The Extremists Won't Win, But The Moderates Are Pretty Extreme

This Pew survey from last year gives an indication of where public opinion in Egypt stands. It stands in the corner of the room marked "crazy"- with a large majority in favour of the public concerned about the rise of Islamic extremist but an equally large majority in favour of stoning for adultery and flogging for petty crimes.

So whilst the religious extremists probably won't take sole of Egypt, even the moderates & liberals aren't going tp be the Egyptian equivalents of Christopher Hitchens and will be likely to throw the Islamists a few bones.

Tomorrow's News Today.

I see, via Autonomous Minds, that the public is much less supportive of tax and spend than they were a few years ago according to the "British Social Attitudes" survey.

I discovered this back in August.

How The World Sees Communism.

Interesting survey* at the BBC on how the world views the collapse of Communism 20 years on: Relief at the demise of the USSR seems to be widespread throughout the West even though feelings are mixed in the poorer countries. I'd argue that it the poor countries who have benefited most from the end of communism with the wave of democratisation that has spread throughout Eastern Europe, South East Asia and Latin America being a direct result of the absence of a communist threat.

The survey also asks what people think about free markets and the results are much more mixed:

With more than 40% of the French population believing that capitalism is "fatally flawed", the failure of the French left to win power for 15 years is remarkable.

In Britain only about half that number believe that capitalism is doomed and an even smaller number that the demise of the USSR was a bad thing although if they had surveyed Guardian Towers the results would have been very different.

* and an "interesting" headline!

The Public Loves Taxes!

Also from the BSA survey I referred to in the previous post, here is how people's attitudes to taxation and spending have changed over time:



The bad news is that the public seems historically to be in favour of tax and spend, on the other hand there has been a pretty dramatic fall in public support for increasing taxes and spending over the five years from 2002 to 2007.

Update: In the comments Matthew plots the support for tax & spend against actual levels of tax & spend. There is a pretty strong negative correllation:

British Children Most Resistant To Brainwashing

A survey of ten countries has been done for the British Council which has found that UK school pupils are the least globally aware. From highest to lowest the countries were ranked as follows; 1-Nigeria, 2- India, 3- Brazil, 4- Saudi Arabia, 5- Spain, 6- Germany, 7-China, 8-Czech, 9- USA, 10- UK.

The survey was carried out only among internet users which explains why the poorer countries do so well, seeing as in those internet users will be less representative of the wider population In fact judging from my email account most Nigerian internet users are sons or widows of General Abacha and desperately need my bank account to put money into. Judging from the BBC report it isn't a particularly good survey as it asks vague self assessment questions that don't actually measure awareness of anything, but rather whether the children are likely to share the values of the people who run the British Council:

Asked whether they saw themselves as citizens of the world or their own country, most saw themselves as global citizens - except in the UK, USA and the Czech Republic.

Young people in Brazil were among the most likely to agree with the statement "it is a good idea for schools in my country to have links or partnerships with schools in other countries" but the least likely to be in schools that had such links.

So as surveys go it isn't much cop. Mind you there has been a proper survey of European and American adults that was conducted recently for "France 24" which suggests that as a whole we tend to be less interested in foreign affairs than most countries of similar economic development.