Good day for "poll quants"

Well, the election is over and there are some big winners other than the political candidates; namely, the "poll quants" as there are called.  That is, the statistically trained people who used sophisticated models to forecast the results of the election (for example, see Nate Silver's work at the blog FiveThirtyEight, Sam Wang at the Princeton Election Consortium, and Drew Linzer at Votamatic).  That were spot on while all the political pundits were way off (to be kind).

A reminder!

Just a reminder for all those people (and there appear to be lots of you) who wonder why the U.S. economy hasn't been "fixed" yet (as if we were repairing a washing machine).  The graph below uses data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and is posted by Catherine Rampell (see here).

She also has the following graph in her November 2 article in the New York Times (see here).

Most costly hurricanes/storms

Sad, indeed

Lawrence Mischel (see here) expresses my sentiments over the claim (by Jack Welch, among other conspiracy nuts) that the BLS manipulated the data:

This controversy is not funny at all. BLS career staff has been inundated with calls from people attacking them, the predictable consequence of these conspiracy charges. BLS staff should not be facing this type of harassment. This whole episode makes me angry—at the disrespect for facts and the professionals at BLS—and it also makes me sad about the state of discourse in our nation.

Big Bird on the dole

From Salon (see here) Big Bird may be joining the unemployed.

Output gap - Federal Reserve of Atlanta

The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta (see here) has some interesting data on the "output gap" (see below).

About the data, they say:

In this month's BIE survey we went fishing in the same murky waters, but this time we took a more direct approach. We asked our panel to provide a percentage estimate of how far their sales levels are above/below "normal." Here's what we found: On a gross domestic product (GDP)–weighted basis, the panel estimates that current sales are about 7.5 percent below normal. That's more slack than the conventional estimates, like the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) measure of the GDP gap, which puts the economy about 6 percent under its potential.

Student debt - again

The Pew Research Center (see here) has the following graph on the growth of student loan debt.  And, yes, it is in adjusted dollars.