Making Dishonest Comparisons
When talking about social problems, we might be told there is no problem. There’s no problem because we’re doing well if you look at other countries. They have more violent crime or much less freedom and so on. Maybe we shouldn’t worry about gun violence because cars and medical malpractice kill more people. Doesn’t all that stuff make sense?
In fact, they don’t make sense. Activists, politicians, and pundits often mislead the public by setting up inappropriate comparisons between things or by comparing progress to some irrelevant goal or standard. Read on to see how both of these tactics work.
Inappropriate Comparisons and Propaganda
How dangerous is life in the United States? To narrow things down a bit, how likely is someone to be murdered here compared with other countries? You can look up murder statistics for various countries. In fact, all you really need to do for a snapshot of violence in different countries is to skim this Wikipedia article.
Review the chart there and you’ll learn that the United States had 5.3 intentional homicides per 100,000 people in 2017. We rank 143rd out of the 230 nations and territories in that list. Is that bad? Well, you have to define what ‘bad’ means. Note that we haven’t done that yet. Knowing how the United States ranks now provides an opportunity for complaining about how violent the society is or how lots of countries are more dangerous. Someone will invariably mention guns — the countries that are more dangerous don’t allow citizens to own guns. Or, someone will think of poverty and revolution. All of the countries that are doing worse are in the middle of political revolutions, depressingly poor, ruled by violent and corrupt governments or whatever.
No one who dismisses our ranking will examine that list of countries and defend their claims. They will tell you every country that is more violent than the USA has disarmed its citizens or is involved in a war or is a failed state. Because if they invited you to study the list yourself, you and they would have to admit that something is wrong.
Picking the Right Comparison Group
Is it possible that only gun ownership or only poverty can explain most of the differences in violence between nations? In other words, is poverty the most important factor in violence? Is lack of gun rights the single most important factor? One could argue that if people aren’t allowed to defend themselves with guns, violent crime will become an epidemic. One could also argue that easy access to guns will make it more likely for people to settle differences and take things by shooting at other people.
None of that matters though because pundits and politicians just pick whatever comparison helps them make their point. They can’t be depended upon to choose a fair comparison, or decide what a fair comparison would look like, or to know how social scientists usually compare the things under discussion.
For example, we can compare literacy rates in the United States with literacy rates in the rest of the world. As an aside, when you do international comparisons, you have to be careful that things are defined in the same way. With literacy this might not be a serious concern, but when talking about crime it can be. You can’t assume that any two countries use the same definition of rape for example. Rape may have a much broader definition in one nation’s legal code versus the other nation. Guess which country is going to look especially dangerous for women?
Consider a hypothetical example of sex crimes in the United States and Sweden. Let’s say the numbers reveal that Swedish women in 2018 were raped twice as often as women in the United States. What does that mean? Remember what you just read about the definitions of things. Are we really comparing the same crimes? Actually, we aren’t. In the United States, official crime statistics will cover rape committed through force or the threat of force. In Sweden, “rape” also includes credible threats to commit rape and sex with someone who is not able to consent to sex. So, sex with minors and women in mental institutions or prisons would also count. If you added the same offenses to the official rape statistics for the United States, what would happen to the numbers? The smart money has them going way up, that’s what.
In short, you have no idea if Sweden is more dangerous for women based on “rape” statistics for the two countries. Feminist activists might not mention how sex crime have different legal definitions in different countries. Right-wing activists won’t tell you that either.
Use the Same Standard
How much murder should there be? None of course. Now, we can’t really get to a state where there are no murders at all. Taking another look at that list of intentional homicide rates by country, you can be reminded of one important thing: We can always do better. In other words, the United States government and the various states can always do things to reduce the homicide rate.
Maybe that’s the standard activists are using when they call for new laws and policies. New gun control laws might look reasonable because we ould have fewer homicides than we have. We could be closer to Germany or Norway in terms of the murder rate. Gun rights advocates will say that gun control is pointless because gun homicides will still happen. If your standard is no gun deaths or no sex crimes, then no effort to address a social problem will ever be any good.
And that’s good, for certain people and groups.
