Noted for Your Morning Procrastination for October 12, 2014

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

Talking Points: Global Cross-Fire: Secular Stagnation or Policy Paralysis?: (Early) Monday Focus for October 13, 2014 - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Morning Must-Read: Heather Boushey and Carter Price: How Are Economic Inequality and Growth Connected?: A Review - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Morning Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Europanic 2.0 - Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Morning Must-Read: Dean Baker: David Leonhardt Wonders Why Its Cold In the Winter and Wages Aren't Rising - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

Plus:

"The most interesting subplot of 2012 US election coverage was the battle between the poll-oriented quants--most famously Nate Silver--and sundry television know-nothing pundits who insisted based on their guts that Mitt Romney was going to pull it out. The 2014 horserace has produced... a proliferation of quantitative models based on poll aggregation... [and] its own entertaining feud between the famous, entertaining, and media-savvy Nate Silver and the less-known Princeton University scientist Sam Wang.... We're never going to know which model is correct.... If we got to look at 100 or a 1,000 midterm elections, we'd end up with a pretty good sense of whether Silver's forecast or Wang's forecast is the more accurate one. But elections simply don't happen that frequently.... Which isn't to say we should go back to the bullshitting-on-television approach to understanding elections. Rather, we should try to remember the high-level points that all these models have in common, namely "the candidate leading in the polls usually wins" and "aggregating polls is more accurate than looking at particular ones." Unlike fussing over the details of 51 percent vs 57 percent, these are actionable insights.... Smart people are really good at devising sophisticated explanations for why their preferred outcome is also the likely one..."