Australia is currently unsustainable in many respects. Change is
coming. Will that change be wisely managed? Or will it be forced upon us
in potentially catastrophic ways?
Wise management will require governments at all levels to make lots of decisions, and to make them much more quickly than they have been to date.
In this decision making, public opinion is a critical constraint. For example, an equitable road-use pricing system could solve our congestion problems, but doesn’t stand a chance in the court of public opinion.
Simply put, unless we can improve the relationship between government decision making and public opinion, we’re going to hit the wall. Hard.
Improving it will require, among other things, developing better ways to find out what the public really thinks. We usually assume that what the public thinks can be ascertained using standard opinion polls and surveys. Yet we also understand that those opinions are generally not very thoughtful or informed.
As many have pointed out, respondents are largely ignorant – indeed rationally ignorant – about the issues. Their opinions are subject to manipulation by powerful interests; and their opinions can be “manufactured” by the polling processing itself.
Read more: http://theconversation.edu.au/sustainability-demands-public-wisdom-7813
Wise management will require governments at all levels to make lots of decisions, and to make them much more quickly than they have been to date.
In this decision making, public opinion is a critical constraint. For example, an equitable road-use pricing system could solve our congestion problems, but doesn’t stand a chance in the court of public opinion.
Simply put, unless we can improve the relationship between government decision making and public opinion, we’re going to hit the wall. Hard.
Improving it will require, among other things, developing better ways to find out what the public really thinks. We usually assume that what the public thinks can be ascertained using standard opinion polls and surveys. Yet we also understand that those opinions are generally not very thoughtful or informed.
As many have pointed out, respondents are largely ignorant – indeed rationally ignorant – about the issues. Their opinions are subject to manipulation by powerful interests; and their opinions can be “manufactured” by the polling processing itself.
Read more: http://theconversation.edu.au/sustainability-demands-public-wisdom-7813
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