TRAGIC DAYS FOR POLLSTERS?

by admin Comment Closed
According to Rambam, it is natural for people to follow others when it comes to thoughts and wishes. To put it differently: people, on average, tend to be led. Rather than lead, let us just say. If one takes Rambam into account, one knows everything one needs to know about why pollsters, on the occasion of the 2024 US election, look pale to some (not everybody). Seemingly, they could not predict Trump's victory..? Is that so? Let us what the best forecasters said. Nate Silver is known, hardly requires an introduction. His magic? He aggregated all Trump vs Biden and Trump vs Harris polls he could lay his hands on, but, unlike other aggregators, like ‘Real Clear Politics’, he weighted them differentially. In weighting them he took into account not just the sample sizes but other characteristics that, in his eyes, could impact on the trend. Timing of surveys was taken into account, for example. This is not something that anyone...
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THE WEST AND THE REST: THE ANTI-TRUMP VS THE PRO-TRUMP WORLD?

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Western Europe is an anti-Trump world. If there is a stable feature in the Western European politics, it is that: anti-Trumpism. For anyone who engaged in any political conversation on the topic in Europe since 2015, that much is clear. The ‘uncloseted’ pro-Trump individuals I personally came across in the UK since Trump’s appearance on the map of the world politics can still be counted in single digits. This well-entrenched European anti-Trumpism is seen pretty much nowhere else in the world. In 2017, very early in Trump’s first presidency, YouGov conducted a global survey of attitudes toward Donald Trump asking how confident respondents felt about Trump being a good US president. In every single Western European country featured in Figure 1, a majority said that they were not at all confident. It seems like the Northern European block of countries was especially pessimistic in relation to Trump , with Denmark and Sweden leading in prevalence of this sentiment. Majority of British...
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BANANAS AND POTATOES

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My grandmother never ate mushrooms. I could not understand it. I thought they were the most delicious thing on the planet. I asked her why and she said ‘You see-I never ate them as a child. We just did not eat them. And something you do not eat as a child…you rarely learn how to eat later’. I was curious about that. My grandmother’s family did not eat mushrooms. They lived in a town, not in a village. To get mushrooms-you need to pick them in the forest. Central Ukraine in year 1914 was not known for its supermarkets. To pick them-you need to know an awful lot about them, otherwise you are at a risk of serious poisoning and death. Given the lack of effortless lifestyle-based knowledge and the risks, it is easy to see why they never ate them. But: is that true that childhood determines your taste for the rest of your life? Before I was six I...
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GIVE ME YOUR POOR

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Life offers few certainties but there are surely advantages to being a demographer and a country bumpkin. It makes you less cynical where most people are, and more cynical where trepidation is expected. The good place to start this essay is to say that I self-identify as a country bumpkin for a good reason. There are just three places I lived in and know well. Just three. One is a godforsaken location in the South-West of today’s Russia that might as well remain nameless, who cares after all..? Is it not just bears drinking vodka and playing balalaikas there? Another one is the majestic Jerusalem, second to none, I might have been born there if not the Romans. None of them prepared me for the third, and so far, the last: the South of England, the United Kingdom. Cambridge, to be precise. There are other small stations in the middle but they matter less for the purpose of this story. When...
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COVID-19 and fertility

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COVID-19 pandemic for demographers was what the 9/11 events in the US were for experts in the Middle Eastern affairs. A sudden upgrade from an esoteric and who-knows-how-useful discipline to something actually interesting. At first, the focus was on mortality, understandably so. The concept of ‘excess mortality’ started travelling across publications read by ‘normal people’ and the humanity learned that the ‘force of death’ is (a) quantifiable and (b) obeys certain rules. Which also means that the effects of the pandemic could be captured in numbers and compared across countries, ethnic groups and medical systems. A small step for demographers themselves but a big step for humanity. So far so good. COVID-19 pandemic is over, at least the governments across the enlightened world decided that it is…and when the Government says, pandemic stop, is it not?….Irrespective of that, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are not over. It is now the turn of fertility, not mortality, to come under scrutiny. What...
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2024 UK general election: voting intentions of British Jews and other minorities

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4 July 2024 is the Election Day in the United Kingdom. The position of the ruling party, the Conservatives, has not been looking very strong since the early 2022, if the voting intentions poll are to be believed. To be fair- there is little surprize in this: the Conservative Party have been at the steering wheel, so to speak, for the past 14 years (from 2010) and, looking back, for another 18 years in the late 20th century (1979-1997). All the way back to the mid-1940s, the Labour-dominated periods of British history appear like relatively short stunts, mostly 1-6 years long, looking a lot like a little dance of desperation with the Conservatives that the British public performs from time to time. The longest period that the Labour party managed to rule continuously in this time was under Tony Blair/Gordon Brown: 13 years (1997-2010). Telescopically speaking, between the end of the second World War and year 2024 (almost 80 years),...
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HARVARD UNIVERSITY ANTICS: 55 YEARS OF SUPERSTITIO, AND COUNTING

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‘What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun’-Kohelet, son of David, king in Jerusalem, made this point 3,000 years ago. Want a prime example of words that ‘aged well’? These are Kohelet’s words. Arguably, they did not age at all…. And if another example is needed, it exists in the form of the autobiographical account of Richard Pipes, a historian of Russia whose illustrious career started and developed in Harvard, then continued in the framework of the CIA, and then concluded in Harvard. Being an advisor to the American administration on all-things-Soviet during the period of the Cold War, Pipes became a very public persona. His reputation of a ‘conservative intellectual’ is a responsibility of the ‘liberal press’. The label of a ‘conservative intellectual’ has a function akin to a warning ‘contains nuts’ on food products: consume with care, remembering your sensitivities, just in case, you know…There...
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ANECDOTALLY SPEAKING: the Russian street and Israel-Gaza war

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The following text is a translation of the post published by the resident of St Petersburg, a theatre critic and a journalist, Elena Volgust, who decided to walk the streets of St Petersburg with an Israeli flag. *************BEGINNING*************** “I followed the route Moscow boulevard -Kuznetzovskaya-Brother’s Strugatskiye square-bus-trolleybus-Zagorodny boulevard-Vladimirskiy boulevard- corner of Nevsky and Liteiny-trolleybus-bus. All the way -I travelled silently. I did not talk to anyone and did not ask anything. All that time I simply held a flag in my hand, vertically. Reactions: A boy on a bicycle shouted : ”Jews!” A woman in a mask: “An activist..ugh” Two aged men: “Well done” Four people smiled at me on the street, size people smiled-on public transport Many looked intently but did not express any view One significant conversation happened, with a woman who initiated it, at a bus stop near Vitebskaya station. She approved of the flag, said that watches news day and night and all sorts of clever commentary, worries about Israelis, wishes them victory. Another woman,...
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Putin, Gaza and the siege of Leningrad

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For all those who are interested in the evolving position of Russia regarding the most recent developments in the 2023 Gaza war, below is an (almost) literal translation of positions publicly expressed by Putin on this matter. The link to the original video is here. The formulations employed show a degree of continuity with the late Soviet policy in essentials but not in detail. Israel and Zionism are not presented as a settler-colonialist enterprise, for example,  but as a side with legitimate and justifiable claims. The commitment is a very ‘general-purpose’ rather unspecific one to the creation of the independent Palestinian state. There is a degree of grievance towards the one-sided American mediation and abandonment of the ‘Quartet’ effort.  In particular, the comparison of the ‘siege of Gaza’ to the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War is not meant to draw ‘Israel-Nazis’ parallel but to hint at the devastating, for civilians, consequences of such a measure. All, or almost...
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Friday sermon at the Moscow Memorial Mosque, by Imam Shamil Alyautdinov, 13 October 2023

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First, why to talk about it? Why to consider and listen to something as (deceptively) esoteric as a Friday sermon to Muslims in Moscow? Well, the historical conflict that is coming to a crescendo as I am keypunching, is between Israel and some surrounding Arab populations but it echoes across the world. Islamic communities across the globe, albeit many not all, seem to align with or at least produces voices of support for Palestinians. Muslims in Russia are a genuine ‘black whole’. If Russia is not well understood and known to the average and above-average Westerner, then Russian Muslims ten times so. Yet, it is an important community. It is big, as I am going to show in a minute. It is also situated in the midst of the country that is itself at war. And it lives and thinks and operates from the larger Russian society, with its peculiar collectivism, a degree of reverence towards leadership figures and a...
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