The latest Ipsos Perils of Perception survey highlights how wrong the public across 40 countries are about key global issues and features of the population in their country.

The key patterns are:

Most countries think their population is much more Muslim than it actually is – and that the Muslim population is increasing at an incredible rate
All countries think their population is less happy than they actually say they are
Most countries are more tolerant on homosexuality, abortion and pre-marital sex than they think they are
And nearly all countries think wealth is more evenly distributed than it actually is.

In Great Britain we get some things very wrong – but some things right…But Britain is far from the worst in identifying realities and predicting the future – in fact we are the third most accurate country in our “Index of Ignorance”. Looking across the 40 countries included, many are much more wrong…

https://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchp...ets-wrong.aspx

The irony is that the lack of focus is itself ignorance.

I do think the media play a big part in this. I know a lot of people think that the social housing shortage is due to immigrants getting preferential treatment over uk citizens and getting "all the houses" but i'm fairly sure I read that over 90% of social housing goes to UK citizens and that the shortage is actually down to successive governments failing to build enough stock to cover the shortfall in social housing after properties are bought up.

But talk to any random elderly person in the street, and it's usually the elderly more often than not, and they'll insist it's down to the immigrants because of what they've seen in the media, or, quite often, through chinese whispers and word of mouth.

Yes - the elderly `especially were brought up to believe the press and TV presented a balanced, accurate and factual view of things. These days they all chase after headlines and shock whether balanced or not.

I remember last year especially when the BBC, night after night, showed miles and miles of backed up queues of lorries heading to Dover, together with pictures of hundreds of immigrants at Calais.

In the public mind, people thought the lorry queues were being caused by illegal immigration, when in fact they were two completely different issues - and, if you stopped to think about it logically, there was no way immigrants in Callais could cause queues of lorries in Britain.

But the BBC knew what they were doing and just didn't care.

I'm having an Adam Curtiss moment here.

I just checked the stats for my local area. With regard to identifying realities and predicting the future I would have to say that the national figures are utterly irrelevant.

I'm precisely as happy as I think I am

that's how the happy thing works, unless you're Plato