TRAGIC DAYS FOR POLLSTERS?

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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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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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Russian antisemitism and Jewish immigration

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‘Has antisemitism been increasing in Russia?’, ‘Is that the reason that immigration of Russian Jews has been so high lately?’ – these are the most frequently asked questions that I received since the publication of the report ‘Jewish migration today: what it may mean for Europe’. The report has shown that, since the outbreak of war between Russian and Ukraine in February 2022, immigration of Jews and their family members from Russia and Ukraine rose to the levels last seen at the end of the 1990s, almost quarter of a century ago. If these levels keep for the next 5-10 years, Jewish community of Russia would be less than a half of its current size while Jewish community of Ukraine would almost disappear. Immigration of Jews from France have been high in the early 21st century but really at an incomparably lower level compared to the new Russian and Ukrainian realities. It almost feels like immigration of Jews from Ukraine does...
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HOW TO UNDERSTAND RUSSIA, AND HOW NOT TO

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Autocracy it isHaving gone through a period of radical political transformation and economic crises Russia is back as a world player. It re-emerged gradually, but its recent direct involvement in Syria, its sightings within the context of the American election and finally its 2014-2022 ‘Ukrainian campaign’ brought it back to the Westerners’ attention. Russia, in the eyes of an average Westerner, is an exotic and somewhat incomprehensible place. Russian bears, Russian dolls, Russian oligarchs, Russian brides, Russian vodka, Russian baths. A soft form of ‘Orientalism’, if you ask me. ‘Natasha from Russia’ will tell you everything you need to know about that… A lot has been written on Russia by serious scholars since the collapse of communism and the access to the archival materials that followed. However, the area of Russian studies in the Western academia never stagnated. Robert Conquest, Robert Service, Richard Pipes, Orlando Figes published maybe 50 books on the Soviet period of Russian history, all before 1990. There...
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DO SANCTIONS AGAINST RUSSIA WORK? A REPORT FROM THE NATURAL EXPERIMENT AND LESSONS FOR ISRAEL AND ISRAEL’S DETRACTORS

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Do Western sanctions against Russia work? Such was the question asked by the ‘Economist’ recently. Those sanctions, yes, ‘like none the world has seen’. Well, how does one know that something works, in principle?  In scientific fields, it is rather rigidly understood: something ‘works’ when it achieves the hoped result, and the result is confirmed by comparing the ‘before-policy’ situation to ‘after-policy situation’, and possible alternative explanations that could have generated the result are ruled out definitively. The comparison, in scientific fields, should be based on numerical indicators, not feelings. Presumably, Western sanctions were imposed to end the war against Ukraine. And, presumably, the causal mechanism, if it was ever specified by those who conceived the sanctions, would look something like this: sanctions will be imposed, prices would go up, hopefully scarcity would develop too, Russian population will suffer, it will then turn against Putin and depose him. That will end the war. Has it happened and, if not, how close...
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WHAT RUSSIANS WANT TO ACHIEVE IN UKRAINE? (=Xотят ли русские войны?)

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I have said it before-the times of intellectuals opining about the current affairs-and 'ordinary people' listening in awe- are truly over. Who needs intellectuals to interpret and 'mansplain' situations, preferences and the ‘actual truth’ when there are opinion polls? There, people speak for themselves. And whoever is interested in what people actually think, can look at the results of these polls-nothing added and nothing taken away, or very little… Here I present, in translation into English, the results of the opinion poll taken in Moscow on 11-14 March 2022. (Sample size of 1,000). The Russian public was asked about the way they see the Russian 'military operation in Ukraine', as the war in Ukraine is called in Russia. The results came my way via a fellow Russian demographer Dmirty Zakotyansky who did the world a favour by publishing them in his blog in Russian. 'Russian Field' was a polling agency conducting the poll at the request of Roman Yuneman,...
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