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By now, we all realize that long-range weather forecasting -- models that forecast beyond the next 3 days -- can be as useful as a gas tank in a Tesla, but there is increasing confidence that a major snowstorm is taking shape over parts of Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska this coming weekend.

The models have been consistently showing for the last few days areas of snow accumulation over 40 inches in some places up and down the front range along Interstate 25.Early this week, forecast models were hinting at possibly even 5 feet of snow. The National Weather Service in Boulder was quick to point out it wasn't forecasting these totals. After a lengthy discussion on the possibilities in the forecast this morning "the messaging of 1 to 3 feet of snow for much of our forecast area is still on track," the NWS Boulder said.

Is it time to panic? No.Is it time to prepare for a possible 3-foot snowstorm? Yes.

With all the anxiety about Tuesday’s vote, it’s understandable that many of us look to statisticians’ election models to tell us what will happen. If they say your candidate has an 80 percent chance of winning, you feel reassured.But after Donald Trump’s surprising victory in 2016 seemed to defy those models, there have been many questions about how much attention we should pay to electoral forecasting.

Electoral forecast modelers run simulations of an election based on various inputs — including state and national polls, polling on issues and information about the economy and the national situation. If they ran, say, 1,000 different simulations with various permutations of those inputs, and if Joe Biden got 270 electoral votes in 800 of them, the forecast would be that Mr. Biden has an 80 percent chance of winning the election.

This is where weather and electoral forecasts start to differ. For weather, we have fundamentals — advanced science on how atmospheric dynamics work — and years of detailed, day-by-day, even hour-by-hour data from a vast number of observation stations. For elections, we simply do not have anything near that kind of knowledge or data. While we have some theories on what influences voters, we have no fine-grained understanding of why people vote the way they do, and what polling data we have is relatively sparse.

Bernanke’s 80-page assessment, the result of more than seven months’ work, is the most comprehensive independent analysis of a big central bank’s performance since an inflationary crisis hit the world economy in early 2022. He offers a dozen recommendations for change at the Bank, the strongest of which is for the MPC to begin publishing “alternative scenarios” that show how its inflation forecasts stand up in extreme situations, for example in the face of an energy price shock.

The review lays bare how the Bank and its international peers all failed to model the impact of the huge energy price shock that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, the disruption in global trade during the pandemic after 2020 and how workers and companies would respond to significant price changes.

In choosing Bernanke, one of the most respected central bankers of his generation, to lead the review, the Bank has ensured that his findings will be difficult to ignore. The former Fed chairman carried out more than 60 face-to-face interviews with Bank staff and market participants and sat in on the MPC’s November 2023 forecasting round to assess where the Bank’s forecasts and communication were failing short, from the use of computer models to the role played by “human judgment”.

Temperatures were forecast to hit 107 on Wednesday in the San Joaquin Valley in the center of California, according to the National Weather Service. While temperatures in Fresno were 16 to 18 degrees above normal for this time of year, they fell short of breaking records.

In Redding, in Northern California, temperatures reached 107 on Tuesday, a day after peaking at 109 and breaking the previous record of 103 set in 2016, meteorologists said.

In Nevada, Las Vegas saw its first 100-degree day of the year on Monday, followed by another triple-digit day — 103 — on Tuesday. It’s forecast to hit 105 on Wednesday and 106 on Thursday.

it’s not clear to me that economists who had predicted that getting inflation under control — it’s down a lot, although not all the way — would require years of very high unemployment are engaging in a similar reckoning. They should. In particular, they should ask themselves whether inflation pessimism was in part caused by a form of bias that has had negative effects on a lot of economic policymaking — not partisan bias, but the urge to sound serious by calling for hard choices and sacrifice.

let me talk about what went wrong with so many recent economic predictions.

mainstream predictions about inflation and unemployment made late last year — economic projections by the Federal Reserve and by professional forecasters surveyed by the Philadelphia Fed. Perhaps surprisingly, both more or less correctly predicted the inflation decline we’re actually seeing.

Is income inequality holding back the United States economy? A new report argues that it is, that an unequal distribution in incomes is making it harder for the nation to recover from the recession

The fact that S.&P., an apolitical organization that aims to produce reliable research for bond investors and others, is raising alarms about the risks that emerge from income inequality is a small but important sign of how a debate that has been largely confined to the academic world and left-of-center political circles is becoming more mainstream.

“Our review of the data, as well as a wealth of research on this matter, leads us to conclude that the current level of income inequality in the U.S. is dampening G.D.P. growth,” the S.&P. researchers write

oping with a pandemic is one of the most complex challenges a society can face. To minimize death and damage, leaders and citizens must orchestrate a huge array of different resources and tools.

I have heard military and intelligence officials describe some threats as requiring a “whole of nation” response, rather than being manageable with any one element of “hard” or “soft” power or even a “whole of government” approach. Saving lives during a pandemic is a challenge of this nature and magnitude.

“If he had just been paying attention, he would have asked, ‘What do I do first?’ We wouldn’t have passed the threshold of casualties in previous wars. It is a catastrophic failure.”

a Washington, D.C.-based professor insisted that Trump was lined up for a win — based on the idea that elections are “primarily a reflection on the performance of the party in power.”

Allan Lichtman uses a historically based system of what he calls “keys” to predict election results ahead of time. The keys are explained in-depth in Lichtman’s book, “Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House 2016.”

“I'm going to make another prediction,” he said. “This one is not based on a system; it's just my gut. They don't want Trump as president, because they can't control him. He's unpredictable. They'd love to have Pence — an absolutely down-the-line, conservative, controllable Republican. And I'm quite certain Trump will give someone grounds for impeachment, either by doing something that endangers national security or because it helps his pocketbook.”

Money managers are wondering whether soft earnings will justify more stock gains, given the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s 26.5% rise last year. That helps explain why the Dow is down 118 points to start the year.

hey are far from most extremes of 2000, however. So while many investors are turning cautious, few are pulling back wholesale.

Goldman SachsGS +0.63% investment strategist David Kostin startled investors a week ago by warning that prices are high compared to analysts’ forecasts. The chances are two out of three that the S&P will fall at least 10% sometime this year, before finishing with an overall yearly gain of around 3%, he said.

In early 2009, the United States was engaged in an intense public debate over a proposed $800 billion stimulus bill designed to boost economic activity through government borrowing and spending. James Buchanan, Edward Prescott, Vernon Smith, and Gary Becker, all Nobel laureates in economics, argued that while the stimulus might be an important emergency measure, it would fail to improve economic performance. Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, on the other hand, argued that the stimulus would improve the economy and indeed that it should be bigger. Fierce debates can be found in frontier areas of all the sciences, of course, but this was as if, on the night before the Apollo moon launch, half of the world’s Nobel laureates in physics were asserting that rockets couldn’t reach the moon and the other half were saying that they could. Prior to the launch of the stimulus program, the only thing that anyone could conclude with high confidence was that several Nobelists would be wrong about it.

we have no reliable way to measure counterfactuals—that is, to know what would have happened had we not executed some policy—because so many other factors influence the outcome. This seemingly narrow problem is central to our continuing inability to transform social sciences into actual sciences. Unlike physics or biology, the social sciences have not demonstrated the capacity to produce a substantial body of useful, nonobvious, and reliable predictive rules about what they study—that is, human social behavior, including the impact of proposed government programs.

recognition of our ignorance should lead us to two important, though tentative and imprecise, conclusions. First, we should treat anybody who states definitively that the result of stimulus policy X will be economic outcome Y with extreme skepticism. And weaseling about the magnitude of the predicted impact such that all outcomes within the purported range of uncertainty still magically lead to the same policy conclusion doesn’t count; we should recognize that we don’t even know at the most basic level whether stimulus works or not. Second, “boldness” in the face of ignorance should not be seen in heroic terms. It is a desperate move taken only when other options are exhausted, and with our eyes open to the fact that we are taking a wild risk. Actual science can allow us to act on counterintuitive predictions with confidence--who would think intuitively that it’s a smart idea to get into a heavy metal tube and then go 30,000 feet up into the air? But we don’t have this kind of knowledge about a stimulus policy. We are walking into a casino and putting $800 billion dollars down on a single bet in a game where we don’t even know the rules. In general, in the face of this kind of uncertainty, we ought to seek policy interventions that are as narrowly targeted as is consistent with addressing the problem; tested prior to implementation to whatever extent possible; hedged on multiple dimensions; and designed to be as reversible as is practicable. What I am trying to describe here is not a policy per se, but an attitude of epistemic humility.

But after Donald Trump’s surprising victory in 2016 seemed to defy those models, there have been many questions about how much attention we should pay to electoral forecasting.

Why do we have models? Why can’t we just consider polling averages? Well, presidents are not elected by a national vote total but by the electoral votes of each state, so national polls do not give us the information we need. As two of the last five elections showed — in 2000 and 2016 — it’s possible to win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College.

While we have some theories on what influences voters, we have no fine-grained understanding of why people vote the way they do, and what polling data we have is relatively sparse.

Some of the most popular sports, like athletics and swimming, have had unofficial world rankings based largely on form in any given season. But generally onlookers have had to rely on the odds produced by bookmakers for a guide of who is likely to win Olympic glory.

The most comprehensive publicly available projection belongs to Gracenote Sports, an analytics company owned by Nielsen, an American market-research firm.

The long-feared “population bomb” may not go off, according to the authors of a new report that estimates that human numbers will peak lower and sooner than previously forecast.

on current trends the world population will reach a high of 8.8 billion before the middle of the century, then decline rapidly. The peak could come earlier still if governments take progressive steps to raise average incomes and education levels.

The new forecasts are good news for the global environment. Once the demographic bulge is overcome, pressure on nature and the climate should start to ease, along with associated social and political tensions.

In the rest of the euro zone, the unemployment rate for workers ages 25 to 74 has more than doubled over that period, to 12.8 percent. The rate for younger workers is more than 30 percent, on average — and above 50 percent in Spain and Greece. In Germany, it is less than 8 percent.

In terms of adult unemployment rates, the most recent figures for the United States (6.1 percent) and Britain (5.7 percent) are not that far from Germany’s figure of 5.1 percent. The major difference is in youth unemployment, which is above 16 percent in the United States and above 20 percent in Britain.

What accounts for that difference? Some of the credit goes to Germany’s education and employment system for young workers, and to German policies that encourage employers facing downturns to reduce working hours rather than fire workers. In Germany, students are separated into different career tracks, with many put into a system that leads to apprenticeships rather than to college degrees.

Heavy rain and floods are affecting dozens of villages, after Typhoon Koppu swept through the northern Philippines.The slow-moving weather system has killed at least two people and forced tens of thousands from their homes.

Koppu has now been downgraded to a severe tropical storm by the Japanese Meteorological Agency, which is responsible for naming and tracking it.However, the Philippines' own weather agency, which calls the weather system Lando, is still characterising it as a typhoon.

Despite weakening, Koppu is expected to keep dumping rain on the country for a considerable time to come. Some forecasts suggest it may not be until Wednesday that it moves past the Philippines and on to Taiwan.

When you vote, you don’t elect the president: You tell your state’s electoral-college electors how to vote. In most states, all electors vote with the state’s popular opinion. If 51 percent of voters in California choose Hillary Clinton, all 55 of California’s electors will vote for Clinton — and none will vote for Donald Trump.(Historically, a few so-called faithless electors have voted against popular opinion. They never changed the outcome of an election, so we don’t model them.)We simulated a Nov. 8 election 10 million times using our state-by-state averages. In 9.8 million simulations, Hillary Clinton ended up with at least 270 electoral votes. Therefore, we say Clinton has a 97.6 percent chance of becoming president.

Eduardo Porter: I read your very interesting column about the universal basic income, the quasi-magical tool to ensure some basic standard of living for everybody when there are no more jobs for people to do. What strikes me about this notion is that it relies on a view of the future that seems to have jelled into a certainty, at least among the technorati on the West Coast

the economic numbers that we see today don’t support this view. If robots were eating our lunch, it would show up as fast productivity growth. But as Robert Gordon points out in his new book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” productivity has slowed sharply. He argues pretty convincingly that future productivity growth will remain fairly modest, much slower than during the burst of American prosperity in mid-20th century.

it relies on an unlikely future. It’s not a future with a lot of crummy work for low pay, but essentially a future with little or no paid work at all.

Two days after a disastrous initial public offering, shares in Facebook are collapsing. They’re down to $33, well below the IPO price of $38.

The larger picture is that a powerful company, one that is collecting more information about more people than any organization in history, one that has 900 million members, making it the third-largest country on earth, is in the control of a 28-year-old man who has a history of being, well, less than forthright. Will it ever occur to people that so many who rub up against Facebook later notice that their watch and wallet are missing?

Russia’s central bank forecast that net capital outflows would shrink in line with the country’s current account surplus. But the bank now says a net sum of $63 billion flowed out of the country last year, even as the surplus—money from trade, money transactions and investment revenues—more than halved.

Analysts say it was because state oil firm OAO Rosneft’s acquisition of TNK-BP for some $60 billion boosted the number, although it’s not clear what part of the complex deal was counted as outflows.

The Economy Ministry has forecast that net capital outflows will fall this year to $30 billion.