Friday Reading List - 8 November 2024
Things to read; work to do
Good morning. Here are this week’s newsletters:
Monday - My wrong prediction about the US election (see the bottom of this newsletter for a follow-up comment)
Wednesday - How Mexico is preparing for President Trump 2.0 (for paying subscribers)
Thursday - Six Stories - Including how Petro, Lula, Milei and Bukele may all react to Trump (for paying subscribers)
This week’s World Politics Review column, published before Tuesday’s election, was also on the implications of the US election, looking at how either candidate would impact the region.
Reading List
FT - Mexico grapples with its hidden Chinese trade problem
AP - Mexico appears to abandon its ‘hugs, not bullets’ strategy as bloodshed plagues the country
NYT - Mexico’s Top Court Dismisses Proposal to Invalidate Judicial Overhaul
Guardian - Severe drought puts nearly half a million children at risk in Amazon – report
AP - As sports betting addiction takes hold in Brazil, the government moves to crack down
Blooomberg - Lula’s 79th Birthday Should Be a Wake-Up Call for Brazilian Politics
WSJ - China’s EV Makers Set Sights on Latin America in Global Expansion
Bloomberg - Brazil Woos Chinese Starlink Rival Maker After Feuding With Musk
Economist - BRICS isn’t exactly picky, but has just rejected Venezuela
NBC - 'Fat Leonard' sentenced in Navy bribery scandal almost 9 years after pleading guilty
IndraStra Global - Venezuela: The Path Forward
WSJ - In Miami, Long-Settled Venezuelans Have a Bone to Pick With New Migrants
Reuters - Colombia to buy Saab fighter aircraft, Swedish public radio reports
AP - Bolivia's Evo Morales tells AP he'll press on with a hunger strike until his rival accepts dialogue
InSight Crime - Will Costa Rica Follow the Same Criminal Path as Ecuador?
International Crisis Group - Weighing the Case for a New Peacekeeping Mission to Haiti
WSJ - Trump’s Huge Latino Gains Put a Big Crack in Democratic Coalition
Reuters - Is Goldilocks gone? Emerging markets face uncertain path under Trump
IMF - Crime in Latin America: Implications for Economic Policymakers
US Election Comment
This comment was included in yesterday’s newsletter as well, but thought I should put this out there for all subscribers too.
I spent a good portion of time this week answering questions about how I got my election prediction so wrong. To be clear, while I did have this red wave scenario within the 25% odds, I'm also very willing to admit "I got it wrong" and those odds should have been higher. As part of best practices, I wrote a two page premortem document prior to the election about what it would mean if my prediction was wrong in various ways and I've been using that to post-mortem the methodology. It's a useful exercise and I encourage you all to write premortems with predictions.
The other thing to do with predictions is actually write them down. It's easy for people to say, "I knew in my head/heart this would be the result." but there is a lot of hindsight bias in those statements. Many people, me included, went through waves of thinking Harris would win, Trump would win, chaos would reign, and/or everything would be fine. At some point during this campaign process, you thought about the correct answer and at some point you thought about the wrong answer, but unless you write down an answer and a reasoning behind it, then you usually only remember how you got it correct and that makes it hard to improve. One reason I built a model and wrote down my prediction was that I try to be methodological about these things and not simply change my prediction based on the whims of how I'm feeling at any given moment, particularly when I care about the results.
Still, the model I built got the election wrong in fundamental ways. And that failure is wonderfully public to everyone who reads this newsletter. And that's how I learn and build better models moving forward.
I've written much more personally and on other forums about lessons learned from the election prediction process and what I think are the main takeaways/analysis of Trump's victory. Being that this is a LatAm-focused newsletter, I'll spare you all the details unless it's specific to LatAm analysis (and there will be a lot more of that moving forward). But feel free to ask me specific questions about the US side of things if you are interested in my opinions.
Barring some major shift, I went 8 for 10 on my "80% predictions" that I made at the start of 2024, exactly the accuracy rate I was looking for. The interesting detail is that I got the eight correct about Latin America and the two wrong about the United States. There is some insight there I need to consider.
Thanks for reading
Have a great weekend!
