A Blog by Jonathan Low

 

Sep 28, 2013

The Whole Truth About Global Honesty Rankings

It's kind of cute the way we attempt to measure everything these days. It started even before Big Data purported to provide us with detailed comparative information concerning just about everything we might want to know - and a bunch of things we'd probably be better off having never heard about.

We are insatiable consumers of statistics, however spurious, misleading or ill conceived about health and money and sex and weird aspects of the human condition that would have caused our forebears to send us to our rooms or wash out mouths out with soap and then say ten Hail Marys just in case.

Ethics is one of these topics. Or as we have come to better understand it, the relative honesty of various municipalities, regions or nations when compared to each other. As more and more cultures interact, the combination of unfamiliarity with customs and legacies combined with fear of being misunderstood or just plain ripped off increases. So we look for ways to either allay those concerns or just validate our biases.

Magazines seem to take the lead in this process. It appears to sell product and doesnt require a lot of effort from reporters. The problem, however, is with the methods employed. It turns out to be pretty easy to get this stuff wrong. As the following article explains, Readers' Digest has jumped into the honesty game with the same fervor that US News and World Report embraced rankings of colleges, universities and almost anything else. In fact, US News has ceased to exist as a publication. It's only revenue source is now compilations of listings.

The venerable Digest has been around a lot longer but faces similar pressures. What it hopes to gain by becoming the arbiter of The Truth must be assumed to lie with finance rather than pure knowledge. But if it expects to have its credibility verified, it may need to address rising disputes regarding the sources, uses and definitions of the topics on which it claims it is its destiny to opine...in all honesty. JL

Olga Khazan reports in The Atlantic:

Several international papers and sites' "most read" lists had some version of the results from a recent Reader's Digest test that aimed to find the world's most- and least-honest cities. The magazine determined this by "dropping" 192 wallets—each filled with $50, a cellphone number, and other items—in major cities around the world to see how many people would try to find the owner
The Finnish city of Helsinki was the most "honest," with 11 out of 12 wallets returned. Mumbai was second, with nine, and Lisbon was allegedly the least, with just one returned.
And now, bring on the slideshows and the simplistic cultural explanations:
"Finns are naturally honest," said Lasse Luomakoski, a 27-year-old businessman, who found one of the wallets dropped in the Finnish capital."We are a small, quiet, closely-knit community. We have little corruption, and we don't even run red lights." Another Helsinki couple in their sixties said: "Of course we returned the wallet. Honesty is an inner conviction."
No one loves praising Finland more than me, but if you look at the rest of the ratings, this tidy explanation simply doesn't hold up. Zurich, which is in rich, homogeneous, corruption-free Switzerland, scored on par with Rio de Janeiro, which is rife with inequality and crime. London is apparently less "honest" than Moscow, the capital of one of the world's most corrupt countries.
Digging deeper into stories about the test, it turns out some of the wallets were actually returned by foreign visitors to the country, which makes it less a reflection of the cities themselves than of the tourists who travel there. About a third of people in Zurich are foreigners. Meanwhile, about 60 percent of Mumbai residents live in slums, but the city is also home to towering skyscrapers and wealthy CEOs. Which contingent found the wallets, and did their economic situation influence their decision to call the owner?
Aside from the lack of information about who found each city's wallets, and where, there's also the issue that "honesty" doesn't mean the same thing in every country. Someone who finds a wallet in Spain—where the unemployment rate is 27 percent—might see keeping the $50 just as a way to buy food that day, not as an act of malice.
Granted, Reader's Digest isn't exactly a peer-reviewed journal or a polling organization, and it can do whatever experiments it wants. But news organizations shouldn't report this like it's a true representation of relative ethics worldwide. It would certainly be interesting to find out which cities are actually the most honest—maybe by coming up with culturally specific questions and having trained researchers administer them to a random sample of people who represent the full demographic range in each country. But this isn't that, so saying Lisbon is the "least honest" city is, well, dishonest.

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