kind of stuff on weekends, which I consider a more personal space. So far, nobody has disabused me of this notion.

Excerpt from: 

Email Newsletters Are a Blight on Mankind

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Email Newsletters Are a Blight on Mankind