Incrementalist wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 22, 2018 1:22 am

As much as I think both of those Nates are overrated, I don't think "guilt by word association" (fundamentals -> fundamentalists) makes a very strong case.

Jeff Hauser wrote: Forty years later, for these models to make sense, you have to believe the same thing about a long and dizzying list of cycle-specific contingencies. Here’s but a small sample from the general election of 2016: Wikileaks’ release of hacked Podesta and DNC emails; Anthony Weiner’s sexting problem leading James Comey to send a public letter reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server eleven days before the election; Comey’s reticence to unveil the FBI’s investigation of whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia; the Clinton high command’s decision to pour resources into Ohio and Iowa while taking Michigan and Wisconsin for granted; and so on. Oh, and Clinton was the first woman ever nominated by a major political party, aiming to succeed the first African American president.

But: 1976 and 2016 certainly both had “weighted-average growth of per capita real disposable personal income over the term.” So why not model them as one singular, rarely deviating study in foreordained outcomes?

Jeff Hauser wrote: Since these thinkers are fond of calling their fetishized, quantified variables “fundamentals,” let’s call them “fundamentalists.” We might as well because, for all their statistical sophistication, their accounts of human motivation are so narrow as to bring to mind the dogmatic conviction that dinosaur fossils are less than six thousand years old. As they gained prominence during the Obama era, fundamentalists argued that the political factors obsessed over by journalists and activists, even the day-to-day analysis of aggregated poll data favored by the new breed of data journalists such as Nate Silver and Nate Cohn, are essentially a distracting waste of time. They also—and this is important—consider the daily tactical give-and-take of campaigns, the grand machinations of strategy, wildly overrated and largely irrelevant.