Are things getting better?

The latest edition of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Measuring Australia’s Progress was released yesterday. From what I have read and heard about it (at 71 megabytes I decided to wait for the print version rather than download it) it is better than previous efforts, criticised by Peter Saunders here.

Such reports are, however, likely to have only modest effects on public opinion. Poll respondents are always more pessimistic about trends for other people than they are about trends for themselves, and more negative about the present versus the past than the present versus the future. I try to explain why here (html, but click on the pdf version to see the figure and tables clearly). It is an interesting case study in how biases and heuristics distort the answers people give pollsters.