Good news for the world: Obama is winning

There are no national solutions to the problems of the world, but some national solutions are more important than others. All of us are affected by what will happen on Tuesday 6th in the USA's presidential election. In past elections, I used to follow predictions from political stock markets such as Intrade, and I was always curious to see who was The Economist endorsing. Good news from these two sides: Intrade gives a probability today of more than 66% of an Obama victory and The Economist has just announced it prefers Obama to win. This time, I have also been following the blog Five Thirty Eight, written by Nate Silver, who uses a statistical model to predict the result based on national and state data. The current prediction is that Obama has a probability of victory of 79%, with a clear victory in the electoral college and a slight majority in the popular vote. Of course, Romney may still win, and the election will be closer than four years ago. As Silver explains, when a team is winning a match by a narrow margin when there are still a couple of minutes to play, it has a high chance of winning, but many things can happen. Decent readers (also, or perhaps especially, in Europe) should keep their fingers crossed.