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For the second time in a couple of months voters in an election have delivered a result which has surprised the “experts” and pollsters. In the UK we saw the opinion polls misfire badly but yesterday’s events in Greece saw them in even more disarray. The referendum which was supposed to be neck and neck turned out to be as shown below. From the BBC.

The final result in the referendum, published by the interior ministry, was 61.3% “No”, against 38.7% who voted “Yes”.

Accordingly we are left again wondering as to the value and worth of opinion polls as rather than a close result we saw a decisive one.

Some care is also needed in considering what was decided as it was presented by both Euro area politicians and some sections of the media as a vote on the Euro. This was deliberately misleading as Prime Minister Tsipras was…

  An anti-austerity march in front of the Greek Parliament in Athens. (Ggia/ CC BY-SA 3.0)

Now that Greece has become the first advanced nation to fall into arrears with the International Monetary Fund, the nation has reached a crucial crossroads: Should it concede to the demands of the “troika” — the institutions representing creditor interests—or continue to reject austerity and prepare to ditch the euro?

Amid mass protests, tumbling markets and bank closures, Greece will hold a referendum Sunday to decide.

Recent opinion pieces by Nobel Prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman maintain that Greece must keep going it alone and vote no.

Stiglitz writes in The Guardian “… the economics behind the programme that the ‘troika’ (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) foisted on Greece five years ago has been abysmal, resulting in a 25% decline in the…