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Justin Wolfers Profile picture
@JustinWolfers
May 18, 2019 • 3 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
Australian democracy is amazing.

Aussies are voting today. All of them, because voting is compulsory. Lines are short. Postal voting is easy. There's no voter suppression. No gerrymandering, because district lines are independently drawn. And everyone enjoys a #democracysausage.
And apart from that one incident at Engadine Maccas in 1997 after the Cronulla Sharks lost the Super League final, Australian politics is pretty clean.
It looks like it’ll be an enormous electoral upset in Australia as the conservative government looks set to win after losing more than fifty polls in a row, then losing exit polls.

Don’t think I’ve ever seen as big of an electoral surprise in my lifetime. #auspol

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More from @JustinWolfers

Justin Wolfers Profile picture
Feb 17
One thing I've learned to do when I have questions about social security number holders who are age 100 or older is to look up the SSA Inspector General audit report, "Numberholders Age 100 or Older Who Did Not Have Death Information on the Numident."

oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads… x.com/elonmusk/statu…
It's a gripping read. It tells me, for instance, that 98 percent of these folks have received no payments. Image
Why are there dead people on (this one table of) the social security database? They died before the use of electronic death records. Image
Read 4 tweets
Justin Wolfers Profile picture
Nov 4, 2024
This counter-response essentially says that any form of weighting in survey research is herding. If so, I love herding!

He's right about the motivation: All weighting is done to ensure that you don't get crazy results. But that's a feature of a good poll, not a bug!
After all: Is there a principled difference between weighting on age (to ensure that your sample includes youngs and olds) and weighting on past vote (to ensure you get folks from across the political spectrum)?
Both age and past vote are:
- Predetermined (before this poll)
- Non-manipulable
- Though self-reported
- And we have good population estimates to weight them to.

What principle would make one of these a legitimate survey design weight and the other "herding"?
Read 9 tweets
Justin Wolfers Profile picture
Nov 4, 2024
Lately @NateSilver has been arguing that pollsters are "herding" —tweaking or hiding their results to avoid publishing outliers.

I don't know any (reputable) pollsters who do this.

And I think the problem here is Nate making a simple math/stats error 🧵 Image
Let's explore binomial distributions and the standard errors of weighted samples.

TL, DR: Weighting across groups with different voting patterns should change how you calculate confidence intervals.

Fail to do so, and you'll falsely accuse pollsters of herding.
First, what @NateSilver538 does:

In a “vanilla” poll—a simple random sample—the standard error of an estimate of a candidate’s vote share, p, in a two horse race is √[p(1-p)/n].

This is the perspective that animates Nate's analysis of "herding". Image
Read 34 tweets
Justin Wolfers Profile picture
Oct 24, 2024
Focusing for a moment on the POLICIES at play.

Voters were asked whether they supported 100 different policies, but weren't told whether the policy was from Trump or Harris.

Nearly all of Harris' policies got majority support from the public, and... 🧵 Image
Far fewer of Trump's policy proposals garnered majority support, and almost none were broadly popular (say, >75% support). Image
Most undecided voters like most of Harris' policies (left graph).

Most undecided voters dislike most of Trumps policies (right graph). Image
Read 5 tweets
Justin Wolfers Profile picture
Oct 13, 2024
Senator, I think it's worth acknowledging that violent crime actually has falllen, and indeed it is lower today than it has been for decades. Image
This decline in violent crime is evident in not just the FBI reports, but also an independent survey by the BJS. Image
If you don't trust data from G-men, the decline in homicide rates the FBI reports is also evident in a count of death certificates in which coroners cute homicide as the cause of death. Image
Read 6 tweets
Justin Wolfers Profile picture
Oct 4, 2024
Wowza: HUGE jobs report.

September payrolls grew +254k, well above expectations.

August payrolls revised up +17k to +159k, and July revised up +55k to +144k.

Unemployment fell to 4.1%

This economic expansion that is motoring along.
Honestly, there's not much to say here other than that fears the job market had slowed turned out to be a statistical illusion due to incomplete data.

Over the past three months, payrolls is motoring along at +186k per month, on average, which is pretty much where you want it.
(The conspiracy theories on revisions to economic numbers confuse me, and I can't remember whether numbers getting revised up to look good is evidence of a conspiracy, or numbers later get revised down is evidence of an initial conspiracy that falls apart.)
Read 12 tweets

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