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
It’s 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. That’s 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 British government said all ambulances should reach a life threatening emergency (category A) within 8 minutes – suddenly there was 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.
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.
Residents of Notting Hill, west London, received more in capital gains than the combined population of Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle. More broadly, the top 0.1% of UK adults received 86.4% of gains (FYI this is money received from selling an investment for more than the purchase price).
Inspired by the “broken windows” theory of crime – where minor disorder leads to the potential for more severe crime – the NYPD aimed to increase enforcement around minor offences throughout the 2000s. Unfortunately, the target encouraged arrests for absurd crimes; eating doughnuts in a Brooklyn park, or subway riders placing their feet on seats at 4am.
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.
According to EU law, all members must keep their budget deficit to within 3% of GDP. You’d think this was based on sophisticated modelling and forecasting, but actually Guy Abeille, then a senior Budget Ministry official, came up with the figure in less than an hour. As he explains, he needed “an easy rule that he could deploy in his discussions with ministers who kept coming into his office to demand money.” And luckily for him the number 3 was “somewhat reminiscent of the Trinity.”
Most people don’t think of Singapore as particularly free: laws are draconian, spitting is a fineable offence, and drug smugglers are executed. But to many locals, the strict laws is exactly what makes it freedom. “Freedom is being able to walk on the streets unmolested in the wee hours in the morning. 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.”
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 at $600 a year. These and other omissions explain why, to quote John F Kennedy, “GDP measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile”.
Every governing party facing election in a developed country lost vote share in 2024, the first time this has ever happened.
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.