Nowhere Near 1 in 5 Women Were Raped In College: Is "Rape Culture" on Campus Really a Thing?

One in five women will be raped while attending college. It's one of those statistics that illustrates that if you repeat something enough times, people will believe it. This oft-cited statistic comes from the 2007 Campus Sexual Assault study. It might sound fancy, but it comes with some major flaws: 1) only two colleges were surveyed, 2) there was a large non-response rate, thereby inflating the figures, 3) the definition of "sexual assault" was very vague, and included such actions as forced kissing, and 4) the survey questions were also vague, thereby leading them open to interpretation where one could assume the worst.

Aside from shoddy statistical analysis, I bring this up because the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released a much more thorough study earlier this month entitled "Rape and Sexual Assault Victimization Among College-Age Females, 1995-2013." The BJS uses both longitudinal and cross-sectional data to determine rates of sexual assault. What did they end up finding? Looking from 1995-2013, the number of women raped is not 1 out of 5, but rather 6.1 out of 1,000 women, which is 0.03 out of 5 women. That's an exaggeration of thirty-three fold! And it's more egregious when you figure that the rate of sexual assault on campus has had an overall decline since 1995 (Figure 2).

Is this to say that we should condone this piggish behavior? Of course not! Sexual assault is inexcusable, as are the times when campus tribunals sweep sexual assault under the rug to artificially bolster their campus safety statistics. Forcing someone else to have sexual contact against their own will is a blatant violation of the nonaggression axiom. "No" means "no," and that's no less relevant when we're talking about college students getting drunk at a frat party or if the woman is scantily clad. Alcohol only fuels a man's propensity towards randiness, and it doesn't excuse deplorable behavior. The underreporting that the BJS points out (p. 1) makes a sad statement of the stigma attached to sexual assault, and that should be addressed so more women report when they are sexually assaulted. Nevertheless, 0.03 out of 5 women being sexually assaulted is a far cry from 1 in 5 women.

If the premise behind feminism is gender equality, then colleges should be promoting responsible behavior for both sexes instead of encouraging segmented gender roles that exacerbate the issue. We should help women without knocking men down. There's a fine line between holding men responsible for their misdeeds and demonizing men in a "guilty before proven innocent" mob mentality because believing that women would never lie about something lie this is "politically correct" (FYI: Although it's rare, there are moments when women report false accusations, as was infamously illustrated with the Duke University case back in 2006). Not only is sexual assault lower on campuses, but it has experienced quite the drop since the 1980's. It would be nice to live in a world without sexual assault, but it should still be noteworthy that the problem is nowhere prevalent as we thought, and that it has been on the decline, much like we see with rates of domestic violence and rates of other violent crimes in general. This is something that we should all celebrate, but I anticipate that the hardcore feminists will still advance the idea of a "rape culture," regardless of what statistics or even the people over at the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), the largest anti-sexual-assault organization, have to say about there not being a "rape culture." As RAINN points out, "Rape is caused not by cultural factors but by the conscious decisions, of a small percentage of the community to commit a violent crime...[Blaming it on 'rape culture'] has the paradoxical effect of making it harder to stop sexual violence, since it removes the focus from the individual at fault, and seemingly mitigates personal responsibility for his or her own actions."

We should take rape and sexual assault seriously, but bemoaning "rape culture" is not the way to go. Whatever colleges decide to do, what we should stop doing is giving credence to the "rape culture" myth because as Cathy Young over at the libertarian Reason Magazine point out, the anti-"rape culture" movement is one that has "capitalized on laudable sympathy for victims of sexual assault to promote gender warfare, misinformation, and moral panic. It's time for a reassessment."

Parsha Vayigash: Teshuvah and Forgiveness as Signs of Emotional Maturity

Although some people never grow up, many of us have this uncanny ability to handle situations more tactfully than we would have when we were younger. We find this to be the case with Joseph and his brothers in this week's Torah portion. We're at the point in the story where Judah pleads on behalf of his brother, Benjamin. Afterwards, Joseph ordered everyone except the brothers to leave the room, and Joseph reveals his true identity (Genesis 45:1). Instead of throwing the book at the brothers or exacting revenge, Joseph told his brothers not to grieve because G-d had "sent Joseph before them to preserve life (Genesis 45:5)."

Joseph's reaction was remarkable. Why? Joseph's brothers threw him in a pit and sold him into slavery. Before ascending to power, Joseph had done some hard time in prison. Joseph had been put through the ringer. He had every right to be angry, and what's more is that he could have treated his brothers either with the same treatment because in ancient times, might was right. What we see is not a vengeful Joseph, but a Joseph who was longing to reunite with his family. Not only do his actions speak to this desire, but so do his words. In Genesis 45:5, Joseph said "כי למחיה שלחני אלהים לפניכם" (G-d sent me before you to preserve life). There's one problem: it wasn't G-d that sold Joseph into slavery and cause all the subsequent events that led up to that moment. It was his brothers who sold him into slavery. The text clearly says so. So why would Joseph attribute these events to G-d? Even though Joseph's dream/prophecy was correct (Genesis 37), I would postulate that Joseph cared more about family than being right or having prophetic powers. Not only did he miss his family, but he has realized the importance of G-d in his life. Joseph had a hard-knock life, and if it taught him anything, it's that an unfettered ego does not make for a fulfilling life. Rather than being the immature child who rubbed his conceit in his brothers' faces, he has figured out the importance of forgiveness as the beginning of healing his years of angst and frustration, which are illustrated by the loud cry he let out after revealing his identity (Genesis 45:2).

Why was he so overwhelmed with emotion? Why couldn't he keep up the charade anymore? Because if we read the text closely enough, Judah actually went through the stages of the teshuvah process. The brothers admitted their error (Genesis 42:21-23), they confessed and admitted collective responsibility (Genesis 44:16), and showed behavioral change by being willing to become Joseph's slaves (ibid.). This essentially is the teshvuah process (Mishnah Torah, Hilchot Teshuvah, 2). Joseph didn't hand out forgiveness for free. He realized that his brothers were truly repentant because they had shown true changes in their mentality and behavior, and for that, he was able to let them back in his lives. No more grudges. No more living in the past. Joseph was able to live in the present, feel at peace, and share that peace with his loved ones. The Joseph story is not only the first instance of forgiveness in recorded history, but also a wonderful example of the power of forgiveness and reconciliation that can guide us in the relations we have in our life.

People Tend Not to Exchange Gifts with Economic Efficiency, So What Gives?

With Chanukah ending and Christmas on its merry way, it got me thinking about the practice of gift-giving. People exchange gifts as a part of the holiday spirit, but the more I think about it, gift-giving doesn't make economic sense. One of the most basic ideas in economics is that the individual knows their consumer preferences better than anyone else. It's one of the reasons I get annoyed when the government assumes they know what individuals want better than the consumer. Whether it's the government spending money on in-kind transfers or individuals spending money to buy gifts, it creates economic inefficiencies because neither fully understands the individual's preferences. Yet people still give presents during the holiday season, so what gives?

The topic of the economics of gift-giving was heavily discussed in a 1993 study called "The Deadweight Loss of Christmas," in which economist Joel Waldfogel calculated a deadweight loss of $4-13B in 1993 dollars, which would be $62-206B in 2014 dollars. Deadweight loss takes place when a certain good or service is not exchanged at economic equilibrium, thereby creating economic inefficiency. The result is a loss to one party without an offset gain to another party. In this case, the assumption is that the gift-giver buys a gift that they think the recipient will value at the very same level of the gift purchased. The issue is that in many instances, the gift-giver does not have an accurate sense of what gift(s) the recipient would want, i.e., there is an information asymmetry. Since the value of the gift is less to the recipient than it is at the level at which the gift-giver perceives, economic welfare is lost in the process. The Secret Santa gift exchange is a classic example of the phenomenon at hand.

As nice as it is to make an impassioned argument about the economic inefficiencies of gift-giving, it fails to account for what economists call utility. Utility is economic jargon for "the fulfillment one receives from a certain good or service." In more layman's terms, the term could be defined as "sentimental value" or the psychological joy felt as a result of receiving or giving gifts (Gneezy and List, 2006). There is also the argument that gift-giving is a "signal of intensity of effort in one's search (see video below on Valentine's Day and gift-giving)," or another way of saying it: "it's the thought that counts" (Yao, 2009). Behavioral economics also postulates that there is an allure and excitement in gift-giving that brings joy to the giver, and it also strengthens the social connection between the giver and recipient. Although one cannot objectively measure it, one has to be able to consider the social and individual utility produced by gift-giving. And who knows? Maybe by exposing the individual to something new, they might actually like it even more (read: "more utility") than a gift that would have kept them in their comfort zone.

Even with social utility, the economic inefficiency is troubling to me. Making the argument of "stimulating the economy" doesn't work because while it might stimulate some consumer spending in the short-run, it leaves us with less resources in the medium-to-long term to help build the economy in the future. Does this mean that I have an inherent problem with gift-giving or think that gift-giving should be banned? Nope! My issue isn't with gift-giving per se, but bad gift-giving. The inefficiencies are created because the giver really doesn't know what the recipient wants. If you know the recipient well (e.g., parents buying for their children, spouses or best friends buying for each other), then economic efficiency is maintained. However, we don't have that sort of close relationship with most people, and since most gift-giving is done with people to whom we are more distant, the economic inefficiencies are still created.

So my advice on more economically efficient gift-giving goes as follows. If you don't know the person that well, either get to know them better or directly ask them what they would like. If you are too uncomfortable asking outright or simply don't want to better know the person, then give in such a way that is beneficial to the ultimate recipient. Cash is the most efficient form of gift-giving. If giving cash comes off as impersonal or you view it as socially unacceptable, a gift card can both personalize a gift while capturing much of the economic efficiency (I say "much" because $45B in gift cards have been unspent since 2005, which comes out to about nearly $5B each year). Charities are also a good idea, although if you want to give to a place like a food pantry, give them $20 instead of $20 worth of food because food drives are just bad economics. Whatever method of gift-giving you decide, I hope that 'tis the season for more economically efficient gift-giving. Happy Holidays!

Eating Cheese on Chanukah and Why Using the Story of Judith As a Basis for This Practice Has as Many Holes as Swiss Cheese

When I was in synagogue this past week, I learned about a peculiar minhag (custom) in Jewish practice: eating cheese on Chanukah. In spite what people might think, latkes, or potato pancakes [commonly eaten on Chanukah], were not originally derived from potatoes, but from cheese. Considering that the potato was a New World crop, this would make sense. But that isn't the disturbing part. It's how the practice of eating cheese on Chanukah began. The origin of this practice is first mentioned in the Shulchan Aruch by the Rema, also known as R. Moshe Isserles. In it, the Rema attributes this practice to the milk that "Judith (יהודית) fed to the enemy."

This made me ask an initial, but important question: who in the world is Judith? The Book of Judith is a deuterocanonical text, which is to say that this text made it into Christian Scripture, but never made it in the Jewish version of the Bible (Tanach). Why was this text not considered for the Jewish canon? The story itself could provide some context.

Although the text was allegedly written in Hebrew, the oldest surviving text is in ancient Greek. What the text depicts is that the Greeks conquered Judea, and the evil general Holofernes declared that all the Jewish virgin females had to sleep with a Greek official or be punished by death. Someone had to stop the madness, so Judith took it upon herself to do so. Essentially, Judith used her good looks to enter the Greek camp and seduce Holofernes. One night, she fed him cheese, which made him thirsty for wine. This was the point where she brought Holofernes to the point of inebriation, after which she decapitated Holofernes. The decapitation eroded the Greek morale, and the Greeks retreated.

Whether it's that Judith decapitated someone or that she used her sexual allure and prowess to get the job done, using Judith as an example of valor was probably something that the rabbis didn't want women emulating. Is the message that religious communities want to send to their daughters that exploiting a situation by using your sexual appeal is acceptable as long as the ends justify the means? Perhaps this is why the Book of Judith never made it into Jewish canon, or perhaps it is due to the historical anachronisms in the text or its possible Greek origin. What's even more ridiculous about using this as a basis for a minhag for Chanukah is that Holofernes wasn't Greek; he was Assyrian. This story took place during the rule of Nebuchadnezzar (6 c. B.C.E.), which was centuries before the Chanukah story, so the connection between Judith and Chanukah is literally inconceivable. It's also interesting to note that the earliest mention of this practice is during the 14th century.

I don't like the fact that a practice in Judaism, even if it's a minor one, is based on an apocryphal, fictional text with historical inaccuracies and a problematic protagonist. Fortunately, I was able to find another explanation for this practice because the primary, traditional one was very perturbing. This insight comes from the Ben Ish Chai. When the Greeks occupied Judea, they banned three specific Jewish institutions: maintaining the Jewish calendar [based on the lunar cycle], Shabbat, and circumcision. The Hebrew word for "month" is חודש, which begins with ח. The second letter of the word Shabbat (שבת) is ב. The third letter in the word מילה (a ברית מילה is the Hebrew term for circumcision) is ל. These three letters spell the world חלב, which is the Hebrew word for "milk," which gives us the basis for eating dairy on Chanukah.

It's a tenuous explanation, but let's go with it. The story of Chanukah took place during a time when the Greek rulers banned practices vital to Jewish observance. Milk is a source of sustenance. Not only does the Bible refer to Israel as the "land of milk and honey" (e.g., Exodus 3:8, 33:3; Deuteronomy 31:20), but milk symbolizes life in Judaism, as is observed by the prohibition of mixing meat and dairy. Much like milk can nurture life, Jewish rituals and practices nourish the Jewish people.

On the one hand, the universalist morals and ethics are a vital part of Judaism. On the other hand, without the ritualistic, particularistic practices, there is nothing to distinguish Judaism from other world religions. If consuming dairy products on Chanukah is to remind us of anything, it is that studying Torah, Shabbat, affixing mezzuzot, and the plethora of Jewish ritualistic practice engenders, vitalizes, and helps define Jewish spirituality.

Reading About CIA Interrogation Methods Sort of Felt Like Torture

I know, I know. I'm running a tad behind on the news. I just moved to a different part of the country and I'm still getting settled in, so please cut me some slack on catching up here. I heard about the Senate's report on the CIA's detention and interrogation methods last week, and I have wanted to comment ever since, even if briefly.

After 9-11, things haven't been the same with the way the United States approaches national security. Fortunately, we didn't become a police state (Thank G-d!), but at the same time, it became easier to justify doing things in the name of national security, and what's worse is that most Americans are okay with their liberties being violated for security's sake. Didn't Benjamin Franklin say something about those who are willing to give up freedom for security deserve neither? I'm not just talking about starting two wars in the Middle East or passing the Patriot Act. The Senate's report shed a lot of light on what was taking place in the world of intelligence gathering. The CIA's interrogation techniques included "wallings," sleep deprivation, threatening the detainee's family with bodily harm, and the ever-infamous waterboarding.

There's the ethical question of whether we should be torturing people in the first place. There are those who are absolutely opposed in violating one's human rights to acquire national security intelligence. Proponents can certainly provide an extreme enough of a hypothetical where one would be inclined to reluctantly acquiesce, at least from a utilitarian perspective, to the violation of international law if the situation were that dire. Torture is akin to poison: "dosage matters." Given the information I presently have, I'm not quite convinced that the risk were so high that we need to use such methods. The problem with national security issues is that classified information and security clearances cause such an information asymmetry that only the top echelon would have adequate information to assess who is a threat and who is not. Objectively, we cannot know how deep the rabbit hole goes.

However, let's give the CIA the benefit of a doubt for a moment, and let's say that using torture to obtain pertinent national security information is reasonable, and let's also assume that the detainee actually has pertinent information to divulge. The intuition behind torture as an intelligence gathering method seems sound. You put the detainee through physical and psychological pain to get him to talk because he can't take the pain any longer. It has been done for centuries, so it's not like the intuition is anything new. Perhaps there is enough of a gradation in the quality and quantity of interrogation techniques where the CIA is justified in its actions. The problem is what the report illustrates, which is such interrogation methods are counterproductive, which makes intuitive sense, especially if they're just saying what the interrogators want to hear. The CIA has even admitted that at least up until 2013, it had no way of assessing effectiveness of its interrogation methods. If the interrogation methods don't provide the CIA with the information they require in the first place, what good is torture? The lack of oversight from either the legislative or executive branches, or even the CIA's Office of Inspector General for that matter, does not help with situation, either.

I'm about ready to head to work, so although I can say more, I really need to summarize my thoughts. Unsurprisingly, people criticize these methods. Proponents point out that we're nothing like China or North Korea. While it is true that America's methods are mild in comparison to the Middle Ages, if we are going around the world trying to promote democratic values, then America needs to "walk the walk" and act upon what it preaches as a matter of policy. I'm not here to say that America shouldn't have any counterterrorism measures whatsoever. There certainly is room to have a conversation on what the CIA's role should be in providing the social good of national security. What I am trying to say is that if the CIA is to have an active role in national security, the policy alternatives to improve the situation should be done tactfully, with accountability, and should be implemented with a greater context of the threat's overall risks in mind. We should expect the highest quality of governance from all bureaucratic agencies, and national security organizations like the NSA or the CIA are no exception. I hope that this report is a stepping stone to implementing some real national security reform.

Did the Minimum Wage Cause the Great Recession to Last Longer?

Economists and historians will be debating well into the future as to what caused the Great Recession. What is a comparably amusing debate to watch is what caused the Great Recession to linger on as long as it has. My money has been on unemployment benefits being the primary culprit (see here and here), and yet another theory comes along to complement the "unemployment benefits" theory: minimum wage laws. Shortly before the Great Recession began, Congress passed the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007, which gradually raised the federal minimum wage from $5.85 to $7.25 per hour. Minimum wage proponents like to think that gradual and "minute" minimum wage increases cause negligible economic harm at best, but recent research continues to add to the evidence that the minimum wage is nowhere as benign as proponents would have us believe. According to Professors Jeff Clemens and Michael Wither of the University of San Diego, the minimum wage hikes caused a net job loss of 1 million (Clemens and Wither, 2014).

Since there were states that were already paying a minimum wage that was higher than the proposed federal minimum wage, Clemens and Wither were able to measure the effects with a legitimate control group, which is no easy task in the world of social sciences. By doing so, the authors found that the employment-population ratio, i.e., the share of employed, working-age adults, decreased by 0.7 percentage points, which accounts for 15 percent of the overall decrease during the Great Recession. This helps make the study more credible because plenty of other minimum wage studies like to focus only on certain demographics (e.g., fast food workers, teenagers) instead of the macro effects of the minimum wage legislation.

This research also points out the significant declines in economic mobility (Clemens and Wither, Table 6), which is important because it reemphasizes the importance that low-skilled work has a stepping stone for upward mobility: five percentage points less likely to acquire a middle-class job. The other point that this research makes is how the minimum wage does not do nearly as good of a job of targeting low-skilled workers as the earned income tax credit does (Clemens and Wither, p. 33). The disemployment effect caused more educated workers to take on internship (p. 26), whereas less-educated workers were subject to increased odds of simply being unemployed (p. 27).

The fact that minimum wage increases unemployment and decreases economic mobility does not shock me in the slightest. While it is true that some individuals have the positive impact of an improved quality of life because of a minimum wage, let's not forget that it comes with the cost of depriving other individuals of the opportunity to gain experience and achieve higher-paid jobs in the long-run, which did nothing to help ameliorate the economic conditions of the Great Recession. This will hardly be the end of the minimum wage debate because it has become such a hot-button topic over the years. Nevertheless, if we want to help the poor, we should come up with policy alternatives that actually helps them, and spoiler alert, the minimum wage is not such an alternative.

Does Income Inequality Cause Decreased Economic Growth?

The income inequality debate never seems to die. Its most recent revival was due to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and its latest report (summary here) on "Trends in Income Inequality and its Impact on Economic Growth." Although the OECD's analysis has more variables, the essential relationship that the OECD establishes is between the Gini coefficient and the GDP growth rate.

What is the Gini coefficient? It is a form of statistical dispersion used to represent the income distribution of a given nation. It has become the gold standard for measuring income inequality. Although it works nicely because it's relatively easy to compare across countries, there are still some flaws with it. One is that it compares income, and not wealth. Two countries with different amounts of wealth can have the same Gini coefficient, which also means that the Gini coefficient says nothing about quality in a given country. The Gini coefficient can produce the same coefficient for two countries with different income distributions because the Lorenz curve can have different curvatures for different countries. Furthermore, the Gini coefficient does not account for utility or economic opportunity.

Much like with the GDP, until we can come up with a better metric, we need to do the best we have. Even if the OECD uses the GDP as the metric for economic success, I still take issue with the temporal comparison because over time, a more developing country is going to experience an overall decline in GDP growth rate with reasons having nothing to do with income inequality. Correlation has suddenly turned into causation, and that fact that the OECD recommends wealth redistribution, a policy that does more than its fair share of harm, based on a correlation that can be easily explained by other factors is most unfortunate. The OECD says that redistribution would work if the government could do so efficiently (OECD, p. 19), which I find to be a highly tenuous assumption.

Although there is enough reason to not to jump to conclusions with the OECD's report, what did the OECD end up finding? The ratio of the income of the richest ten percent to the poorest ten percent increased from 7:1 in the 1980s to 9.5:1. As a result, the OECD's economic analysis suggests that this increased income inequality has had a statistically significant, negative impact on economic growth. Conversely, what the OECD finds that is equally intriguing is that "no evidence is found that those with high incomes pulling away from the rest of the population harms [economic] growth (p. 6)." This is important because the typical income inequality narrative is that the top echelon is gobbling up the resources while the "99 percent" have nothing left.

Looking at the OECD study, the issue is not with the rich getting richer per se, but rather with the poor not having the same level of access to resources in order to develop their human capital. This is especially true when looking at educational attainment for lower-income families (p. 28), which was one of the biggest kvetches of the OECD in this study. If the OECD study is correct, then income inequality only affects those with a lower educational attainment. Those with parents who have medium to high educational attainment are not affected by income inequality (p. 25-26). 

The OECD focuses on the bottom of income distribution, as it well should. Anti-poverty initiatives are not enough, according to the OECD (p. 29), but they might not be enough because the current programs are not sufficient at accomplishing the task at hand. It very well could be because many anti-poverty initiatives are handled by government bureaucracies, which makes me wonder whether the government intervening to reduce income inequality will actually increase economic growth. There are many ways to revive economic growth, and I honestly don't think simply redistributing wealth is going to help. The IMF actually published a report, and showed that at best, redistribution is negligible, but it can also very well make things worse (Ostry et al., 2014, p. 23). There is no need to knock rich people down a peg with poor policy like the wealth tax because by the OECD's own admission, the "one percent" isn't de facto causing the issues at hand. I've discussed education and anti-poverty initiatives in the past, but it should go without saying that we should focus on policies that help make the poor less poor and provide them with the opportunity to access the tools they need to succeed in life. Whatever those policies may end up being, we should improve the quality of education and encourage entrepreneurship instead of going after the ever-intangible and elusive "income inequality."