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Which countries are on the right track, according to their citizens

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Re: Which countries are on the right track, according to their citizens

#61

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

yostrovs wrote: post #54
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect more than half to worry given the number of children in food insecure households, the lack of retirement savings many americans are confronted with. You might have seem poverty abroad but there are plenty of countries on this list that worry more (like Germany) which much better working conditions for the vast majority of people with little income.

You're equating "food insecure households" and "lack of retirement savings" with poverty. In America, the supposedly impoverished, the "food insecure", are more often obese than not and their retirement, though boring and doesn't involve golf courses and biannual vacations, doesn't involve starvation, lack of electricity, television, heating and air conditioning, and other essentials. Open up any book from 100 years…

The statistics speak for themselves. If you want to argue them away you are just further telling me that Americans are indeed more likely than not blind to those issues when surveyed compared to (some) other countries.

Re: Which countries are on the right track, according to their citizens

#62

Post by ciguy »

zachguo wrote: post #58
ciguy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did I ever claim to be an authority on anything? I'm making the observation that citizens who know they're being surveilled online are unlikely to respond to this type of poll negatively, affecting the accuracy of the results. I threw an interesting personal anecdote in there as an example but at no time did I make an authority claim. So I don't know what your point is.

He/she is trying to point out your hasty assumption that Chinese people share the same societal and cultural values as you. In reality they may not care much about surveillance and censorship at all.

When did I ever say that the Chinese cared about censorship or surveillance? I know you think you're culturally enlightened by bringing up this tired argument. You're not.

Anyone who's been to China knows that the average person in China doesn't particularly care about privacy, we're not arguing that here. What I'm saying is that regardless of whether someone cars about it, it does affect their behavior.

Re: Which countries are on the right track, according to their citizens

#63

Post by ciguy »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #48
ciguy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. I should have left the anecdote out as it's clearly distracting from what I really wanted to get across. I'm saying that this type of poll is never going to be accurate in an authoritarian regime where citizens know they're being watched. The anecdote was just an observation and as such should of course be taken with some skepticism.

They didn't miss the point. Yes your anecdote is "meh" because the economy being about to crash doesn't necessarily mean you think your country is going in the wrong direction. But claiming you won't get an honest answer from those people seems just as flawed. It's a pretty general question. If you download the PDF you'll see there were a bunch of more precise questions asked and in some of them China did rank Quite…

This different priorities argument comes out every time China is discussed. It's tired, simplistic and overused by people who want to feel culturally enlightened and hand wave away the possibility of issues in China. Anyone who's been to China knows they value different things, of course they do, every culture has different values.

Just because someone doesn't particularly care about censorship and surveillance doesn't mean they don't adjust their behavior accordingly though. If you read the PDF China ranked highly on precisely the questions which are officially approved government positions, such as the need for greener tech and better environmental management.

Re: Which countries are on the right track, according to their citizens

#64

Post by Jolter »

erikstarck wrote: post #24

The note about Sweden seems a bit off. It is now January and we still don't have a government formed since the election in September. The politicians have all showed their worst sides in not getting along and the trust in them has plummeted. At the same time there are clear signs of a recession coming. Things are as gloomy as a Bergman-movie in Sweden. Sort of.

Remember, these were the numbers from September, just after the election. Lots of people would still have their hopes up then.

Re: Which countries are on the right track, according to their citizens

#65

Post by Jolter »

dang wrote: post #10
tuukkah wrote: post #8

There are newer results from September here: https://www.ipsos.com/en/what-worries-world-september-2018

OK, we changed to that from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/which-countries-are-o... . Thanks!

See Daureg' reply below for November numbers.

Re: Which countries are on the right track, according to their citizens

#66

Post by yostrovs »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #61
yostrovs wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're equating "food insecure households" and "lack of retirement savings" with poverty. In America, the supposedly impoverished, the "food insecure", are more often obese than not and their retirement, though boring and doesn't involve golf courses and biannual vacations, doesn't involve starvation, lack of electricity, television, heating and air conditioning, and other essentials. Open up any book from 100 years…

The statistics speak for themselves. If you want to argue them away you are just further telling me that Americans are indeed more likely than not blind to those issues when surveyed compared to (some) other countries.

Yes, statistics speak for themselves. Minimum wage is roughly $10 and a meal at McDonald's is $4. Perhaps there are reasons for "food insecurity" that are not the fault of the society in general.

Re: Which countries are on the right track, according to their citizens

#67

Post by lolc »

thejohnconway wrote: post #53
lolc wrote: post #13

> online survey Is it representative in some way? > Data are weighted to match the profile of the population. No, just the opposite.

Weighting is done to make the sample more representative, because voluntary samples are always demographically biased. You can argue that the way they weight is wrong in some way, but it’s purpose is exactly to address representativeness of the survey.

When the lone 80-year old that participated is weighted against the hundreds 20-year olds (I'm exaggerating, I hope) we still don't know whether her opinion is representative for the other 80-year olds that didn't respond. There is no point of weighing her more than a 20-year old.

My glib comment was about the fact that before weighing, I could have at least attempted to imagine who would typically respond to such an online-survey. It's a biased sample. But it's a sample. I could say: Well at least this many people out of the whole population answered this or that way. Once weighing mixes things up I don't even know how people responded anymore.

Re: Which countries are on the right track, according to their citizens

#68

Post by wenc »

pergadad wrote: post #36
wenc wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are techniques to ask sensitive questions on a survey without implicating individual respondents and still obtain useful answers on the aggregate [1]. I can only imagine Ipsos, being a survey firm, would have used some of these techniques. I would be careful about generalizing from anecdata. Unless the people you talk to come from every strata in society and your sample is representative, your conclusion may be…

Whether there are techniques is irrelevant, whether people trust that they'll not face consequences due to their answer is much more important. You can reassure them as much as you want - who really would want to risk real-world consequences for a random survey? Alternatively there might be somewhere in the fine print how Chinese participants were invited/selected - it wouldn't be the first such data where PRC manage…

> who really would want to risk real-world consequences for a random survey?

Why not? We don't know the baseline behavior and expectations of the respondents.

I think we differ on where our subjective Bayesian priors are situated.

I'm more at the 50/50 mark in that I think the results could be biased but at the same time, there's no necessity that they must be. Whereas most people on this thread automatically assume a priori that the survey results surely are biased, because China.

Re: Which countries are on the right track, according to their citizens

#69

Post by iforgotpassword »

ciguy wrote: post #63
iforgotpassword wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't miss the point. Yes your anecdote is "meh" because the economy being about to crash doesn't necessarily mean you think your country is going in the wrong direction. But claiming you won't get an honest answer from those people seems just as flawed. It's a pretty general question. If you download the PDF you'll see there were a bunch of more precise questions asked and in some of them China did rank Quite…

This different priorities argument comes out every time China is discussed. It's tired, simplistic and overused by people who want to feel culturally enlightened and hand wave away the possibility of issues in China. Anyone who's been to China knows they value different things, of course they do, every culture has different values. Just because someone doesn't particularly care about censorship and surveillance doesn…

> This different priorities argument comes out every time China is discussed.

So you're trying to invalidate the argument by saying it's mentioned to often? I don't think this is how this works.

> Just because someone doesn't particularly care about censorship and surveillance doesn't mean they don't adjust their behavior accordingly though.

Of course they do, and if you knew Chinese culture you'd clearly see that. The average person trying to make a living might not, but it's the same in the west. Who even cared about the snowden revelations? Certainly not your bus driver. When bringing up the argument how companies like Facebook and google know more about you than your best friend, and government access is just one court order away, how many people counter you with "well I got nothing to hide"? I'd go as far as saying I can at least give the Chinese gvt the props for being upfront about their censorship and surveillance. Before snowden, if you claimed the NSA would be running a huge surveillance program tapping into the country's and world's largest internet exchanges, you got a confused look or were told to put your tinfoil hat back on.

Bottom line is, people in China genuinely think their country is heading in the right direction and the vast majority doesn't care about censorship and surveillance, anyone who's been to China for more than just a couple weeks quick travelling and didn't just spend time with other expats would quickly have learned that. Whether they truly understand the implications of this is an entirely different matter and not even part of the survey. But then again most westerners also don't, they just happen to live in a very free environment and don't realize what they got themselves there, or just don't care (Facebook point from above, voter turnouts).

Re: Which countries are on the right track, according to their citizens

#70

Post by Jolter »

marcosdumay wrote: post #45

As a Brazilian, the one thing that gives me some confidence that things will get better is the low confidence people display on those studies.

Already in the November study, Brazil's confidence is up 22 percentage points, so yes things are happening. My confidence in Brazil has taken a dive, but I'm not voting there...

https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/...

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