The 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey Report: Even more interesting if you actually bother to read it

The Center for Disease Control recently put out a study on (among other things) sex crime victimization, the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. The most repeated figures from the study are that 1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men (excluding those in institutional settings such as prison, which is a problem with the numbers but not the primary one) over the age of 18 have been the victim of rape or attempted rape, as defined by the CDC, at some point in their lifetimes. These are the numbers all the media outlets reporting on the study and everyone talking about it online are quoting; no surprise, given that that they are the ones the CDC itself is focusing on.

The numbers make quite a contrast- a staggering 1 in 5 women alongside an unfortunate but comparatively rare 1 in 71 men, a monstrous pandemic that bespeaks a grave problem with our society alongside an unfortunate statistical blip. A blip that would still comprise more than 1 million human beings, admittedly, but if you want to justify the erasure, trivialization, or victim-blaming of male victims and/or victims of women by arguing that such crimes are so rare and anomalous that for most purposes the victims can be treated as if they did not exist, the juxtaposition of 1 in 5 1 vs. 1 in 71 can certainly help to give the impression that men who complain are just whining about something petty, perhaps for some nefarious, misogynistic purpose. That's already started, and there will plenty more of that in the years to come.

There are some things about the study that are problematic. Adding the numbers for rape and attempted rape together and just calling the resulting sum “rape” is misleading, even though I think that for some purposes an aggregate figure is more useful and revealing than just the number of completed rapes. The survey question about drug or alcohol-facilitated rape is worded very vaguely and broadly and can potentially encompass not only sex that occurred when someone was unconscious or incapable of giving meaningful consent, but any sex where one or both participants were drunk or high, and so the number given is likely too high. (And has some bizarre implications, or would if applied in a nonsexist manner: a signifciant portion of the women classified as rape victims under such a standard would also be rape perpetrators, and actually became both simultaneously.) And, as mentioned above, the prison population, among others, is not included in the survey data.

However, as none of these affect my point one way or the other, I'll not deal with them here. The problem with the numbers is more fundamental than that.

The sturdiest falsehoods are not based on outright lies, but upon facts stripped of relevant context. Does the study indicate a lifetime “rape “ or attempted “rape” victimization of 1 in 5 for women and 1 in 71 for men? Yes. Why the scare quotes? Here's how the study itself uses the word, from page 17 of the PDF file of the report:

Rape is defined as any completed or attempted unwanted vaginal (for women), oral, or anal penetration through the use of physical force (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threats to physically harm and includes times when the victim was drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.

Among women, rape includes vaginal, oral, or anal penetration by a male using his penis. It also includes vaginal or anal penetration by a male or female using their fingers or an object.

Among men, rape includes oral or anal penetration by a male using his penis. It also includes anal penetration by a male or female using their fingers or an object.

This is consistent with the definition used in previous CDC studies on the subject, and in other studies such as the Department of Justice's commonly cited National Violence Against Women Survey. So, what isn't rape?

Most conspicuously, forcing someone to engage in vaginal sexual intercourse against their will through violence or the threat of violence is not rape if it is the male who is unwilling. Forcing someone to perform fellatio on you is rape. However, forcing someone to perform cunnilingus on you, or performing fellatio on someone else against their will, is not. Forced genital-digital contact can be counted as rape, but never when it's a man being forced. Forcible anal sex is not rape if the victim is forced to penetrate, rather than be penetrated.

We have a laundry list of sexual acts that are rape when the woman involved has not consented, but cease to be rape when an equally involuntary and directly analogous or physically identical act occurs when the man has not consented. In fact, the only thing a woman can do to a man that is counted as rape is forcibly inserting something into his anus. Everything else that would be considered rape if it was a Worthy Victim who didn't want it goes into either “Being made to penetrate somebody else,” a new category in CDC studies included in the subsection "Sexual Violence Other than Rape," or “unwanted sexual contact.”

The estimated lifetime "rape" figure for men in the study is 1,581,000 million men, compared to about 21,840,000 million for women. If being “made to penetrate” (which, like the rape, category, includes attempted as well as completed acts) were counted as rape in the same way that identical involuntary acts the man involved did want are, the estimated number of men over 18 who have been raped in their lifetime jumps from 1.58 million to 7 million, plus however many male rape victims are currently in prison and so outside the scope of the study, plus however many of the 13.3 million men filed under “unwanted sexual contact” would also be designated as rape victims by the CDC in a reverse-gender scenario.

Going by the CDC's lifetime stats, around one in every four American rape and attempted rape survivors, at minimum, is male. Based on the statistics about the sex of the perpetrator (see page 24), well over half of those seven million were raped by a female perpetrator.

And then there's something that is written plain as day in the study itself that you'd you'd never even guess at from what almost anybody says about it- or, indeed, what the CDC itself says outside the pages of the study results themselves. The survey subject were asked not one but two questions about each category of sexual crime covered: if such an act had been committed against them at some point in their lifetime, and in the last 12 months. This is done with good reason: memory is unreliable and highly malleable over time, to the point that people not only forget events but sometimes “remember” a sexual encounter as consensual even though they did not consider it to be such at the time. People interpret and reinterpret their past perceptions through layer upon layer of filters- their general assumptions about how the world works, their mental images of themselves and people they know, what others have said, what they want to believe is true- and as an event recedes further into the past and the original memories of it grow fuzzier these things help fill in the gaps.

Thus, questions covering relatively short, recent periods of time are typically considered more accurate than asking someone to look back over their entire life. They are also more relevant to the prevalence of violence now than questions about lifetime victimization rates. which encompass decades.

Based on the survey responses to the latter question, the study estimates that 1,270,000 women over 18 outside of institutional setting were the victims of rape or attempted rape, as defined by the CDC, in the last 12 months. (There is no 12-month figure for women “made to penetrate,” and likewise no 12-month “rape” number for men, due to insufficient sample size.) Meanwhile, since we all know that women are the overwhelming majority of rape victims, the study estimates that the number of men over 18 “made to penetrate” was a paltry... 1,267,000, of which roughly one million were "made to penetrate" by a female. Which would make women the perpetrators in roughly 40% of rapes of adults and men the victims in about half of them, according to the CDC's survey data.

I do not think, as many people would, that the idea that the number of men “forced to penetrate” might be comparable to the number or women forcibly penetrated is somehow inherently absurd. With the advantage of hindsight, I don't even find it particularly counterintuitive.

It doesn't require the existence of a vast horde of female predators or Amazons who can match a man's upper body strength. A disproportionate portion of male-perpetrated sex crimes are committed by a comparatively small number of serial offenders, and typically involve tactics- social manipulation, physical and psychological isolation, surprise, shock, confusion, alcohol and other drugs that impair motor control and situational awareness or cause unconsciousness, weapons and other instruments of intimidation, etc.- that greatly reduce the amount of actual brute physical force needed. I see no reason to think that predatory women would differ greatly in those respects, and they enjoy certain advantages (near-absolute lack of public or law enforcement vigilance against them, male socialization against injuring a woman in self-defense, the ability to credibly threaten a target with imprisonment or vigilante violence via false criminal charges) over their male counterparts.

If you 1. don't think Victorian sentimentality and its modern left-wing reincarnations are necessarily a trustworthy guide to actual women, 2. credit human females with enough mental capacity to use some of the fancier hominid forebrain gimmicks like planning, social interaction, and tool use, and 3. have ever possessed a functioning penis or at least advanced your knowledge of them beyond the "boys have an outie" stage, either of which should immunize you from idiotic notions about raping a man somehow being physiologically impossible, it isn't unthinkable. And it's not as if the idea that women are obliged to concern themselves with men's sexual consent in any serious way is something the typical American woman is likely to get much exposure to, least of all from typical "anti-rape" activists.

Suppose one takes the CDC numbers at face value- as the mainstream media and most people commenting on it and treating it as something important are, and as previous CDC estimates about male victimization typically have been by the same. In that case, this is quite the bombshell. My own misgivings about the intoxication question doesn't change that, since there's no reason to think that it would inflate the male number more than the female. In either case, the CDC's study has produced startling results that are radically at odds with both traditional and feminist assumptions about rape.

And virtually no one notices. It sits in plain sight in a much-publicized report that many people have been talking about, from a source widely considered one of the country's authorities on the prevalence of sexual and interpersonal violence, and virtually no one notices or says anything. In fact, thus far the three most prominent sources I've been able to turn up that reference the study while specifically addressing the subject of male sexual victimization- sensitive feminist guy/occasional child molester apologist Hugo Schwyzer, Soraya Chemaly at Huffington Post, and Maya Dusenbery at popular blog Feministing- explicitly claim that it says the opposite of what it actually and quite clearly says! (Though Dusenbery was just quoting Schwyzer in that section of her post, which goes to show why you shouldn't outsource your research on sex crimes to someone who responds to a story about an adult caretaker being repeatedly masturbated by an 11-year-old by defending the adult and calling the child a sexual predator.) There's some online comment threads, mostly at a few sites focused on violence against men and boys or men's issues in general. There's a nice examination at a German masculist site (in English), Feckblog. There's a fourth-string libertarian blogger who occasionally refers to himself in the third person. And that's pretty much it, nearly a month after the report was published.

This isn't really surprising, unfortunately; as with so many other issues, the two recognized "sides" are just minor variations on the same theme. Most conservatives would consider the idea that female-perpetrated sexual predation was a widespread problem absurd, and are unlikely to consider such acts serious crimes even if they did acknowledge them, so they're hardly going to make noise about it. Meanwhile, on the Left, the folks who have the loudest voices and biggest megaphones in discussions of sexual violence have a long track record of "proving" that rape is overwhelmingly committed against women and almost universally perpetrated by men by citing statistics on male "rape" rates that define millions of rape victims- and their rapists- out of existence in the same way the new study's official definition does. (E.g. Past CDC studies, the National Violence Against Women Survey, the oft-repeated claim from the latter that 1 in 33 men will be the victim of rape or attempted rape compared to 1 in 6 women, etc.) And this continues. Despite the startling data in the new CDC study that so many people are seemingly taking so seriously, it doesn't look like things will be any different than they were back when a man or boy being "made to penetrate" wasn't counted as a victim of "sexual violence other than rape" because he wasn't counted as anything at all.

Happy New Year to everybody!

Happy New Year!

The Superfluous Man is not a terribly cheerful blog, generally, so I wanted to start this year off on a positive note by thanking some people who have helped this blog in one way or another. Some names have been truncated to protect the innocent:

My friends JT, Kevin, Dave, Peter, Lecester, Cheryl Cline, and Catherine.

Pete Eyre, Jeremy Sapienza, James Wilson, and Jim Babka.

Midnight and Toshi.

All of my other friends, who know who they are.

My family.

Mark, Dr. B, and the other Kevin.

T and F.

People online who have helped me in one way or another: Jacob, Danny, Jim, Daran, TB, Alfonso, Keisha, and everybody else.

Everyone who's linked to this site.

Unattainable Bar Chick, for her unfailing friendliness, kindness, waitressing and bartending professionalism, willingness to laugh at my stupid jokes, and Lisa Loeb/Velma Dinkley-esque hotness. You were always far nicer to me than you had to be, or than I had any right to expect. I always knew that I would never tell you how I felt, but you made me wish I could have. Thank you, and best of luck with everything.

And, of course, everyone who takes the time to read The Superfluous Man; hopefully doing so has been worthwhile for you. I tend to be pretty useless trying to express myself when I'm face-to-face with people unless it's with folks I already know well, so being able to do so by writing online is very precious to me, and so is knowing that someone is actually reading it. Thanks. I hope you'll keep coming back in 2012!

And now, just the thing to make the year complete: The Star Wars Holiday Special!

Happy holidays, everybody! The year is almost over. While the sort of angry and/or depressing writing that permeates this blog might give a different impression, this has actually been a good year for me; it's just that my writing on more pleasant and cheerful subjects appears on sites other than this one.

Despite the dark topics that this blog mostly focuses on, I want The Superfluous Man to conclude 2011 and welcome 2012 on a happy note. To that end, I'm dedicating the last Superfluous Man post of 2011 to posting this link to my commentary, which I wrote the original version of in 2009 and have added to each year since, on the legendarily awful late 1970s TV cash-in, The Star Wars Holiday Special. I hope it makes you laugh. And if it piques your curiosity enough to get you to find a copy to watch yourself, remember: I tried to warn you.

Thanks for reading, and I hope I'll see you all again in 2012!

The National Domestic Violence Hotline and the Verizon Foundation join forces to demonize abused children

The Verizon Foundation, a nonprofit offshoot of the telecommunications company, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline, established by the United States government in 1996 through grants provided under the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act, recently released a short video entitled “Monsters,” which the Verizon Foundation says “shows the immediate and long-term impact on children who witness domestic violence.” Now, this is an important issue. Subjecting children to the spectacle of one or both of their parents being attacked, degraded, or tormented by the other is a form of psychological/emotional abuse that can be devastating even if no one ever raises their hand against the child. I'd praise the video for bringing this up if only the folks at the Verizon Foundation and the National Domestic Violence Hotline were actually siding with such children, rather than against them.

Now, one can- and should- object to the fact that the ad explicitly defines domestic violence to be something men do and women suffer- if my introduction to the concept of domestic violence were this ad, the notion that a man or a lesbian could be a victim of "domestic violence” wouldn't occur to me. That would be less of an issue if the makers and the typical expected viewer of this came from a culture where it was widely understood that the male perpetrator-female victim scenario described was not the only configuration possible, and children seeking help because of a violent mother weren't ignored or called liars because of traditional prejudices that “women don't do that” or feminist claims that “domestic violence is gendered,” but this wasn't made in that world. In this case the usual erasure of any victim of intimate relationship violence who isn't a heterosexual female is only a secondary problem, however.

The ad starts off with an animated depiction of a child in a violent household. We are told of her pain and distress. She lives in “darkness,” in a “nightmare.” And it is very conspicuously HER pain and distress, and SHE who lives in a world of darkness and nightmares- the consistent use of 'she” and “her” for the victimized child is not, as we shall see, merely a byproduct of the fact that English lacks a singular third-person pronoun for referring to a human being without reference to sex.

The source of her distress is explicitly referred to as her father, which brings us to the first group of children in the ad's cross-hairs. Suppose you're a little kid who's upset because you see Mommy hitting Daddy, or pushing him down, or throwing things at him, or waving a kitchen knife around and screaming about how someday she's going to cut his balls off. Maybe the sound of people yelling or screaming or sobbing at night makes it hard to sleep. Maybe you hate yourself because you think you're somehow the cause of it. Maybe you're afraid that someday Mommy will kill Daddy, or even get so angry about something that she'll kill you. Maybe part of you wishes she would, because surely she wouldn't act this way if you were a better child- and if you were gone, maybe everybody could be happy again.

And those nice people who talk about this thing called “domestic violence,” and how it's really bad, and that it's not children's fault, and that if it's happening in your house you should tell a grown-up you trust so you can get help, and that people being hurt by it deserve help and protection? They're not talking about you. They're not there to help you. They don't care about you. They've helpfully explained who the people who need and deserve help are, and you're not one of them.

Again, this wouldn't be such an issue in a world where a child whose mother abuses her father was likely to have other sources information telling her that what happens in her family is also "domestic violence," and that she and her father also deserve help, and where an adult authority figure told of such a situation by a child was likely to have also been exposed to such information, and to have internalized it to the point that they could be counted on to treat the child's situation with due seriousness. Unfortunately, people living in that world aren't the ones seeing this.

The all but exclusive fixation on male perpetrators brought about by gender feminist domination of this topic doesn't just erase or vilify male victims; it also throws many women and girls to the wolves, if the person who hurt them has the wrong genitalia. The folks who dominate the discourse about abuse typically seem, based on revealed preference, to desire the former badly enough to consider the latter an acceptable trade-off. These children get off comparatively lightly, however; they're merely written off. There are worse things.

The ad continues by saying that the girl will be more likely to be abused herself as an adult, since she will be more inclined see domestic violence as normal. And then, finally, the existence of male children comes up. After being told in anguished tones about how much girls are hurt by living in violent household, we're told “and her brother, he'll be twice as likely to become a monster himself.” At which point a little cartoon boy appears, briefly, only to immediately transform into a grotesque, ferocious-looking monstrosity that looks like some horrible beast of Greek mythology filtered through H.P. Lovecraft, looming hideously over the fragile, prone form of his helpless sister.

The little girl, of course, remains human.

Contrary to popular myth, most child abuse victims do not go on to become abusers themselves. There are many other ways a boy can be shaped by such an experience, even if they are seldom thought worthy of mention.

Maybe he'll grow up to think of all men as sadistic monsters, and loathe himself for being one. Maybe he'll cut himself off from others, seeing his own permanent loneliness as an acceptable price to pay to “protect” women and children from what he imagines himself to be- and what the makers of the ad want us to imagine him to be. Maybe he'll grow up to let other people abuse him because the memory of his father makes him so frightened by his own capacity for anger that he doesn't dare stand up for himself. Perhaps he'll teach his sons to “respect women” by doing likewise. (In which case he is hurting others, albeit not others the domestic violence industry cares about.) Maybe he'll actually try to stop his father, and get beaten to a bloody pulp. Or maybe he'll spend the rest of his life reviling himself for “failing” to protect his mother- for not being strong enough, or big enough, or brave enough, or loving his mom enough to somehow stop a grown man when he was only a child.

But no such boy, no traumatized boy who ought to be viewed with sympathy rather than fear and horror, exists in the universe of the ad. None ever could.

In two minutes and thirty seconds otherwise saturated with descriptions of the terrible pain and suffering inflicted on innocent people by domestic violence, the heart-wrenching litany of pain, misery and tragedy abruptly stops when male children are mentioned  and is replaced with horror and revulsion- not for the abuse or the abuser, but for the victim. Once the loathsome, terrifying boy-thing departs and the narration moves to the subject of the battered wife, the original tragic, sympathetic tone resumes. The effects of systematic emotional abuse on a helpless little boy are referred to solely in terms of how they make the boy seem scary, dangerous, inhuman, or evil.

Imagine being one of those boys and seeing this. Imagine being one of those boys and seeing this while being told that this is the message of people who really, really care about how domestic violence hurts innocent people.

The dehumanization is absolute. The effects of domestic violence on women and girls are bad because- as the ad pulls out all the stops to tell us- they cause women and girls to suffer. The effects of domestic violence on boys are bad... because they cause women and girls to suffer. The boy's capacity to experience pain is utterly erased, and he is stripped of any moral value as a human being in his own right. His existence and experiences are relevant only insofar as they affect people who do have moral value- women and girls. We are thus encouraged to think of traumatized male children not as victims who warrant sympathy or protection, but as menaces to be feared and despised- as monsters.

This is not unusual, though the Verizon Foundation video makes it more explicit than usual by portraying the boy as literally inhuman. Turning abused and traumatized boys into objects of fear or revulsion is a fairly common feature in discussions of domestic violence. The same is commonly true if the boy is the direct target of abuse. In public beliefs about male victims of (male-perpetrated) sexual abuse, in particular, the myth that abuse victims typically go on to abuse others is so ubiquitous and colors people's attitudes towards abuse victims so strongly that the victim's supposed propensity to abuse others in the future is commonly spoken of as if it were the primary harm of the abuse itself- the greatest evil of the abuse is becomes something that will happen to some undefined person at some point in the future, which conveniently vitiates the perceived need to feel sympathy for any actual existing male abuse victim.

(This illustrates the extent to which attitudes towards male victimization transcend the boundaries between different sides of cultural and ideological arguments. Feminists dominate the discourse about domestic violence and efforts to encourage public awareness of it, and do more than anyone else to encourage the “hurt boy=future monster” attitude in that area. The same is not true in the case of male victims of male sexual predators, however, where such an attitude is expressed by many people from a much more diverse array of ideological backgrounds and is probably most conspicuously expressed by people of conservative views who are actively hostile to feminists. Members of both groups typically have an exaggerated view of male strength that makes it difficult to think of one as truly victimized rather than victimizer, and both often seem to think of raising boys primarily in terms of neutralizing the danger they are seen as naturally posing, so this convergence is to be expected.)

There's no need to assume that anyone at the Verizon Foundation or the National Domestic Violence Hotline had this aim in mind. It is the natural, predictable product of the mindset that dominates discourse on the subjects of domestic violence and child abuse, as well as related areas like sexual violence- one that tends to treat the well-being of males (especially once they're no longer young enough to enjoy the limited moral-value-by-association of being regarded as appendages of their mother) as having purely instrumental value, if that, which is prone to regarding even the most vulnerable males as present or future menaces to be contained, and which is at best extremely uncomfortable with the idea that males can be hurt as badly as females or should be viewed with equal concern if they are and frequently outright hostile to the idea. 

The best thing I can think of to sum up my feelings about this is something Jacob Taylor of the blog Toy Solders wrote a few years ago in his post “Being a Boy: 101.” He was talking about a different topic- a school speaker's treatment of a boy who had been sexually abused, rather than children who grew up witnessing their mothers being battered- but the subjects are closely related enough and his words so relevant that they're worth quoting here.

I wonder how many of the boys in that class have been abused. I wonder how many of them have been raped. I wonder how many of them go home to a house full of violence and say to themselves, “I won’t be like this when I grow up,” only to have someone like this woman say, “You have a penis. Yes, you will.”

There are so many monsters lying in wait for children to tear apart, yes. So terribly many.

Thoughts on Daniel Klein's studies of economic literacy

A little while back economist Daniel Klein, a professor at George Mason University and editor of Econ Journal Watch, and Zeljka Buturovic, a researcher at Zogby International, published an article entitled "Economic Enlightenment in Relation to College-going, Ideology, and Other Variables" which presented data from a survey about how people of different ideological stances view economic questions that, Klein argued, inidcated that people who identify as politically left-wing showed less undertsanding of basic economics than those identifying as libertarians or conservatives. He's now calling his own prior claims "partially vitiated" in a new article by  Buturovic and himself, "Economic Enlightenment Revisited," based on the results of another survey which he believes shows that people of different ideologies are in fact about equally likely to believe falsehoods about economics, depending on how comfortably the answer to a particular question fits with their other beliefs. He attributes his prior results to a survey that was biased by including too many questions on issues the Left tends to be bad on and his own eagerness to believe something that supported his own assumptions. (Klein is himself a libertarian.)

I greatly admire Klein's willingness to publicly state that he believes himself to have been mistaken on a matter that he had been quite outspoken about. However, after reading his new article, I don't think he actually was wrong; at any rate, I don't think the additional data he presents tells against his own prior conclusion in the way he believes.

In each study, Klein gave the test subjects a list of statements about economics, such as "free trade causes unemployment." The survey subjects, all of whom were American adults, would then write an answer stating that they (strongly or somewhat ) agreed or disagreed with it, or weren't sure. Klein then compiled the figures for how often respondents of different political persuasions agreed with false statements or disagreed with true ones to get a sense of how well people of different beliefs understood economic issues. Conservatives and libertarians did better than liberals on the first survey. Concerned about the possibility that this result might be caused by an ideological slant to the survey items (cherry-picking subject matter so that most or all of the statements concerned areas people on the Left were especially likely to get wrong, for instance) rather than an actual difference in knowledge, he did a second survey, this time with questions intentionally designed to poke at potential conservative or libertarian blind spots. This time the results were reversed, with conservatives and libertarians scoring much lower than on the first survey.

I agree that the first survey is imperfect. In particular, the survey item "Third-world workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited" is problematic because, depending on how one interprets the word “exploited, ” agreement can be either a sign of economic ignorance (i.e. you believe that the workers would benefit economically if they had to fall back on whatever second-best option they had themselves judged inferior to the sweatshop) or an answer to a question- in this case, a moral one- other than the one the survey meant to ask and is intended to assess. (Though if you changed it to something more economics-specific, such as whether sweatshop make their workers worse off than they would be in their absence, I imagine the percentage of wrong answers would still be pretty high.) I also like the fact that the second survey includes an item about the economic effects of immigrant workers, an important and heated subject that was absent the first time around.

However, the first and second sets of questions differ in some important ways that are likely to make the first set more genuinely revealing than the second, because there were serious problems with the second set that make it questionable whether it measures what it is supposed to be measuring.

The first issue is that with the exception of the statement about sweatshops noted above the first survey consists of fairly clear, unambiguous statements like "Rent-control laws lead to housing shortages." This isn't the case with several statements on the second survey, and the result is that several statements on the second survey can't be trusted to measure what they're supposed to.

If some of my points here seem like semantic hair-splitting, it's because such hair-splitting is incredibly important in order to make sure that a survey is actually measuring what it's supposed to. Klein and Buturovic's interpretation of the new data hinges on certain quite specific assumptions about how survey takers interpreted the survey statements. If some of the survey statements are worded in a way that allows for multiple plausible interpretations of what's being asked, some of which could entail a different answer from the one treated as correct by the survey for reasons unrelated to economic ignorance, then responses to that statement on the survey can't be presumed to measure what it's trying to measure, especially if members of some of the the different groups being assessed are especially likely to take a particular interpretation. This is, I believe, the case on at least three of the survey items. One could argue about whether the word meanings I think were most likely being used by the typical respondent are the best way of using those words or not, but like the interpretation of “exploit” in the first survey that's not a question of economics.

Two statements to which the majority of libertarians gave what was judged to be a wrong response response were "Drug prohibition fails to reduce people’s access to drugs" and "Gun control fails to reduce people’s access to guns." The survey treats these statements as false, since prohibition makes the prohibited item more costly, so agreeing with them is counted as an incorrect answer in the respondent's score is.

But is it false? It depends on what "reducing access" means.

It could mean increasing the overall cost of getting drugs or guns, which is presumably the intended interpretation- but it could also be taken to mean, and in typical language is probably more likely to be taken to mean, eliminating the ability to acquire something at all or at least making it so insurmountably difficult that it is effectively impossible. Klein and Buturovic do acknowledge this problem, somewhat, but argue in defense of their interpretation of the responses that “it is reasonable to include price effects as a dimension of 'access'.”

It is reasonable, but it's also quite reasonable not to and instead treat access as basically binary, and I think it very likely that this is what most respondents- of all ideological types- were doing. In typical usage the latter meaning is probably more common- it would sound odd to most people if I said that an increase in the price of a particular class of products that I had previously been able to buy had lowered my “access” to them, unless the increase was so large that paying it was now completely out of reach. Gun and drug laws in the United States have done no such thing. Some illegal guns can be bought for less than $100, sometimes significantly less, and even people who literally own nothing but the clothes on their backs can and frequently do support illegal drug habits. The non-monetary cost of is high, due to prohibition- you have to be willing to break the law and possibly associate with dangerous characters- but it's also one that anybody can pay if they choose.

Klein and Buturovic also state they believe that their interpretation would be sound even if one doesn't interpret “access” in the way they had in mind. They don't specify what they mean by this. My assumption is that they're referring to the marginal gun owner or dug user in the absence of legal restrictions- even if “access” is treated as purely binary the total number of people with access in that sense would be decreased by prohibition because there would be some people for whom drugs or guns are now completely inaccessible who would have had access if the laws were less restrictive. Again, this is a perfectly valid way of interpreting the statement, but it's not the only valid way or the typical way. In contexts like this the word “people” is almost always means, and will be taken to mean, people in general or on average or the great majority of people- almost no one will interpret “reducing people's access” to mean depriving a few extreme outliers of access or slightly lowering the total sum total of people who have it.

Guns are readily accessible even in jurisdictions that forbid them, some of them at prices so low that anyone who can't afford one now likely couldn't have afforded one even in the total absence of gun control, and illegal drugs are so ubiquitous that the government can't even keep them out of its own prisons. In everyday English the statements "Drug prohibition fails to reduce people’s access to drugs" and “Gun control fails to reduce people’s access to guns” are true, even if there are other valid ways of interpreting the statement under which it would be false. In the absence of any indication that the respondents were assuming the definition the creators of the survey had in mind, there's no reason to assume that choosing “agree” indicates economic ignorance.

Another statement on which the study indicates libertarians were more likely than liberals or progressives to give the wrong answer was "A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person,” which the study treats as true.

If we take this to be basically a statement about the declining marginal utility of money, then this is true, but in that case it would be better to phrase such a question in terms of a single person at different levels of wealth rather than two different people. As is, the statement entangles declining marginal utility, a pretty fundamental concept that can rightly be considered a matter of basic economic understanding with the more complicated and contested subject of the validity of interpersonal utility comparisons. People who would choose “disagree” because the question uses two different men and they don't think such comparisons are possible or meaningful may or may not be correct, but even if they're mistaken being on the wrong side of a complex philosophical dispute is quite a different thing from not understanding basic economic concepts.

The other and probably bigger problem is, again, one of ambiguity: There are common uses of “means more” that do not entail that the statement is true. To say that "a dollar means more" to person A than to person B can just as easily be taken to mean that A is more frugal than B, or drives a harder bargain, or is more miserly, or makes wealth a greater priority in his life, none of which necessarily suggest that A has less money. My suspicion is that the differences in answers between people of different political persuasions boils down to philosophical differences, with libertarians being more likely to think of people in terms of their actions and liberals/progressives more likely to think of them in terms of their needs. In any case, agreement and disagreement are both defensible answers to the question as written.

Aside from ambiguous language, there's another problem with comparing some of the statements from the first survey with the second one. The statements about economics in the first survey were, with the exception already noted, quite straightforward claims on the effects of economic policies, and "agree" and "disagree" each represented distinct , dichotomous positions. You believe that minimum wages or free trade cause unemployment, or that they do not, for instance, and disagreeing with a statement from the first survey is a pretty clear statement of what you do believe. Thus, disagreeing with a wrong statement is a pretty solid indication that your beliefs on the subject are in fact correct, while agreeing with a wrong statement means that you are solidly wrong, as opposed to largely but not entirely correct, and that those who disagreed are closer to the truth than you are. This is not the case with some of the second survey.

After the gun control and drug prohibition questions, the statement which the greatest number of libertarians gave a response counted as wrong to was “When two people complete a voluntary transaction, they both necessarily come away better off.” This is something that had no analog of the first survey- it is an incorrect statement designed to closely mimic a correct one. All voluntary transactions take place because both participants believe they will come away better off from it, and- since they have direct knowledge of their own preferences, usually know more about their own situation than anyone else, and have more incentive to figure out whether the transaction is a good idea or not than anyone else- they are usually correct. The great majority of voluntary exchanges do benefit the participants- but not all, since sometimes people do things that, with the benefit of hindsight, were not a good idea even according to their own preferences and values at the time. Agreeing with the statement from the survey is thus pushing things too far.

Disagreeing with the statement, on the other hand, can mean believing anything from "They almost always come away better off" to "they never come away better off." We have no reason to believe that the typical person who correctly chose "disagree" did so because their own beliefs about the benefits of voluntary exchange are more accurate than people who chose "agree." Indeed, I would be surprised if this were the case. The claim that all voluntary exchanges turn out to be mutually beneficial is too strong, but it comes much closer to the truth than the belief common among statists, particularly of a leftist bent, that people frequently or routinely enter into voluntary agreements that cause them harm.

To a lesser extent I would make the same criticism of another item, "When two people complete a voluntary transaction, it is necessarily the case that everyone else is unaffected by their transaction." This is false, but there's no way to tell whether a person who answered "disagree' and got marked as correct was merely thinking "No, transactions can have externalities," or believes that externalities not only exist but are so common and so large that most or all seemingly private agreements are actually a public/government concern,, or chose "agree" because they believe that they or society as a whole is harmed in some moral or spiritual sense if voluntary interactions they don't like are allowed to occur.

The fact that at least one of the questions on the second survey was, by design, a "trap" set for people of a particular ideological bent in a way none of the first survey's items were is a serious problem. This is especially the case when the format is a essentially a series of true/false questions where a correct answer of "false" encompasses a broad spectrum of widely held possible answers, a great many of which are even less accurate than the false statement in the survey. Such a survey item is worse than useless for assessing how knowledgeable different groups are, because the best way for a particular group of people to be rated as highly enlightened on the subject by getting the correct answer is abject ignorance- it's only when you're in the ballpark of being right that you're at risk of agreeing with the not-quite-right claim and being marked as wrong in the survey results. It's like a test of scientific knowledge where respondents have to agree or disagree with the statement “The Earth is 5 billion years old,” which overstates the Earth's age a bit- giving the wrong answer requires knowing that the Earth is several billion years old, while someone who believes that the entire universe is only a few thousand years old will give the correct answer by disagreeing.

I think Klein and Buturovic's concern about possible bias against people on the political Left in the original survey led them to overcompensate in the second survey, resulting in the problems described. If anything, the fact that Klein and Buturovic's attempts to balance against possible bias against people left of center required them to downplay the first survey's focus on straightforward claims about the effects of economic policy in favor of more abstract and/or ambiguously worded questions and come up with questions that were specifically designed as traps for other ideologies only seems to underscore the results of the original survey; at any rate, it doesn't make Klein's original conclusion that people on the Left knew less about economics seem less plausible.

So I think Klein is wrong now about being wrong before. He attributes what he believes to be his error to confirmation bias, pouncing too eagerly and uncritically on data that seemed to reinforce his existing beliefs. Based on the two survey articles, my own impression is just the opposite. Klein goes so far to guard against his own possible bias against liberals and progressives that he ends up biasing things in their favor and against his own (at the time) interpretation of the first survey. Given Klein's demonstrated willingness to scrutinize his own position and even publicly criticize his own past conclusions, this is unsurprising. Monitoring yourself for bias in your own favor involves the same trade-off as detecting other things: the more vigilant you are to ensure that nothing gets past you and the more sensitive you are to possible signs of your quarry, the greater the chance of a false positive. The direction in which I believe Klein has actually erred is just the sort you'd want in a person involved with a publication like Econ Journal Watch- would that more people's mistakes were the result of going too far to be fair to their opponents!- but in this case his desire to ensure a level playing field has backfired.