Group items tagged

Two Words That Could Shape the Politics of the Trade War: Loss Aversion The pain of a loss tends to be greater than the enjoyment of a win. That has big implications for trade, and also helps explain the politics of health care and taxes.

Nothing but the truth: Are we really living in a post-truth world? It has been an extraordinary year for the concept of veracity. Brexit. Trump. Experts have taken a beating, facts have apparently taken second place to emotion and feeling. And what about truth? It seems like fewer and fewer people, whether voters or politicians, care what's true anymore. Step forward the Oxford English Dictionary's word of 2016: "post-truth". Is this just shorthand to help liberals make sense of a world they don't like? Or does it mark something more meaningful? Are we really no longer interested in truth or is our toxic political climate clouding our ability to agree on what the facts are? In a series of special programmes as 2017 begins, Radio 4 examines inflection points in the world around us. In the first programme, Jo Fidgen explores how our brains process facts when they become polluted by politics. Producer: Gemma Newby

If you were surprised by the result of the Brexit vote in the UK or by the Trump victory in the US, you might live in an echo chamber - a self-reinforcing world of people who share the same opinions as you. Echo chambers are a problem, and not just because it means some people make incorrect predictions about political events. They threaten our democratic conversation, splitting up the common ground of assumption and fact that is needed for diverse people to talk to each other. A few tools are mentioned in the post that help you see "the other side" of a story - you might like to play with them, e.g. http://politecho.org "is a browser extension that shows the political biases of your friends and Facebook newsfeed"

Nice discussion of the data around contraception choices. Shortly after Donald Trump was elected president I started noticing an interesting trend on my social media newsfeeds. And no, I'm not talking about the near-constant bickering of people with differing political opinions. I started seeing post after post from friends publicly asking one another about their experiences with different forms of birth control. The motivation for these kinds of conversations centered around the pending rollback of copay-free contraception, but have since been re-kindled every time reproductive rights come up in the political arena. And it's not just talk. Many of these conversations centered around the use of long-term contraceptives like intra-uterine devices or IUDs which can protect against pregnancy for 3 - 12 years. In the months immediately following the 2016 election, AthenaHealth reported a 19% increase in IUD-related doctor's visits and Planned Parenthood reported a 900% increase in patients seeking IUDs. Cait, 27, recently switched to a copper IUD, and said that she made the switch due to convenience and "because now in light of our current administration I'd like to have something that will continue to work and be affordable even if I end up without health insurance."

There's a form of casual violence that kills 1.25 million people a year (3 times more than malaria) and injures up to 50ODI roads cover million more. 90% of the deaths are of poor people (usually men) in poor countries. No guns are involved and there's lots of things governments can do to fix it. But you'll hardly ever read about it in the development literature, although road safety did make it into the Sustainable Development Goals (as did everything else, it has to be said) - targets 3.6 and 11.2 for SDG geeks. So hats off to ODI (again) for not only painstakingly building the case for taking action on a major cause of death and misery in poor countries (see below), but also exploring the politics and institutions that so far have prevented governments from taking action.

A BBC episode (30 mins) on changing minds. There's a widespread belief that there's no point talking to people you disagree with because they will never change their minds. Everyone is too polarized and attempts to discuss will merely result in greater polarization. But the history of the world is defined by changes of mind -that's how progress (or even regress) is made: shifts in political, cultural, scientific beliefs and paradigms. So how do we ever change our minds about something? What are the perspectives that foster constructive discussion and what conditions destroy it? Margaret Heffernan talks to international academics at the forefront of research into new forms of democratic discourse, to journalists involved in facilitating national conversations and to members of the public who seized the opportunity to talk to a stranger with opposing political views:

This is a great list of evidence based stories by FiveThirtyEight (FiveThirtyEight uses statistical analysis - hard numbers - to tell compelling stories about elections, politics, sports, science, economics) They also produced a list of some great stories from other venues: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/damn-we-wish-wed-written-these-11-stories/

Journalists often make mistakes when reporting on data such as opinion poll results, federal jobs reports and census surveys because they don't quite understand - or they ignore - the data's margin of error. Data collected from a sample of the population will never perfectly represent the population as a whole. The margin of error, which depends primarily on sample size, is a measure of how precise the estimate is. The margin of error for an opinion poll indicates how close the match is likely to be between the responses of the people in the poll and those of the population as a whole. To help journalists understand margin of error and how to correctly interpret data from polls and surveys, we've put together a list of seven tips, Look for the margin of error - and report it. It tells you and your audience how much the results can vary. Remember that the larger the margin of error, the greater the likelihood the survey estimate will be inaccurate. Make sure a political candidate really has the lead before you report it. Note that there are real trends, and then there are mistaken claims of a trend. Watch your adjectives. (And it might be best to avoid them altogether.) Keep in mind that the margin of error for subgroups of a sample will always be larger than the margin of error for the sample. Use caution when comparing results from different polls and surveys, especially those conducted by different organizations.

Some great quotes in this piece! The language of politics warps our democracy again and again, as in this tax calculation. The media must unpack statistics Last week, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Health Foundation published a report on funding for health and social care. One figure from the report was repeated across the headlines. For the NHS to stay afloat, it would require "£2,000 in tax from every household". Shocking stuff!If you're sitting at a bar with a group of friends and Bill Gates walks in, the average wealth of everyone in the room makes you all millionaires. But if you try to buy the most expensive bottle of champagne in the place, your debit card will still be declined. The issue to be addressed, and one to which there is no fully correct answer, is how we can put numbers into a context that enables people to make informed choices. Big numbers are hard to conceptualise - most of us have no intuitive understanding of what £56bn even looks like.

We learned this week that the Trump campaign may have tried to dissuade millions of Black voters from voting in 2016 through highly targeted online ads. The investigation, by Channel 4, highlighted a still little-understood online advertising technique, microtargeting. This targets ads at people based on the huge amount of data available about them online. Experts say Big Tech needs to be much more transparent about how microtargeting works, to avoid overblown claims but also counter a potential threat to democracy.

Bald-faced lies are, thankfully, fairly rare in Australian politics. Being caught in an outright fib or blooper is still seen as shameful. The problem in Australia is that facts and statistics are frequently twisted to paint a misleading picture. Weasel-words, cherry-picking and overstatements are common. Our politicians and lobby groups are masterful at disguising opinion and ideology as fact, and making statements that, ultimately, aren't checkable. These tactics are harder to spot, but equally dangerous. FactCheck: Is 30% of Northern Territory farmland and 22% of Tasmanian farmland foreign-owned? Election FactCheck: are many refugees illiterate and innumerate? Election FactCheck Q&A: has the NBN been delayed? Election FactCheck Q&A: is it true Australia's unemployment payment level hasn't increased in over 20 years? And more...

During the 2016 EU referendum campaign, both sides used statistics pretty freely to back their arguments. Understandably, UK broadcasters felt compelled to balance competing perspectives, giving audiences the opportunity to hear the relative merits of leaving or remaining in the EU. In doing so, however, the truth of these statistical claims was not always properly tested. This might help explain some of the public's misconceptions about EU membership. So, for example, although independent sources repeatedly challenged the Leave campaign's claim that the UK government spent £350m per week on EU membership, an IPSOS MORI survey found that almost half of respondents believed this was true just days before the election. Of the 6,916 news items examined in our research, more than 20% featured a statistic. Most of these statistical references were fairly vague, with little or limited context or explanation. Overall, only a third provided some context or made use of comparative data. Statistics featured mostly in stories about business, the economy, politics and health. So, for example, three-quarters of all economics items featured at least one statistic, compared to almost half of news about business. But there were some areas - where statistics might play a useful role in communicating trends or levels of risk - that statistics were rarely used.

Aleks Krotoski explores why science is being drowned out by Snake Oil online, and how the balance can be shifted to keep desperate people from being exploited. But despite there being more scientific information online than ever, in the modern day the power of the internet has completely flipped. Verified science and medicine are crowded out by a plethora of misinformation and snake oil salesmen. From the relatively harmless quackery such as infrared light treatments or 'wellness' focused diets, to conspiracy theories around vaccinations that are influencing political policy, and have resulted in outbreaks of dangerous, preventable diseases across the world - what is happening online is having a tangible impact across the globe. Aleks Krotoski explores how the infrastructure of the internet allows medical misinformation to thrive, finds out how people can be drawn into communities centred around medical misinformation and conspiracy theory, and how both scientists and every day internet users can redress the balance online.

In what feels like an increasingly polarised world, trying to convince the "other side" to see things differently often feels futile. Psychology has done a great job outlining some of the reasons why, including showing that, regardless of political leanings, most people are highly motivated to protect their existing views."Our results show why debates about controversial issues often seem so futile," the researchers said. "Our values can blind us to acknowledging the same logic in our opponent's arguments if the values underlying these arguments offend our own."

Nice little interactive piece from the NYTimes - they've charted sets of data from the Bush presidency, can you accurately extend their line charts to show the change over the Obama years?

Interesting discussion of a contentious issue related to the idea of a 'basic income' (but here, in a development context). Martin Ravallion (former Chief Economist of the World Bank, now at CGD) published a useful paper this week asking exactly this question. As he says, there's no simple answer - which is why the question is so interesting. Both 'the right to work' and 'the right to income' aim to secure a more fundamental right: freedom from poverty. Workfare has a long history, notably in India, where the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) guarantees (in theory) up to 100 days work per year, paid at a minimum wage, to anyone who requests it. Cash transfers (often with conditions) have expanded enormously in recent years, while the hot topic of Universal Basic Income (UBI) has advocates across the political spectrum. Which of these approaches is most cost-effective? Ravallion sets out the arguments clearly.

journalists often write about public opinion polls, which are designed to measure the public's attitudes about an issue or idea. Some of the most high-profile polls center on elections and politics. Newsrooms tend to follow these polls closely to see which candidates are ahead, who's most likely to win and what issues voters feel most strongly about. Other polls also offer insights into how people think. For example, a government agency might commission a poll to get a sense of whether local voters would support a sales tax increase to help fund school construction. Researchers frequently conduct national polls to better understand how Americans feel about public policy topics such as gun control, immigration reform and decriminalizing drug use. When covering polls, it's important for journalists to try to gauge the quality of a poll and make sure claims made about the results actually match the data collected. Sometimes, pollsters overgeneralize or exaggerate their findings. Sometimes, flaws in the way they choose participants or collect data make it tough to tell what the results really mean. Below are 11 questions we suggest journalists ask before reporting on poll results. While most of this information probably won't make it into a story or broadcast, the answers will help journalists decide how to frame a poll's findings - or whether to cover them at all.

"I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters of religion and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkey's," wrote Mark Twain. Having written a book about our most common reasoning errors, I would argue that Twain was being rather uncharitable - to monkeys. Whether we are discussing Trump, Brexit, or the Tory leadership, we have all come across people who appear to have next to no understanding of world events - but who talk with the utmost confidence and conviction. And the latest psychological research can now help us to understand why.

Analysis of the day's news in an engaging & entertaining way. Host John Barron is joined by a panel of journalists, political & social commentators for a lively, thought-provoking discussion. #TheDrum This week includes discussion of vaccinations and the lock out laws - a great episode for aei

Argument: Because deductions (the amount of income you can claim is not-taxable) will be reduced, even though the tax rate will go down, the richest will not in fact see an absolute reduction in tax paid. Counterargument - looking at the data, this is in fact not the case...