The sad truth is that some people want to exaggerate violence. Fear is a source of power. If you can frighten, anger, outrage and disturb people, you can manipulate them. The threat of violence is potent, whether real or imagined. Recently I blogged how one campaigner used a debunked statistic about violence to bolster her arguments for a change in British law… and perhaps also to draw attention to herself. It depresses me to see that over 200 people tweeted links to the offending article, because many of them dedicated their 140 characters to the misinformation it presented, in the mistaken belief they were raising awareness instead of spreading lies. Violence is an evil, and dishonesty is an evil. We get used to these evils; we find it hard to imagine a world free of them. I often write about information and misinformation, important numbers and public ignorance of them. Today I want to discuss numbers in the context of a major source of violence. I feel compelled to write about something I have long put off: an analysis of the chances you will kill yourself. These particular statistics about violence are never exaggerated, are often neglected. They tell us a story about our society, its priorities, and how they are wrong. I hope that once you know the facts, you will remember them, and that your priorities will change accordingly. If enough people know the facts, maybe our society’s priorities will change, and we might start to address the waste of human life caused by our indifference to self-inflicted violence.

Apologies for readers elsewhere, but I will begin with statistics drawn from the United Kingdom; I will briefly discuss statistics for other countries later on. Whilst suicide rates vary between countries, my chief conclusion holds true across borders.

For the purposes of crime statistics, homicide is murder, manslaughter or infanticide. The reporting periods differ slightly, but for the reporting year 2012-13, there were 551 homicides in England and Wales, 62 homicides in Scotland, 17 murders and 3 manslaughters in Northern Ireland. This gives a total of 633 homicides in the UK per annum, ignoring the differences in the reporting periods.

During the 2012 calendar year, the UK registered the suicide of 5981 people aged 15 and over.

633 homicides versus 5981 suicides. Do the math. Statistically speaking, a Brit is over 9 times more likely to kill themselves, than to suffer homicide.

In the run up to the next general election, politicians will frequently talk about murder, both specific ones and the statistics overall, in order to sway voters. They will insist that they are doing everything possible to tackle violence, or they will promise they will do even more than the other lot has already done. But they will not mention suicide nine times more frequently than they mention murder. They will not promise to dedicate nine times the level of resources to suicide. One of the reasons they will not talk about preventing suicide is because not enough voters ask them about it. Please keep this in mind, next time you hear a politician or activist, saying what needs to be done to reduce violence, or relaying a lurid story about how someone was murdered.

Why do we care so little about suicide? I have a theory relating to that, and it may be unpopular. But let me retreat to the data before I share it.

When the British public was asked their opinions for a wide-ranging survey about important numbers and social policy, the British public believed that 33% of crime involves violence or the threat of violence. The true figure is 24%. 51% believed that violent crime is rising, even though it has fallen significantly and repeatedly. Many people choose to believe society is more violent than it really is.

When you look at the data tables for that survey, there is an interesting split of attitudes according to gender. Women are more likely to overestimate violence than men. 8% of women felt that violent crime falls into the 41-50% band, compared to 5% of men. 7% of women, compared to 4% of men, felt it was in the 51-60% band, and so on. On average, women estimated that 36.4% of crime is violent; men estimated that 30.1% of crime is violent. Asked if it was true that violent crime is rising, 53% of women believed it to be true, compared to 48% of men.

This gender skew in perception cannot be explained by who suffers violence. The most recent relevant statistical analysis covers the year 2011/12. It stated that 62% of all violence is against men. That means that 3.8% of men are victims of some form of violent crime during the year, compared to 2.1% of women. 68% of homicide victims are men.

Another common perception is that young adults are most likely to suffer violence. Whilst young adults do suffer much more violence than older groups, children under 1 year of age are the most likely victims of homicide, at 21 homicides per million, compared to 15 homicides per million suffered by those aged 16 to 29.

There are some types of violence that women suffer more than men, especially sexual violence. 7.3% of women experience domestic abuse, and 51% of female homicide victims are killed by a partner or ex-partner. This contrasts with 5% of men suffering domestic abuse. When men are killed, it is most likely to be at the hands of a friend or acquaintance (39%). Rates of domestic violence are thankfully falling. By 2011/12, domestic violence was 74% lower than the peak value in 1993. However, it should be noted that there are many reasons to believe sexual violence continues to be underreported.

The conclusion I draw from this is that women are most likely to fear violence, but that men are most likely to suffer violence. This disparity may be exacerbated by biased media coverage. Feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez recently asserted the following.

Women murdered by men are often described by the media as tragic. There is a sense in that word of catastrophe, of horror, of something out of the ordinary. Something that could not have been prevented. Perhaps that word gives us a sense of comfort in the face of such brutality. This could not have been predicted, there is nothing we could have done. This is a freak accident.

Such words may comfort us, but they are dangerous, and our comfort comes at a cost of reckoning with a reality that we must face if we are serious about tackling the epidemic of domestic violence. And make no mistake: it is an epidemic… It is an epidemic to which we are so inured that the steady reports of abuse, of beatings, of assaults, of imprisonment, of death, barely register. They are not front-page news. After all, to put it bluntly, “man kills partner”, is not news. It is the opposite of new. It is old. Tragically old.

I think the data tells us a very different picture. If there is an epidemic of violence against women, there is an even greater epidemic of violence against men. And if there is an epidemic of violence where people are killed by other people, there is a much greater epidemic of violence where people kill themselves. That is not to suggest that any violence is tolerable. But it does help to put emotive words like ‘epidemic’ into some kind of context. I am sure our society can do more to reduce the frequency of domestic violence, and the number of women murdered by men. Having said that, how do we now feel about society’s efforts to tackle the epidemic of suicide?

I will continue my unpopular theory on why we care little about suicide. Again, let me present some data first. The Samaritans reviewed and augmented the data on the 5981 suicides that occurred in 2012. Of the victims, 4507 were men. Men commit suicide at least three times more frequently than women. More men commit suicide than women in every age group, and in every part of the UK. Young men are most likely to kill themselves in Northern Ireland, thirtysomething men are most at risk in Wales, whilst middle-aged men represent the largest share of suicides in Scotland and England. Suicide rates have declined only slightly across the UK, except in Northern Ireland, which saw a sharp rise between 2004 and 2006, and has fluctuated since.

Keep the following in mind. If the rates remain steady – 51% of women are killed by male partners or ex-partners, women are the victim of 32% of homicides, and there are 633 homicides per year – then we can expect 103 women will die each year at the hands of male partners and ex-partners. That means British women are over 13 times more likely to kill themselves, than to be killed by a current or former partner. It also means that a typical British man is 44 times more likely to kill himself, than to kill a female partner. What does this say about our perception of ‘epidemics of violence’, and the moral panic surrounding them?

Just as violence against women may be underreported, there is also a problem of the underreporting of suicide. As the Samaritans put it:

It is commonly acknowledged by professionals in the field of suicide research that official statistics underestimate the ‘true’ number and rate of suicide. This is not only the case in the UK and ROI but in most (if not all) countries.

Please read the full Samaritans report for a complete understanding of why suicides are underreported. The report also highlights the problems of comparing suicide statistics between nations. That said, they compare suicide rates for the UK with those for the Republic of Ireland, and the numbers are not that different. The difference between the genders is similarly pronounced; Irish men are almost 5 times more likely to kill themselves than Irish women. However difficult it is to compare stats between countries, male suicides exceed female suicides in almost every country in the world. In the USA, the ratio of male suicides to female suicides is 3.5:1. In Lithuania, 5.1:1. In Sri Lanka, 3.8:1. In Germany, 3.3:1. In Turkmenistan, 3.9:1. In Zimbabwe, 2:1. In Venezuela, 4.4:1. And so on, and on, men are dying at their own hands, all round the world, in disproportionate numbers. If the situation was reversed, feminists and other well-intentioned people would be crying out for a remedy. But where is the current outcry, where is our anger?

And be in no doubt that this is a real epidemic. The World Health Organization says that over 800,000 people die of suicide each year. That is one death every 40 seconds. As a killer, suicide is comparable to the 1.24mn who die each year from road accidents, the 627,000 who die from malaria, and the 521,000 who die from breast cancer. Do we feel as strongly about strategies to prevent suicide as we do about seat belts and air bags in motor vehicles, mosquito nets for African children, or research into cancer treatment? If not, then why not? Is it because the victims of suicide somehow deserve their fate, because they made the choice to die? Is it because most of them are men, and we are far more interested in ‘fixing’ men when they hurt other people, than when they hurt themselves?

The pain of suicide is all around us. We see the victims again and again. Even the famous and successful are brought low by depression. Gary Speed. Kurt Cobain. Alexander McQueen. Tony Scott. Robin Williams. We mourn them, then move on, as if nothing needs to change. When a famous suicide hits the newspapers, the world endures another 2000 suicides that day, without further comment. And for every person who does commit suicide, there will be many more contemplating the act. Why are we blind to this pain around us? Why do we do so little about it? Is it that we do not care, or is the problem that nobody can turn this into a popular ‘campaign’ of the type that monopolizes headlines? It is easy to get people to sign a petition saying a woman’s face should be on a banknote, but much harder to reduce suicide prevention to a glib one-line demand for change. Or is the problem that we only care about violence when there is somebody to blame? Are we indifferent to suffering, if we choose not to imagine ourselves as a possible victim?

Our media presents suicide like each is an individual tragedy. I rather believe our society can do more to prevent suicide, and that there would be less suicide if we changed the priorities of our society. This would benefit both women and men, though statistically men would benefit more, because they currently suffer more. We should be doing plenty more. As the World Health Organization explains:

There is compelling evidence indicating that adequate prevention and treatment of depression and alcohol and substance abuse can reduce suicide rates, as well as follow-up contact with those who have attempted suicide.

And WHO tells us about the obstacles too…

Worldwide, the prevention of suicide has not been adequately addressed due to basically a lack of awareness of suicide as a major problem and the taboo in many societies to discuss openly about it. In fact, only a few countries have included prevention of suicide among their priorities…

It is clear that suicide prevention requires intervention also from outside the health sector and calls for an innovative, comprehensive multi-sectoral approach, including both health and non-health sectors, e.g. education, labour, police, justice, religion, law, politics, the media.

I admit that I started writing this article in an angry mood, not least because a feminist spread a lie about domestic violence being the largest cause of morbidity for women aged 19-44, even though it definitely is not. She did it to persuade people to support a change to UK law, and I was peeved at the thought that ‘awareness’ is not being raised in the ways it most desperately needs to be raised. But having reached this stage, having re-read all the terrible statistics about suicide, I feel a different kind of emotion. I want to learn from that feminist’s example. Some people are doing sterling work to address the epidemic of suicide. More of us must help them. We must campaign for change. People should be more aware of what can and should be done. For example, the charity CALM is taking an innovative approach to countering suicide in the UK, by finding new ways to reach out to vulnerable men. We need charities like CALM more than ever, because as they succinctly put it:

Suicide is now the single biggest cause of death in men aged 20 “” 49 in England and Wales.

And that is the truth.

Supporting charity is a good thing, but we also need to become political. The next British general election is less than 300 days away. We should use this time to press politicians, of every party, to explain their response to the WHO’s call for ‘an innovative, comprehensive multi-sectoral approach’ to suicide prevention. The old political bullshit is not good enough. Effective strategies to counter suicide demand more than simplistic, standard policies that politicians parrot about the economy, healthcare, and welfare state. For the first time, the government has issued an annual report on the performance of cross-government strategies to prevent suicide in England. Voters must demand no less for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We should familiarize ourselves with the findings, popularize the work already done, share the lessons learned, and talk about the steps we still need to take. And then we must hound politicians to compete with each other, demanding they detail the solutions they would pursue, if put in power.

Suicide is an epidemic of violence, inflicted on ourselves by our ignorance, our apathy, our silence, and our sadness. If I was a feminist writing about domestic violence, you would automatically grasp the connections to the political sphere. I am a man, writing about self-inflicted violence, and saying this is a political issue. We must stop averting our eyes, stop treating every suicide like a stand-alone tragedy, and start being ferociously political about how society prevents suicide. I am frightened, angry, outraged and disturbed by how our society passively tolerates the ongoing waste of human life, taken from us every day by suicide. I hope that by reading this, I have passed those feelings on to you, and you will pass them on to others.

Today can we celebrate a partial victory for truth, but the battle is not over. Two weeks ago, I wrote how feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez cited a made-up statistic about domestic abuse in an article for the New Statesman’s website. She stated that British women are suffering an ‘epidemic’ of violence, and that the systemic nature of this violence has been badly underreported by mainstream British media. Her conclusion was that the scale of violence necessitates a change in British law. But only one statistic was presented amidst her extravagant language. That statistic claimed that domestic violence is the leading cause of morbidity for women aged 19-44, and the wording was hyperlinked to a report by the World Health Organization. There are only two problems with her preferred stat.

1) It is totally false.

2) It is not in the World Health Organization report that Criado-Perez cited.

Anyone who went to the trouble to read the 246-page WHO report would discover that interpersonal violence is only the 43rd-highest cause of morbidity for women. According to their data tables, interpersonal violence accounts for 0.5% of the total morbidity suffered by women. In comparison, HIV/AIDS is the genuine leading cause of worldwide morbidity for women, and is responsible for 6.5% of the total morbidity suffered. Actual rates of interpersonal violence would need to be multiplied 13 times in order to become the top cause of morbidity. Criado-Perez not only tried to use a worldwide statistic to make the case for changing British law, it is not even a real statistic.

Criado-Perez just pretended to use the WHO report as source material. Her ‘fact’ is actually a widely-spread urban legend, which can easily be found in all sorts of places on the internet. A tell-tale sign comes from how Criado-Perez worded her fact: “…more than war, cancer or motor vehicle accidents.” I dare you to google those words, to see how often they are repeated in this context. But crucially, none of those websites give an accurate report of any primary research into violence. They are merely misquoting each other, having all been written by people who wanted a juicy sensational attention-grabbing headline, but were too lazy to locate genuine research. A thorough investigation by the BBC statistics program More or Less clarified where this misinformation originally came from:

…there have been multiple bouts of statistical inflation. The 1993 table [in a report by the World Bank] showed rape and domestic violence as the 6th largest cause of morbidity in women aged 15 to 44, globally. Leaving to one side the difficulties in collecting that statistic… rape was dropped from the category without making any adjustments, and the whole lot was booted up the league table from 6th place, to 1st place.

Criado-Perez and the New Statesman ignored me, when I informed them of their error, just a few hours after the article was published online. However, they could not ignore my subsequent complaint to Britain’s national Press Complaints Commission. And so, the bogus stat has now been deleted from the amended version of the article. It is a shame that they waited two weeks to correct an error that would never have been made if they did simple fact-checking, and should have been corrected within hours of publication.

However, the damage that was done has not been undone. Almost everybody who was going to read the article would have read it before the correction was made. Readers now need to specifically search the New Statesman’s website to find the article. The New Statesman made no effort to verify the facts during the days when Criado-Perez’s piece was one of four featured articles on their homepage. I will be persisting with my complaint to the Press Complaints Commission, with a view to securing an equally prominent correction, as befits such a gross inaccuracy and such a gross failure of editorial standards.

Sadly, the editors of the New Statesman have shown they have little interest in factual accuracy. They continue to mislead the public. Instead of apologizing to readers for misleading them, they merely noted:

Update, 7 August 2014: this article was amended to change the statistic referred to in the UN report.

And is the new statistic as misleading as the old one? In a sense, no. It has the advantage of being derived from the cited WHO report, instead of being dredged from some unknown part of the internet. But in another sense, the New Statesman continues to scrabble for misleading data that preserves Criado-Perez’s argument, which was that violence against women is badly understated. This is a difficulty for them, as they can find no statistical data that supports this assertion. That is why they inserted this amended ‘fact’, in place of Criado-Perez’s bogus stat:

The prevalence of domestic abuse means that 40-70 per cent of female murder victims are killed by a husband or boyfriend, according to the UN.

It is true that WHO is a branch of the UN, and that their 2002 report referenced five studies of domestic violence, as conducted in Australia, Canada, Israel, South Africa and the USA. Those five studies give rise to this example range of 40 to 70 percent. But the authors of this WHO report never generalized from those five studies, and did not pretend this is a global statistic, like the editors at the New Statesman have.

Every single murder is regrettable and shocking. However, if we play the game of cherry-picking global stats, it is far from clear why homicide rates in Australia (10% higher than found in the UK), Canada (60% higher), Israel (80% higher), South Africa (3000% higher) and the USA (380% higher) justify claims that British women are suffering an ‘epidemic’ of violence. There is a simpler, better way to improve the New Statesman’s article. They should simply insert reliable and current statistical data about domestic violence suffered by British women. That will be shocking enough. More importantly, it will be relevant, and not misleading. The article starts by describing the murder of a British woman. It ends by demanding a change to British law. Between the two, it comments on the supposed failures of British media. So why not simply present the pertinent data, instead of shopping around for 12 year old stats from five foreign countries?

I think we know the answer. Both Criado-Perez and the New Statesman confuse their ambition as political campaigners with their responsibilities as journalists. However necessary it is to change the law, the change should be motivated by fact, not fiction. And whatever responsibility they have to inform the public about important issues, they cannot forget their responsibility to present accurate information, and to present corrections of misinformation with an appropriate level of prominence. Sadly, some people really want to believe exaggerated statistics about violence. That is unfortunate for everybody, not least the real victims of violence, whose tragedies should not be trivialized by pretending atypical suffering is commonplace. Democratic law-making serves all in society: the victims, the guilty, innocents, and bystanders. Sensational lies about the prevalence of violence will never deliver sound laws that best serve our society. Criado-Perez and the New Statesman should admit their fault, and rebuild their reputations on the solid foundation of fact. That begins with an apology to readers for misleading them, and an accurate presentation of the data.

I enjoy reading the New York Times blog of economist Paul Krugman. I imagine the thrill is similar to that enjoyed by a bloodthirsty crowd of Romans, watching gladiators fight in the Colosseum. When reading Krugman, I know there will be violence (of the intellectual variety). I know that blood will be spilled (in the sense of shredded reputations and cutting put-downs). And I know there will be a winner and a loser. Better still, I know the eventual result, and I know I will like it. No matter what he argues, Krugman never fails to be a comical loser, though he thinks himself a heroic winner. Thanks to the X Factorization of public debate, Krugman’s fans also think him a winner, even when he makes the ludicrously pompous argument that he and his supporters are less prone to confirmation bias than the rest of the human race.

As public intellectuals go, Krugman is of the verminous variety. He routinely picks fights, showing his teeth in the hopes of intimidating others. But he quickly runs to the shadows, when an opponent refuses to back down. To complete the gladiatorial spectacle, and see both sides of the fight, we merely need to flick to the words written by the opponents that Krugman picks upon. They invariably rain literary blows on their would-be persecutor, making it clear why the Krugman’s fans prefer to consume just his side of the story.

Krugman’s one-sidedness is confirmed every time he mentions Niall Ferguson (most recently, here). Niall Ferguson’s name features a lot on Krugman’s blog. It recurs so often that Krugman must imagine Ferguson is an avid follower, and so takes every opportunity to irritate his nemesis. Surely no regular reader needs to hear Ferguson’s name mentioned so often. But whilst Krugman maligns Ferguson month after month, supposedly in a bid to promulgate the truth about Ferguson’s falsehoods, Krugman ran from the big prize fight that Ferguson finally offered him. When Ferguson catalogued every major mistake Krugman has made (a long catalogue, but worth reading again), did Krugman defend himself? Did he offer any evidence to the contrary? Did he admit to errors, whilst giving some justification for the positions he adopted? No, no and no. Krugman just ran away, saying he would not speak about Ferguson because he considers the Harvard Professor of History to be nothing more than a ‘troll‘. And how does Krugman continue to respond to this troll? Not by rising above him, and ignoring his presence. Krugman’s prolonged response comes in the form of endless snide comments in his blog. Krugman has the air of a man who was publicly slapped in the face, so ran away in shame. Now desperate for revenge, the pettiest Nobel laureate stalks the man who embarrassed him, taking every sly opportunity to spit on the back of his head, before running off again.

So, after seeing another needless mention of Ferguson’s name, I scrolled down to see what arrogant absurdities Krugman had served up recently. I hoped to find Krugman saying something smug and stupid about a topic so widely understood that Krugman could not possibly adopt his usual defensive posture, which involves hiding behind wonkish economic gibberish and deliberately skewed misrepresentations of the data. My search was not in vain, and was rather short. Lacking the self-awareness of a man who might actually listen to his own words, Krugman pontificated about a topic that many of us understand: cars, and what we think of them. At first it seemed the so-called liberal was going to grasp the thorny subject of how the internet allows people to drive each other’s cars, and give each other lifts, and how this comes into conflict with protecting the economic interests of particular groups like taxi drivers. That would be a reasonable subject for an economist to discuss, and one that might be vexing for a ‘liberal’ of Krugman’s ilk, who somehow equates liberality with protecting vested economic interests. But Krugman did not offer this analysis. Instead, he observed that people do not really need or want cars.

Life Without Cars

I’ve been following some of the discussion about Uber, Lyft, and all that, and I have a few unoriginal thoughts. Well, strictly speaking they are original… [yada yada]…

Anyway: the big benefit from new IT-mediated car services will come if they make it possible for lots of people “” and not just people in Manhattan “” to live without owning their own cars. And if you think about it, you can see how that might work.

The more human amongst you will have already noticed the flaw in Krugman’s argument. You probably noticed it when I wrote that ‘people do not really need or want cars’. The flaw is that lots of people like cars, and want cars, even if they do not need cars. That is pretty typical of people: they like and want all sorts of things they do not need. Sometimes they like things so much, they say they need them, even though they do not really need them. Nobody needs television, or laughter, or cake. We just really like them. The fact that people like cars is vital to understanding why car ownership has historically gone up, rather than down. It is also key to understanding why the number of households with multiple cars has risen. Things can become more popular, and more common, even if nobody needs them. Our desire for many television channels, and for many kinds of cake, and for many cars, greatly exceeds our bare necessity.

Right now, if you live in places without exceptionally good public transportation, it’s very difficult to manage without a car. Yet when you think about it, for most people owning a car is quite wasteful.

Having reached the middle of the third paragraph, Krugman still has not grasped the possibility that some people like cars. Ferraris. Cadillacs. Top Gear. Personalized number plates. Giving your car a name. Reading car magazines. You intuitively and instantly understand what I am saying, because you are a person and I am talking about people, instead of waffling about the abstractions of macroeconomics and public policy. Krugman’s blind spot is plain: he is a Nobel prizewinning economist without the slightest affinity for actual human beings.

It’s an expensive item of equipment that sits idle most of the time; it requires parking (and often a parking structure) both at origin and at destination; it requires maintenance and is a big hassle all around.

Krugman thinks cars are a big hassle all around. Most of us have a devil and an angel on our shoulders, ensuring some internal quality control over the things we say and do. In contrast, Krugman is a machine, bereft of an internal dialogue. He is more of a machine than any motor car. Krugman relentlessly follows his ‘logical’ programming, no matter how imbecilic the conclusion. And what does he calculate in this case? Porsche = big hassle. Aston Martin = big hassle. Off-roading = big hassle. Driving a convertible sports car through a forest on a sunny day = big hassle. Driving your pregnant wife to the hospital instead of begging a lift off your neighbours = big hassle. Not wanting to depend on somebody who might be unreliable to get you to the airport on time = big hassle. Not knowing when you will leave work but knowing you will not have to wait for a taxi = big hassle. Given what an enormous hassle cars are, marketeers have done an amazing job, brainwashing people, manipulating them into buying their own car! Per Krugman’s logic, as none of us genuinely want cars, our need for cars must be truly enormous, and growing all the time.

I am forced to wonder what Krugman thinks of Recreational Vehicles – the houses on wheels that some Americans own. These monster vehicles serve as both vacation transport and vacation home, which must rank as the most inefficient investment of capital in history. And yet, some Americans want them, even though none need them. They could just fly somewhere, and then stay in a hotel. Krugman must be deeply unsettled by the irrationality of the 8.5% of American households that own an RV.

So reliable, quick-response chauffeur services could free many people from the need to tie up all those resources in a consumer durable that they only use now and then. And from a social point of view it would avoid the need to tie up so much capital that sits unused most of the time.

According to Krugman, his is the thought process I should follow, whilst contemplating if I want to drive to a relatively out-of-the-way location, in order to go for a long hike in the countryside. His thought process is correct, even if I want to nip to a unique gift shop in the next town over, to make a last-minute purchase. Never mind convenience. Never mind freedom. Like Krugman, I should be thinking about the wasted capital! I should be thinking how much wealthier, and happier, I would be if that capital was reinvested elsewhere.

Also I should imagine how much better off I would be, if I could just rent an unfamiliar vehicle, with or without an unfamiliar driver, which we assume is conveniently available at literally any time I need it, and at a price which I also assume is better value than the cost of simply owning and maintaining a car in the first place! And yet, somehow, I struggle to think like Krugman.

But then, when you really think about it, you discover that lots of things are a waste of capital. Do you have a guest bedroom in your house, which is rarely used? That is a waste of capital! Perhaps that means Krugman would be a fan of the British government’s so-called ‘bedroom tax’ – a change to welfare payments where people receive less money if they waste the capital of an unused bedroom in their government-provided housing. But I doubt Krugman would describe that particular waste of capital in those unsympathetic terms.

Those influenced by Paul Krugman should take a look at the house he lives in. It is very much larger than where I live. It is larger than where most people live. There are roads, but no evidence of a sidewalk, so presumably everybody drives in that part of the world. Why should ordinary people give up the luxury of their cars, and the capital invested in it, when Krugman invests so much more capital in his excessively large home which is designed to be visited by car? If you think cars are bad for the environment, consider the energy and resources that were used to build Krugman’s house, and the heightened energy bill needed to make full use of such a property. Or maybe he does not make full use of the house, so from a social point of view, Krugman is happy to selfishly tie up capital so long as it suits him personally.

Any house larger than the minimum necessary to sustain life must count as a very good example of wasted capital, but we are literally surrounded by other examples. Every minute you do not watch your television, you waste the capital that was spent on that purchase. If you have a television in the bedroom as well as the living room, you have doubled the waste. Every minute you are not hoovering your carpet with your vacuum cleaner, you waste the capital absorbed by that useful household gadget. Are you even using all your carpet? I bet there are some segments you rarely stand upon. Wasted capital, all of it! Imagine how glorious life would be, without all this wasted capital!

And that is before I mention public parks, during the night time. Or the books in libraries, after closing hours. Or churches, when there is no service (or even when there is a service, according to atheists). Wasted capital, wasted capital, wasted capital. Why should anyone pay to build parks, libraries and churches, and then pay again to maintain them? Instead, we should all live in dense high-rise cities (to avoid the need for cars) but spare ourselves the waste of parks by visiting the countryside, on the better-than-ever train service. We should not invest in books because they waste capital (and paper!) and instead we should read from free websites on our Kindles. We should do away with organized religion, and its obsession with temples, icons and art, and we should all behave like Quakers, preying in each other’s houses. We should coerce people to give up all these unnecessarily wasteful pursuits, in order to preserve the greatest god of all: capital. Life would be so much better, if we could find peace, knowledge and enlightenment without so much wasted capital!

Of course, we would still have roads. They would be needed for ambulances, and fire trucks, and delivery vans, and possibly even for buses. But if there were far fewer cars to drive upon them, they might seem like wasted capital too.

There is, however, an obvious problem: rush hour.

On the contrary, there are a whole slew of problems with the way Krugman thinks. He is blissfully unaware of them, and is likely to remain so. The adoring comments he receives on his blog are mostly written by people with a similarly blinkered view, so they will not broaden his outlook. Even if the yawning gaps in his thinking were pointed out, Krugman would still not be able to comprehend that his thinking is flawed. There is no need to vote Republican, in order to see what is wrong with Krugman’s thinking, but the fault line of Krugman’s worldview is that criticism only comes from partisans.

Peak car use comes twice a day, and that would seem to dictate that we have nearly as many cars as we do now even if they’re supplied by the likes of Uber.

But here’s where surge pricing comes in. If traveling during peak hours is more expensive than off-peak, people will have an incentive to shave off those peaks. People who aren’t commuting to work will avoid travel at peak hours; some people will find other ways to travel; some people (and businesses) will rearrange their schedules to take advantage of cheaper off-peak travel. So you can imagine a society that still relies mainly on cars to get around, but manages to do this with significantly fewer cars than we need at present.

How does Krugman’s brain work? Does it work? Anybody who ever drove in rush hour knows there are already plenty of incentives to ‘shave off those peaks’. Just because the incentive is not measured in dollar bills, does not mean there is no incentive. Or does Krugman really believe the average driver is a money-obsessed retard, indifferent to sitting in traffic jams for hours, but willing to dramatically change behaviour in order to save a few cents?

Cars aren’t the only consumer durable where something like this might work, of course.

Agreed. See above for my comment on houses. And yet, people do seem to like having spare rooms for all sorts of reasons, despite the truly enormous amount of capital that they tie up. To put capital into perspective, consider the numbers for the UK, the kind of small densely-packed country that might actually have a chance of ‘life without cars’. The total value of all British vehicles, including cars, but also including planes and ships, is under GBP200bn (USD340bn). The total value of all British housing is over GBP4,000bn (USD6,800bn). So why is Krugman worried about the relatively tiny proportion of capital tied up in cars, when the quickest and easiest way to save capital (and to save the environment) is that we all volunteer to live in homes the size of shoeboxes?

People in New York don’t need refrigerators (and in particular freezers) that are as big as those in the suburbs, because it’s so easy to pop around the corner for groceries…

People have small refrigerators in New York because real estate is expensive, and hence living spaces are small. The cost of space is the factor that drives down the size of refrigerators, not the ease of accessing of alternatives. Krugman understands economics like a man who can draw a perfectly accurate picture of a stationary horse and a cart, but earnestly believes that the cart leads the horse when in motion.

… online ordering and delivery could produce a similar effect outside the city.

Here is a question that should arise in the mind of any decent economist: well why the fuck don’t they, then?

The restriction on space in New York is in opposition to the natural human desire to have a great big house with a great big fridge… even if they have bugger all inside them. In Manhattan, people do not choose late-night delis and pizza delivery in preference to having a big refrigerator. The former services become economically viable because of density of population and because the scarceness of land leads to a high cost for even a rudimentary kitchen. In contrast, people who live outside the city can travel easily, using the car they already want and own, they can afford larger and well-equipped kitchens, meaning they have less reason to rely on ‘convenience’ stores and online delivery services. In these circumstances, the latter business models will only succeed through winning a genuine competition.

But cars are surely the big prize.

And here Krugman shows his hand, and reveals what really motivates his thinking. He does not care if you like cars. He does not like cars. And therefore the goal is to stop you doing things, having things, using things, that he does not like. What you want is irrelevant to his analysis.

Again, I’m sure this has been worked out by someone somewhere. But I’m having fun thinking about it.

I am sure his last sentence is very sincere. Krugman gets a lot of fun imagining how you should live your life according to his principles, whether you like it or not. Being a genuine liberal, I despise Krugman’s twisted claim to be a liberal. I feel no sense of fun imagining a world run according to Krugman’s dictatorial whims. He is a rat in sheep’s clothing, a small man with delusions of demagoguery, a would-be tyrant pretending to be a democrat. Lovers of liberty should abhor him. Fans of his half-cocked thinking should reconsider. Or if not, they should follow Krugman’s logic to its inevitable, irregular conjugation: I buy what I want; you waste capital; Krugman knows best.

Caroline Criado-Perez describes herself as a journalist and feminist campaigner. Is it possible to be both, without conflict? Because of the nature of their objective, campaigners are political animals. Sophisticated people understand why politicians use exaggeration, biased statistics and misinformation to persuade. But the excusable faults of a politician cannot be tolerated in a journalist. The role of a journalist is to present information, not misinformation. Journalists may be free to comment, but the information itself is sacrosanct. In our present era, the difficult dividing line between politics and journalism has been blurred to the point where nobody knows where it lies. And yet, we need dividing lines, to maintain standards in the presentation of information and the quality of public debate. Today I will be writing about Caroline Criado-Perez, suggesting that she crossed the line by grossly exaggerating the frequency of domestic abuse whilst writing for an established political journal, in order to generate sympathy for her campaigning goals.

But before I go further, it is necessary to be clear about how Caroline Criado-Perez attained a certain level of fame, which gives her the opportunity to write for widely-read publications. I must also comment on how I feel about her goals. Violence is wrong. I will not demean myself, or the victims of violence, by entertaining further argument on that point. Criado-Perez wants to live in a less violent society, and I want to live in a less violent society too. However, violence takes many forms, and is not the only evil in our world. Though violence is literally defined to be a physical act, we understand there can be violence done to people’s minds, as well as to their bodies. Deception and manipulation is a kind of violence to the mind. Sometimes one is necessary to forestall the other. The classic philosopher’s conundrum involves a homicidal maniac who mislaid his axe. You know where the weapon is. The murderer asks. Most philosophers see no struggle with the ethics of this situation: you send the killer in the wrong direction. But it is rare that we have such clean-cut consequences when contemplating lies over truth. Even well-intentioned lies cause harm. Democracy works in a free society because we trust people to generally do the right thing when they know the truth. If people have to be lied to, in order to get them to do the right thing, then that is an usurpation of democracy.

Democracy also relies upon the principle that people may speak without intimidation. Criado-Perez is famous for some relatively trivial social media campaigns, and the hostility they provoked. Getting middle-class Brits to sign a 2013 online petition saying there should be a woman (other than the Queen) pictured on the notes issued by the Bank of England is hardly as brave or as worthy an act as that undertaken by the giants of the historic struggle for civil liberties. Criado-Perez is no Rosa Parks, who refused to vacate her seat on a bus in Alabama in 1955, nor a Harvey Milk, who was openly gay whilst standing for election in the 1970’s. And yet, the banknote campaign provoked a storm of misogynistic abuse, directed at Criado-Perez. Such abuse undermines and coarsens our democracy, by intimidating the individual and levying a high price for the free exercise of their rights. All forms of intimidation, whether physical or verbal, are wrong. And that is why I will now criticize Caroline Criado-Perez for presenting deliberately misleading information, even though I know it is likely to upset her fans.

These are some extracts from Criado-Perez’s July 23 article for New Statesman:

“Isolated incidents”: how the laws around domestic violence are failing its victims

…Women murdered by men are often described by the media as tragic. There is a sense in that word of catastrophe, of horror, of something out of the ordinary. Something that could not have been prevented. Perhaps that word gives us a sense of comfort in the face of such brutality. This could not have been predicted, there is nothing we could have done. This is a freak accident.

Such words may comfort us, but they are dangerous, and our comfort comes at a cost of reckoning with a reality that we must face if we are serious about tackling the epidemic of domestic violence. And make no mistake: it is an epidemic. Domestic abuse is the largest cause of morbidity in women aged 19-44, more than war, cancer or motor vehicle accidents. It is an epidemic to which we are so inured that the steady reports of abuse, of beatings, of assaults, of imprisonment, of death, barely register. They are not front-page news. After all, to put it bluntly, “man kills partner”, is not news. It is the opposite of new. It is old. Tragically old.

She then goes on to argue for a change in the law. Criado-Perez builds her argument upon the frequency of violence. She is not arguing that a single, isolated incident of violence is wrong, and must motivate a change in law. Criado-Perez insists there is an epidemic of domestic violence, which implies the legal system does too little to address the problem.

Only one straightforward fact is presented as substantiation:

Domestic abuse is the largest cause of morbidity in women aged 19-44, more than war, cancer or motor vehicle accidents.

The problem with this fact is that it is wrong. It is very wrong. However much we may abhor violence, it is nowhere near the top causal factors of morbidity – sickness – suffered by women of any age group, whether in this country or elsewhere. That is not to say that this stat has not been published and repeated widely. It has taken on the status of an ‘urban legend’, being believed true because it, and variants of it, are reported all over the place. Google the words “more than war cancer or motor vehicle accidents” and you will see what I mean. The BBC once recited a variant of this pseudostatistic during their 10 o’clock news broadcast. Thankfully, that error prompted some statisticians who work for the BBC to debunk the stat once and for all. In 2009, the makers of the popular More or Less radio show thoroughly investigated this claim, and all its variants. They discovered that the misfact has been circulating since the 1990’s, and suffered increasing exaggeration over time. However, the statistical truth was plain: the claims that domestic violence are the leading cause of women’s morbidity are fundamentally untrue, no matter how the claims are interpreted. You can listen to the show here, and some of their key observations are repeated below.

…this claim mutates as it circulates…

…it is pretty common for a rogue statistic to spread and mutate like this, and the likely explanation is that people keep misquoting each other rather than going to a credible original source…

…there have been multiple bouts of statistical inflation. The 1993 table [in a report by the World Bank] showed rape and domestic violence as the 6th largest cause of morbidity in women aged 15 to 44, globally. Leaving to one side the difficulties in collecting that statistic… the whole lot was booted up the league table from 6th place, to 1st place.

If you want to look for top causes of women’s morbidity, then unsafe sex is the top issue worldwide, because it leads to the top killer, which is HIV/AIDS. And when it comes to non-fatal morbidity, mental disorders do women most harm.

At this point, a generous reader may still disagree with me, or at least challenge my right to reach a conclusion. Criado-Perez is not guilty of deliberately misinforming the public, if she genuinely believes a stat which has been reported widely elsewhere. We cannot look inside her mind, to judge if she believed the stat herself. But there is another sense in which Criado-Perez misled readers, which goes beyond her choice of words. Her article was published online, and Criado-Perez inserted a hyperlink from the words “largest cause of morbidity in women aged 19-44”. The link takes readers to a 2002 World Health Organization report on global violence. It is at this point where I believe we can accuse Criado-Perez of demonstrable dishonesty, because the data included in that report contradicts her assertion.

The WHO report is long, considered and comprehensive, full of data tables, and avoids sensational language. In other words, it is the kind of report that few people bother to read. Crucially, whilst Criado-Perez’s sentence is a near word-for-word copy of sentences that can be found in lots of British reports and websites, it is nothing like any of the language used in the WHO report. For all the data it presents, and despite dedicating a chapter to violence between intimate partners, none of its contents support Criado-Perez’s claim that domestic violence is the leading cause of morbidity for women of a certain age range, whether worldwide or for any region. Nobody could suggest the chapter on domestic violence seeks to play down its seriousness, but there is never a claim that such violence outranks other causes of morbidity. And whilst there are many data tables, none of them are granular enough to map to Criado-Perez’s very specific claim about domestic violence and women aged 19-44.

The closest data that can be found in the WHO report indicates that Criado-Perez’s claim is a very severe exaggeration; table A.6 on page 286 shows that interpersonal violence is the 43rd highest cause of disability-adjusted life years – a measure of morbidity – for women worldwide. Domestic violence is necessarily a subset of interpersonal violence, but all interpersonal violence causes just 0.5% of the morbidity suffered by women worldwide. To put this into context, HIV/AIDs causes 6.5% of morbidity for women, unipolar depressive disorders cause 5.5%, malaria causes 3%, self-inflicted injuries cause 1.1% and war causes 0.4%. The table makes no mention of traffic accidents or cancer, begging the question of where Criado-Perez really sourced her statement. And there can be no refuge in the suggestion that the worldwide numbers do not apply to Criado-Perez’s argument, because she is presenting UK data as relevant to a change of law in the UK. The report contains no UK-specific stats about morbidity. The closest table covers morbidity of women in Europe, where interpersonal violence ranks 34th.

In short, Criado-Perez’s claim is not only false, it is contradicted by the WHO report she cited, as far as that report presents relevant data. So why cite a WHO report, if the data is not in there? Why take the risk that somebody would double-check the contents of the report, when she could have cited many other (unreliable) sources, without fear that they would contradict her? I suspect it is because Criado-Perez knew the other sources may be questioned, and because those other sources repeat the same assertion, but without supplying any raw data. As pointed out by the makers of ‘More or Less’, data is more credible if taken from the original source, rather than being reported second-hand. We all know that when stats are reported second-hand, they are also liable to be misreported and exaggerated. Criado-Perez believed the stat was right – and she wants it to be right – but she could not find an original source which supported the stat, because there is no original source which supports it. So she cut a corner, and cited a long and worthy UN report which tells us that domestic violence is serious, and we should be doing something about it. She hoped that nobody would try to join the dots from their data to her pseudo-data, or that if they tried, they would give up and blame themselves for not trying hard enough.

My first instincts were similar to those that many people might have. I wondered if I had read the UN report closely enough. I assumed that if a mistake was made, it was an honest one. So I left a comment on the New Statesman’s website, asking for the author to pinpoint the source of her claim. That was ignored, so bereft of other quick and convenient ways to contact the parties responsible, I tweeted both Criado-Perez and the New Statesman, succinctly stating that the BBC had debunked the stat and it could not be found in the cited report.

@CCriadoPerez @NewStatesman your stat on domestic violence was debunked by BBC and is not in the UN report you cited; please pinpoint source

— Eric Priezkalns (@ericpriezkalns) July 23, 2014

Once again, I was ignored. By this time, the story had passed, and was no longer visible on the front page of the New Statesman’s website. Most people who were going to read it, had already read it. The harm had been done. Perhaps, from Ms Criado-Perez’s point of view, that harm is justified by the good she believes she is doing. Perhaps she ignored my tweet because she dismissed me as a misogynistic hater, or maybe she ignored it because she did not want to explain why she cited a WHO report that does not include the single convenient pseudo-fact that she built her whole argument upon. I scratched my head, and wondered what to do.

And then I complained to the UK’s Press Complaints Commission. Criado-Perez describes herself as a journalist. She should be held to the same standards of accuracy expected from all journalists. The New Statesman is not without fault either, because they clearly did not verify the claim that was made against its supposed source. We shall have to wait and see how the Press Complaints Commission responds.

Do my actions make the world a better place? I am not sure, but I hope so. People trust the information presented to them, and clearly some people are far too trusting. We can agree a problem is serious without losing sight of the fact that other problems are even more serious. Violence is an emotive topic, but we make a mistake if we focus resources in a bid to massage our emotions, instead of using them in ways that alleviate most suffering. For example, mental health is woefully neglected by our society, and we will not adequately boost the care given to victims of mental illness if we choose to skew data in order to misrepresent domestic violence as a greater cause of pain. Furthermore, as I wrote in a comment to the New Statesman, I believe that grossly exaggerating violence has a corrosive effect on all of us. It cheapens the tragedy suffered by real victims, whilst encouraging a more hostile, paranoid and divisive society. To make the world a better place, we must start by seeing things as they really are, and that means we must dismiss the politicking hyperbole of self-appointed campaigners.