In the recent French elections, support for Le Pen’s far right party was highest among 18-34s. So much for the famous idea that ‘if you are not a liberal when you are young, you have no heart’.
Politics
In the 2024 election, Donald Trump made gains of +14 points among Latino voters, despite his condemnation of certain immigrants as “drug dealers”, “murderers” and “rapists.” It turns out that ethnicities don’t always predict attitudes, and the promise of low prices is more important than people think.
It is rarely thought of as the key to national productivity. But without it, people in hot countries can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. This is why there is a strong correlation between GDP and temperature, and why Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, said “the first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked.”
In 2001 the government said all ambulances should reach a life threatening emergency (category A) within 8 minutes and there was suddenly a massive improvement in the number that did so.
But it turned out that a number of ambulance services were doctoring their response times to meet the targets, as well as ignoring more urgent cases over less urgent cases to meet the target.
You would expect to see a more rounded curve of responses.
The system means that number of votes isn’t enough – candidates have to win votes in the right places (as bigger states count for more seats in the Electoral College). Al Gore famously won the popular vote in 2000 with 540,000 more votes than Bush, but it was Bush who entered the White House.
Capital gains tax
To the outside world, Singapore is a country with little individual freedom – where laws are draconian, spitting is a fineable offence, and drug smugglers are executed. But locals think of freedom as feeling civilised and safe. “Freedom is being able to walk on the streets unmolested in the wee hours in the morning. Freedom is the woman who can ride buses and trains alone. Freedom is fresh air and clean streets, because nothing is more inimical to our liberty of movement than being trapped at home because of suffocating smog.”
3% deficit limit for EU was pretty arbitrary (a bit like in market research). Guy Abeille came up with it after he was asked for a rule that was ‘easy, sounded like it came from an economist, and can be opposed to the ministers that walk into my office asking for money.’ Took less than an hour to come up with. “It was a good number that had stood the test of time, somewhat reminiscent of the Trinity.”
Every governing party facing election in a developed country lost vote share in 2024, the first time this has ever happened.
GDP has always excluded parent childcare, volunteering and other unpaid work from its calculation. More recently, it has failed to properly account for much of the digital economy. For instance, Facebook is only counted by its advertising revenue ($40 per user per year) but our willingness to pay for the service is much higher – $600 a year according to a recent paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research. These and other omissions explain why, to quote John F Kennedy, “GDP measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile”.
Bill Bratton LA
The Conservative party was in power for 14 consecutive years from 2010 to 2024. Yet the Labour party led in two-thirds of the 4,000 opinion polls published during that time – just not when it mattered.