Brash claims for voter support are just that - they don't add up

A classic case of misrepresentation of polling statistics for political manipulation and self-advancement has surfaced in New Zealand . Former New Zealand National (Conservative) Party leader Don Brash has leaked some very suspect polling results as part of his attempt to take over the leadership of the ACT Party (Right Wing), which he is not even a member of. In fact he is still a member of the National Party!

The ACT party is in coalition with the National party, the Maori party, and the United Future party, forming the current New Zealand government, headed by National leader and Prime Minister John Key. Key rolled Brash after Brash failed to unseat the previous Labour government.

ACT has one electorate seat, Epsom, held by ACT leader Rodney Hide, and under the New Zealand proportional representation system has a total of just five out of the total of 122 seats in Parliament.

Brash has been gathering support for his leadership bid, including failed Auckland Supercity mayoral candidate John Banks (also a former National party Cabinet Minister). Specifically they have been targeting Hide and his Epsom seat.

Three polls of the electorate (no sample data available, nor the polling organisation) "commissioned by a long-standing admirer of former National leader Dr Brash" have been conducted to date, though this is the first data released.

The poll asked "If a candidate were standing in Epsom with the aim of being a coalition partner for National would you prefer that candidate to be?" The options were John Banks, Rodney Hide (sitting member and leader of the ACT party)  or "would not vote for either".

First problem - the question asks who the respondent would "prefer that candidate to be". Not who they would vote for, but who should be on the ballot paper. But the choices include an option "would not vote for either".

Now enter the dodgy results of the latest poll: Banks 35%, Hide 14%, "Don't knows" 24%. Total of 73%. What happened to the other 27%? Are they actually those who responded "would not vote for either"?

Clearly 51% don't want either Banks or Hide!

And who are the 24% "Don't knows"? They weren't an option in the question!

Wonderfully accurate - or is that woefully (in)accurate - polling and disclosure for a man who wishes to lead a party he doesn't belong to, and who has pretentions to be Minister of Finance.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines Brash as:

• heedless of the consequences
• done in haste without regard for consequences
• lacking restraint and discernment
• aggressively self-assertive 

As the Moody Blues once said:
"And we decide which the fact, and which the illusion"

The disconnect between our measures of national income—and how people feel about their lives

The Sarkozy-Stiglitz Commission's Quest to Get Beyond GDP

The Commission's aim was to identify the limits of GDP as an indicator of economic performance and social progress, to consider additional information required for the production of a more relevant picture, to discuss how to present this information in the most appropriate way, and to check the feasibility of measurement tools proposed by the Commission. The Commission's work was not focused on France, nor on developed countries, and its output has been made public, providing a template for every interested country or group of countries.

Economists Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi argue in their recent book, Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up, GDP is a deeply flawed indicator of well-being. Their book is a streamlined version of the final report produced by the Commission to identify the limits of GDP and to outline new metrics that take things like education, gender equality and environmental sustainability into account.

The political reaction has been interesting. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister David Cameron directed the Office for National Statistics to conduct a nationwide survey asking citizens what they believe should be used to measure happiness, with the goal of formulating policy “focused not just on the bottom line, but on all those things that make life worthwhile.”

In Germany, the Bundestag has established a commission on “Growth, Prosperity, Quality of Life” to develop a more holistic measure of progress.

Reforms are under way in Italy, Australia, South Korea, Canada and the United States, where a project called State of the USA, supported by the National Academy of Sciences and numerous prominent foundations, has begun to track some alternative indicators of progress, which will eventually be accessible to citizens online.

A focused comment has come from Alan Krueger, an economist at Princeton who recently stepped down as assistant treasury secretary in the Obama administration: “I think the disconnect between our measures of national income—which have been growing for eighteen months—and how people feel about their lives is raising interest in broader measures of society’s well-being”.

Joint author Jean-Paul Fitoussi, a French economist who served as coordinator of the Sarkozy commission has commented: "One thing that hasn’t happened is the creation of a permanent commission at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to develop a set of common standards, which was promised at the time and [is] crucial to lending any alternative system credibility. Assume you design a good measurement system for one country—how can you compare what is happening in another country? If you have a system, it has to be common; otherwise it has no validity. Invited to Britain for the unveiling of the Cameron initiative on measuring happiness, Fitoussi declined out of frustration. “I was invited, but I said no, because it’s a bit ridiculous: we will end this adventure with fifty systems of national accounting and measurement.”

Further reading:

http://www.thenation.com/article/159926/sarkozy-stiglitz-commissions-quest-get-beyond-gdp