Election Watcher

British Columbian, former Quebecer. I sometimes discuss politics (duh). (Real job: dismal scientist)

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

Update: After further analysis of the counting procedure, the most likely final election results appear to be:

62 🔵 47.7%
29 🟠 37.7%
2 🟢 11.0%
0 🔴 1.6%
0 1⃣ 1.5%

NDP strongly favoured to flip Ladysmith-Oceanside, while Cowichan Valley and Kelowna Centre are near tossups.

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

On the one hand, this is an embarrassingly widespread failure of referees and editors for the profession.

On the other hand, MMT, whose many flaws have correctly prevented it from being featured in top econ journals, has even more popular influence.

So it's all just depressing.

[Phil Magness @PhilWMagness]

I've been pointing out since the early 2010s that Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman have a bad habit of biasing their data construction to fit their politics.

Whenever they make a suspect call in how to handle stats, it ends up showing that inequality is on the rise. They almost never go in the other direction. The errors are non-random and almost invariably reinforce their political claims about rising income and wealth concentration since 1980.

Piketty did this throughout his book Capital in the 21st Century.

Piketty and Saez did this throughout their famous 2003 paper on inequality in the US.

Piketty, Saez, and Zucman Saez and Zucman did this in their Distributional National Accounts paper that Auten and Splinter dissected.

Saez and Zucman did this in their 2019 book on tax incidence and inequality.

Saez and Zucman did this in their flurry of "studies" and white papers to support Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax proposal, California Prop 40, a new wealth tax in France, and dozens of other similar examples.

A new AI report (linked below) audited 138 papers by Saez and Zucman. It found thousands of errors, 194 of which were serious. A whopping 97% of the serious errors went in the same direction: they showed inequality rising faster or made it higher.

But there's a bigger scandal at play here. Despite these clear biases, Piketty, Saez, and Zucman have enjoyed a stream of praise and prestige within the economics profession. They get expedited and friendly reviews in top econ journals even though a more serious peer review should have caught many of these errors (the Quarterly Journal of Economics is a recurring offender in this regard). Journals regularly give them a pass after the errors in their old work come to light - they're never expected to correct any of it, and just keep on using it as if nothing changed. Their non-peer reviewed data claims are also treated as gospel by major media outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. And they get showered with prizes - Saez and Zucman are both Clark Medal winners from the AEA, and Zucman got his prize in 2023 after evidence of major data shenanigans in his work came to light in 2019.

Until now, those of us who have been trying to correct the record have had to wade through the PSZ trio's cluttered, disorganized, and often non-transparent replication packages (almost all of which are convoluted piles of Excel spreadsheets) to find the problems. I did a line-by-line replication of Piketty and Saez's entire 2003 US income inequality series to use one example, and found it was riddled with errors - almost every single one of which biased their results in favor of their political story.

We had the means to catch this stuff as it was happening, but the economics profession failed to do its job. And it failed precisely because its elite ranks wanted to believe the Piketty-Saez-Zucman story for political reasons.

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

@alekssamardz @Prominent_Bryan I think some 2% pension plans have a taxed portion that allows the plan to provide 2% even to people that earn above the limit.

And they might be able to avoid paying much tax at all by having that supplementary portion be basically pay-as-you-go, but I don't know the details.

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

@Prominent_Bryan Yeah, that's pretty nuts. I think the employer's contribution is like 3x their own too - their plan is super expensive because MLAs are generally old, so much less time to compound.

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

@Prominent_Bryan Don't they get a refund of contributions with interest? Although that might be a very bad deal if they only get their own contributions back and not the employer's part.

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

Quebec adopting standard time and Ontario still changing its clock would be hilarious in the summer.

[Paul St-Pierre Plamondon @PaulPlamondon]

Samedi il s’agit fort probablement de la dernière fois qu’on recule l’heure au Québec.

Dans les dernières années, le Parti Québécois a pris position à plusieurs reprises pour remettre en question le changement d’heure. Les études démontrent que cette pratique est contre-productive pour la santé et qu’elle posait des difficultés d’adaptation aux enfants.

Notre intention est d’agir correctement et intelligemment : nous allons donc entendre tous les spécialistes pour valider ce qui semble être un consensus selon lequel cette pratique est contre-productive, mais également pour être certain de bien préparer le terrain et de bien déterminer s’il serait préférable d’opter pour l’heure d’été ou pour l’heure normale. Ces consultations débuteront dans les prochains mois, ce qui nous permettra d’entendre les experts dans une courte commission parlementaire.

Chers parents qui en ont pour plusieurs semaines à gérer la réaction de leurs enfants à ce changement d’heure, ceci est probablement la dernière année durant laquelle nous nous imposons de telles contraintes inutiles. Nous invitons la population à suivre de près nos travaux.

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

The troll side of me really loves Christy Clark.

Is there a centrist politician who is more of a troll?

[Neoliberal Akiho ✨🇺🇳🇨🇦 @NeoliberalAkiho]

Get ready for the 2030 BC Election! We have

🟦CPBC: Aaron Gunn
🟩BC Greens: Emily Lowan
🟧NDP: Actual unironic Maoist
🟫OneBC: Hitler
🟥LPBC (formally CentreBC): Christy Clark

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

@RealAlbanianPat Keep going with probability, statistics and econometrics courses in university.

AFAIK, a public-facing NYT-style needle has only been done for US elections. Would be a fantastic addition to Poliwave.

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

BoC seems worried about another episode where a transitory shock becomes permanent, as high energy and import prices are increasingly passed on.

But with core inflation at 2% and the persistent trade conflict with the US, it's not at all obvious this is the right call.

[Trevor Tombe @trevortombe]

This morning the Bank of Canada raised its policy rate to 2.5%, up 0.25 points. Its first hike since 2023. It now projects inflation averaging 3% in 2027, a full point above its July forecast.

Announcement: https://t.co/zEb78Z8Eyn

MPR: https://t.co/AFTCH70Ubr #cdnecon

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

@acoyne The current plan - 370k new PRs per year and declining NPRs until they hit 5% of population - is probably the maximum reasonable level of immigration.

Anything more would show that gov't is intent to repeat the same mistakes all over again.

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

@acoyne Decades of 1%/yr population growth led to pressure on home prices creeping up as we built enough only for ~0.8%/yr growth.

With the pre-pandemic increase to 1.4% and the post-pandemic spike to 3%, we finally build enough to for 1%/yr increases.

But on net, we're further behind!

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

@acoyne This is a misleading take. As you note yourself in the next tweet, interest rates are a major factor in asset (home) prices.

If we look at rent of turnover units, we see that the population surge coincided with an explosion, unlike anything experienced nationwide previously.

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

At least Netanyahu isn't getting a majority, but ugh...

[נדב איל Nadav Eyal @Nadav_Eyal]

Breaking: this is turning into a dramatic election night in Israel.

It began with all three major television networks projecting the Zionist opposition bloc ahead of Netanyahu’s bloc by three seats. Hours later, the picture has shifted dramatically. Netanyahu’s bloc has been steadily gaining ground and now leads the Zionist opposition by three seats according to channel 12. The overall size of the opposition, including the Arab parties, has not changed significantly. 70 => 68.

Likud officials are now claiming that Netanyahu has won a majority of the Jewish vote, adding that “the night is still young.”

Likud is briefing journalists that it expects Netanyahu’s bloc to finish with 55–57 seats. That would still leave him short of the 61 seats needed for a governing majority, but it would represent a significantly stronger showing than anything suggested by the pre-election polls or the initial exit polls.

The counting continues.

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

@CharJonasson @brent_whiteside @SolaTheAnalyst MAGA supporter lol.

Maybe learn how to read. “Misleading” does not mean “wrong.”

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

@mathelm @TheChaosWeeber 160k still not affected, and I don’t think many people making over 100k bother with or have time for side jobs.

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

A beautiful bellwether, actually.

Voted for the party winning the most seats in 10 consecutive BC elections.

Which is weird as its setup (most urban seat in BC) and demographics (lots of young people, few families with kids) are completely unrepresentative.

[Melty 🎖️🎖️ @masking_dd]

A beautiful Conservative riding

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

@mathelm @TheChaosWeeber I doubt it. 120k not even close to being affected, and extra tax on 200k would’ve been $200.

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

@Prominent_Bryan I think people cut governments a lot of slack for the pandemic/recovery, and are discovering right around now that new problems (big deficits, street disorder, higher interest rate) are permanent…

Plus gas prices, AI anxiety.

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

0th percentile!!!

I wonder what the number for Canada is. The last two weeks' elections told us that, at least in BC, people are grumpy and throwing out incumbents left and right.

[Jason Furman @jasonfurman]

People in rich countries are unhappy. In the US they're truly miserable.

Sentiment fell more in the US since 2019 than any other country.

US sentiment at the 0th percentile of pre-COVID history, others generally around 25th percentile.

And our economy doing better than most!

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

The BC herding was insane. While results weren't disastrously off - polls missed the final margin by 4-5 points on average - they were so tightly bunched that no poll in the last 3 weeks was closer than 3 points off.

[Nate Silver @NateSilver538]

Within <=3 weeks of the election, it tends to be more predictable what particular pollsters will say about particular races and that's not a good thing, actually.

[Election Watcher @CdnElectWatch]

@jdouglaslittle @Prominent_Bryan I think the CPBC will finish up 30-40k and the Greens will finish up 40-50k.

So a bunch of New Democrats stayed home, but another bunch switched to other parties.