Apathy Sketchpad

I think by now more people than have ever met me know what I think of news items that exist because PR companies generate ‘data’ to manipulate journalists into advertising their clients, and here is another one. This one is a survey, which is perhaps not as bad as the formula ones, since they did at least have to do something to generate this data and it does at least tell us something (albeit not something of any use).

It’s not very objective or rigorous, obviously, but I can’t help but like it anyway. How could you not when it leads to such brilliant headlines as “Children say happiness is important”? This from the Metro, which runs a snide little column called “No S**t, Sherlock” (their asterisks), where they poke fun at scientific studies that produce results that they consider obvious. Hm.

Mostly though, it’s an excuse to have a few gentle laughs at the naïvité of children. I can’t find the full breakdown for this year’s survey, but from the summaries in newspapers and the results from 2005-2007, it’s safe to say an equally valid headline would be “Children stupid, survey finds”.

The best bit is question 3: “if you were king or queen of the world, what rules would you make?”. It turns out that children in Luton are far-right-wing lunatics. And they say that you get more conservative with age. My favourite one was the seventh most popular answer in 2005, which was “everlasting pets”. I’d like to think that once people grow up they stop thinking that the government can just ban cancer or something, but clearly they don’t.