Some friends of mine on Facebook were talking about rape (as you do), and one of them brought up how anti-rape public awareness campaigns targeting men have been found to be effective.

Their evidence, just like the evidence of everyone else who makes this claim, was an article in the Vancouver Globe and Mail, which noted that the city’s anti-rape campaign – called “Don’t Be That Guy” and consisted of hanging posters with catchy slogans about how men really shouldn’t have sex with non-consenting women – had successfully decreased rapes in the city. They know this because the year before the campaign, sexual assault rates went up, but the first full year of the campaign, sexual assault rates went down.

I wish I lived in a world that worked like this. If hanging up pictures of distressed-looking pretty women that say “DON’T BE THAT GUY” can reverse rising sexual assault rates within a year, maybe we could end the drug war with pictures of unhappy-looking people smoking that say “WINNERS DON’T DO DRUGS”, or prevent teenage pregnancy with pictures of smiling couples that say “TRUE LOVE WAITS”, or decrease racism with pictures of different ethnicities holding hands and the caption “DIVERSITY IS OUR GREATEST ASSET”.

But I shouldn’t be so cynical. This initiative does claim to have evidence supporting it. So let’s analyze that evidence.

The evidence is that after the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign in Vancouver, sex crimes decreased by 10%.

But Vancouver was not the only city to try the campaign. “Don’t Be That Guy” originated in Edmonton. After that city’s “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign, sex crimes increased by 14%, even as other categories of crime were decreasing.

Am I blaming Edmonton’s “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign for causing more rape? Probably not (although if you read the links above, you know that’s not as far-fetched as it sounds). I am saying that these kinds of small changes in crime are very common for cities and mean nothing.

Just as it would be silly to seize upon a +14% increase in rapes in Edmonton as suggesting anti-rape campaigns cause rape, so it is silly to seize upon a -10% decrease in rapes in Vancouver as suggesting anti-rape campaigns prevent rape.

It is generally bad to take a single number out of context and use it to claim a causative effect. If a hundred people take homeopathic remedies, one of them will have her blood pressure go down 10%, just because blood pressure goes down sometimes. If you are the person selling the homeopathic remedy, you can say “Look! Vanessa used homeopathy, and her blood pressure decreased by 10%! Clearly it’s working!”

Likewise, if you are a movement pushing this kind of anti-rape campaign, you can publicize the article in the Vancouver newspaper that says crime rates decreased 10% after your “remedy” was tried, and just fail to publicize anything about Edmonton [1]. If you have a good enough campaign, everyone will hear about it from you, no one will bother to double-check, and it will become a well-known fact that anti-rape campaigns targeting men lowers the sexual offense rate.

The counterspell is moderate skepticism of articles in the popular media claiming amazing social science results when there is no peer-reviewed research corroborating the discovery. In the case of “Don’t Be That Guy”, as far as I know such peer-reviewed research does not exist.

This concludes the part of this essay that will not be lots of boring numbers.

Still with me? Good. There are actually some other interesting ways we can pick apart the Vancouver rape data, and for the sake of completeness we might as well try. Our source will be the Vancouver Police Department’s crime statistics reports.

These statistics confirm that in 2011, when the “Don’t Be That Guy” program was introduced, sex offenses decreased by -9.7%. But just from that number, we don’t know whether this is an effect of the program, or just the continuation of a long-term trend. Maybe sex crimes in Vancouver decrease by 9.7% every year. So the Globe and Mail article very correctly focuses on the change in the trend. They observe that in 2010, the year before the campaign, sex crimes rose +4.7%, and now in 2011 with the campaign they’re dropping -9.7%. That’s much more impressive. It’s a big switch in the trend.

The mathematical term for this kind of change in trends is “second derivatives”, and the second derivative of sex crimes from 2010 to 2011 was -14.4 (the difference between a +4.7% increase and a -9.7% decrease).

But from the same crime statistics, we see that breaking and entering was down -11.1% in 2010, but up by +5.4% in 2011, so its second derivative shifted 16.6. Possession of stolen goods shifted from -18.7% in 2010 to +3.8% in 2011, a second derivative of +22.5. Arson shifted from -6.5% in 2010 to +38% in 2011, for a second derivative of +44.5. It would be moderately unfair to include murder on this list since there are so few murders that large variations are easy to come by, but if you’ll humor me, change in murder rate went from -53.7% in 2010 to +48.1% in 2011, for a second derivative of 101.8.

My point with all these numbers is that second derivatives are volatile things, and the change in sexual offenses in 2010-2011 was equal to or less than the change in a whole bunch of other crimes, none of which had campaigns targeted against them. In other words, it’s very much the sort of thing you would expect to see by chance.

This is true across years as well as across crimes. In 2004, sex offenses were up by +21.9%, but in 2006, they were decreasing by -1.3, and the next year, in 2007, they were down -7.2%, almost as much as with the introduction of the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign in 2011 (of course, there was no campaign in 2007) By 2009, the pendulum had swung wildly once again, and there was a huge +17.7% increase in sexual offenses. This tells the story of a city where it is common for sex offenses to go up by a large amount one year and then go down by a large amount in another year, or vice versa, whether people are putting posters on streetlights or not.

I’m not exactly sure how kosher this is, but we can try to quantify this with a third derivative – the change in the change in the change [2]. We mentioned before that the second derivative of sex crimes from 2010 to 2011, the year of the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign, was -14.4 – a movement from +4.7 to -9.7. But from 2009 to 2010, the year before the program was introduced, the second derivative was -13.0 – it moved from +17.7% to +4.7%.

In other words, the impressive change in the second derivative of sex offenses in 2011 was the near-exact predicted continuation of a trend that had started a year earlier. There was just as big a shift in 2010 – when the program had not started yet – as in 2011, when it had.

There’s something a little sneaky about this – it should always be possible to find some level of derivative that supports the results you want – but given that the Globe and Mail article was making a second-derivative based argument, I don’t think it’s too unfair for me to follow along. Readers who know more about statistics than I can tell me whether this is already a solved problem.

Of course, the proper way to do this would be to use all the different crime statistics to figure out what the average noise in changes in Vancouver crime rates are, and then see whether the change in rape in 2011 was significantly greater than the noise at a 5% level. I have neither the time nor the intelligence to do this formally, but it’s what I’ve been doing informally throughout this article and it should be clear by now that the answer is “no, it wasn’t”.

So now we just have some mopping up to do. For example, did you know that the majority of the “sexual offenses” reported as declining in the Globe and Mail article aren’t rape at all, but things like “groping, grabbing, or kissing”, and that as far as I know no statistics have ever been published about what happened to rape itself during the campaign period? Or that according to official Vancouver statistics, the large majority of sexual offences are committed by strangers – which is contrary to what we know to be true about sexual offences in general, which suggests there’s a large bias in terms of which sexual offences get reported to the police, and which are the category of sexual offence it’s least plausible that posters defining rape would help with? Or that police attribute much the previous rise in sexual offenses to offenses committed against prostitutes, who are totally ignored by the “smiling girl asks to have a drink with you but probably doesn’t want sex” focus of the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign?

Of course, none of this proves that campaigns like “Don’t Be That Guy” don’t work. It just shows there’s not much evidence that they do. This brings us back to our prior that putting up some posters around town can arrest major social ills. Based on the examples above like drug use and abstinence-only sex education, my prior for this is very low.

Your mileage may vary, but before deciding I urge you to consider an alternative hypothesis. That claims that the posters lower rape – never very plausible on the face of it – are fake consequentialism (I don’t have a good link for this concept yet, but search “fake consequentialism” here). That the real reason people put up “Don’t Be That Guy” posters is the same reason they put RAPE FREE ZONE posters on college classroom doors and the same reason men’s rights activists have taken to putting up “Don’t Be That Girl” posters. It’s a way of signaling your membership in a specific tribe and demonstrating the power of that tribe by being able to take over public places with your symbols.

Or maybe I’m being totally paranoid. We’ll probably know one way or the other soon enough, as its “confirmed success” in Vancouver has led to everyone everywhere adapting the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign and we will soon have oodles of useful data that a real social scientist can use to do a real analysis. I look forward to reading what it says.

In the meantime, please don’t say that there is already evidence in the program’s favor unless you’re willing to give many more caveats than people typically do when they make that statement.

Footnotes

[1]: The only blogger I have ever seen mention Edmonton in regards to “Don’t Be That Guy” is Greta Christina, who very correctly talks about Edmonton as the birthplace and center of the campaign, says how effective it was in Edmonton and how happy the police there were with its effects, and cites as proof of this……that rape went down in Vancouver. Did you know that 100% of my uses of the phrase “what is this I don’t even” this year have been while reading Freethought Blogs?

[2]: Third derivative can also be called “jerk”, which seems appropriate when we are using it to measure the number of rapists.

I tried to scrub my Facebook feed of all of these kinds of articles, but occasionally something gets through. This week what’s gotten through, en masse, is the Gilbert/Frago case, in which a guy killed an escort and was acquitted of murder.

Let’s look at the article titles: In Texas, It’s Okay To Murder An Escort If She Won’t Sleep With You, says Alternet, Texas Jury Says Sometimes Killing An Escort Is Okay, says Feministe, adding that ” “but I thought she was going to have sex with me” is now a viable defense for manslaughter”. abovethelaw.com says Killing A Hooker Is A-OK, Guess What State, because stereotypes are hilarious and you should always perpetuate them. And Mr. Conservative writes “Apparently, in Texas it’s okay to kill an escort if she won’t sleep with you.”

The story is that a guy hired an escort, which is often a code word for a prostitute, for $150. In this case, it was not a code word for a prostitute and the escort provided him with company and nothing more. The guy got angry, and as she drove away, he shot several bullets at her car. One of them ricocheted off the car, hitting and injuring her, and she later died from the injury.

During the trial, the defense argued that in Texas, it is legal to use deadly force to defend your property. This man believed the escort had stolen his $150 (by charging him for sex and then not providing it), so he shot at her car in order to stop her from getting away with committing a crime, which is sort of like self-defense if you really really squint. The jury declared the man not guilty of murder.

How does the Internet interpret the decision? From Alas, A Blog:

I strongly suspect that for many juries, the life of a sex worker isn’t considered as valuable as the life of a store manager or even a drug dealer. Certainly not as valuable as something really precious, like $150.

From “Everyday Victim Blaming“

A woman meets a man, she declines sex and he shoots her, and a jury has decided that it’s OK because she was a sex worker. It is hard to know where to even start with how scary the decision of the jury is, there are so many ways it blames the victim and excuses a man for ever being responsible for his behaviour. The implications for all women should make anyone reading very afraid too. A man’s assumption about sex being an automatic right after a gift, or money, or marriage is now the situation in Texas. How many other women are in danger? Of course people will say it’s different because money was involved, I have already seen some of this victim blaming going on. There are a number of scenarios here; they all blame the victim though.

From Shakesville:

And because she was a sex worker, and because she was marginalized and he is privileged, a jury has ruled that it’s okay. No harm. No foul. It’s not like anyone important was killed today, it’s not like anyone important was hurt by her death, it’s not like anyone important will be terrorized in the wake of this blatant ruling that men can murder women and after the fact with no living witnesses to contradict them claim that they were sex workers who weren’t performing according to expectations and thus get off free and clear.

The most eloquent commentary, is, as usual, provided by Freethought Blogs:

It’s legal in Texas to kill a woman for refusing to have sex?

So if you’ve had any experience with this section of the blogosphere before, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that the case had nothing to do with sex, nothing to do with privilege, and everything to do with legal principles that the jury applied pretty much entirely correctly.

Bridgette Dunlap, who unlike these bloggers is an actual lawyer and has read facts about the case beyond the one article on Gawker that started this whole thing, writes:

The much more plausible reason for the verdict is that the jury believed the defendant’s claim that he didn’t intend to shoot the victim. Per Texas’ homicide statute, the prosecution needed to prove that Gilbert “intentionally or knowingly” killed Frago or intended to cause her “serious bodily injury.” The defense argued that Gilbert lacked the requisite intent for murder because when he shot at the car as Frago and the owner of the escort service drove away, he was aiming for the tire. The bullet hit the tire and a fragment, “literally the size of your fingernail,” according to Defense Attorney Bobby Barrera, hit Frago. Barrera does not believe the jury acquitted because of the defense of property law. He believes they acquitted because they believed Gilbert didn’t mean to shoot her…

One would expect the jury to find that shooting at a car with an AK-47 is at least “reckless,” in which case he could have been convicted of manslaughter. But the prosecution didn’t charge him with manslaughter, only murder. Manslaughter is a “lesser included offense” of murder and the judge is entitled to instruct the jury if the evidence supports that charge, but it appears she did not. The jury can’t convict on a charge that isn’t before them.

In other words, guy hit tire of car, bullet ricocheted off and hit a woman. Prosecutors mysteriously turn case into referendum on whether the guy meant to kill the woman. Man says he didn’t, he was just aiming at the tire (which he in fact hit). Jury believes him and acquits. Under this interpretation, the only “scandal” is why the prosecution charged murder instead of the more legally defensible manslaughter.

A commenter on this blog disputes Professor Dunlap’s analysis:

Scott’s wrong on this, I’m pretty sure. Under Texas felony murder rule, the only defense was defense of property. If the jury did not find defense of property, this would have been murder. As such, there’s no game in manslaughter at all; the prosecutors were right not to charge it . . .

It seems to me to be absolutely right to have charged murder; there is a manslaughter lesser if supported by the evidence. Here, given Texas law, it appears that the self-defense would be justified if it was for recovery of stolen property. (No other state permits deadly force for recapture of property.) See below as to why murder was the *only* rational charge . . .

“Malice” is a term used in most jurisdictions for murder, and includes “depraved-heart murder.” Texas repealed that in 1974 when they changed section 19.02 of their criminal law. The commenter quoted for the theory that murder requires direct desire to kill rather than implied malice is basically correct as far as it goes, but appears to me to be entirely wrong for another reason.

Texas felony murder rule is different. If you’re somewhere else there’s something called the merger doctrine that doesn’t always make your felonious attack murder. In Texas, if you, say, feloniously shoot at a car and inadvertently kill an occupant, that’s felony murder. (Felony murder is usually: You and I go to rob a store. I shoot the clerk fatally. Bad news for you: You’re on the hook for murder. Don’t rob stores with violent armed criminals.)

This was almost certainly found to be self-defense.

Salisbury v. State, 90 Tex.Crim. 438, 235 S.W. 901, 902 (1921), observed that one who shoots wantonly and recklessly into a car or building known to him to be occupied need not have the specific intent to kill any particular person in order to make him guilty of murder. Texas went through several gyrations since then.

In 1974 in Hilliard v. State, the court ruled that the intent to commit the underlying felony (here, injury to a child) was sufficient to make the child’s death felony murder.

Upholding that view is Rodriguez v. State (http://tinyurl.com/mc2foyk) (And that’s the link you want to follow for a great overview of Texas felony murder). It makes clear that there is no merger doctrine in Texas – if shooting at the car was felonious – and without justification it surely was – defendant is guilty of murder. That’s why they tried this particular defense and stressed it – “I shot at the occupied car itself” is a felony (Texas Penal Code section 22.05(b)), so this leads directly to felony murder. In short, our blog host is wrong. It is possible I am wrong; I do not have the full tools at my disposal to solve this puzzle 100%, but I’d bet heavily on me. The screaming bloggers are sort of right: The hooker-stole-my-money defense worked.

This was then followed by another learned legal scholar suddenly showing up on this blog (why am I the only person who has to deal with this?) and arguing the opposite:

JRM, I didn’t get the impression they were going for felony murder. Why would the defense attorney say he thought he they won on lack of intent if it was felony murder?

I could be missing something. I am not a criminal expert (but did run the piece past some criminal law profs). I’m most interested in the narrative because I think the inaccuracy/hyperbole will make some people more emboldened to harm women.

I assumed it was felony murder as well, but it appears not. It isn’t just the post-trial statements (which have been changing). Reporting from during the trial shows they were arguing no intent.

A commenter on another blog who claims to be a lawyer in Texas says that “stand your ground against nighttime intruder” law does not apply in this case anyway:

As I read the applicable law, the defense allows you to use lethal force against a night-time intruder who is committing a crime (and here’s the kicker) only if you yourself are not engaged in unlawful activity. That clause seems specifically designed to prevent johns from using this defense against prostitutes. If you ask me, the DA in this case screwed up big-time. Someone should be losing their job over this.

I had some stronger conclusions here before, but right now I’m just going to end with “law is complicated”.

I decided to edit the last post to split it in half. Some of you who read this through Reader are probably getting it twice, so apologies for that.

The second Facebook meme to grab my attention recently was this:

And having beliefs ought to mean you can make predictions, so in this case I predicted as soon as I saw this image that something was not quite kosher and that on further investigation it would turn out to be terribly misleading and that people aren’t really this horrible at all. And, well…

First of all, when I Google these words I get some very different results. For example, Googling “disabled people should…” brings up some of the same things they found, but also things like “disabled people should be treated equally”. I am not going to accuse the original author of lying because I know Google can sometimes be idiosyncratic, but at the very least it is less monolithic than the image presumes.

Second of all, even on the offending results, very few of them are actually making the positive case. For one thing, Google interprets “Should disabled people be killed?” interchangeably with “disabled people should be killed”, meaning that a lot of these results are people rhetorically asking “Should disabled people be killed?” and then answering “No, disabled people are as good as anyone else.” Others are quoting other people: for example, the top site to appear for me is an article titled Kill the disabled, they are unworthy , but its title seems to be paraphrasing the Nazi position on the issue and then goes on to say how wrong the Nazis were and how “I have been astounded at the capabilities of these so-called “disabled” people. They speak better English than many of my peers and the joy and spontaneity they experience through music clearly shows them to be more evolved than the average person. I know now that the words ‘special needs, disabled, handicapped and retarded’ need a thorough re-evaluation.”

Another lot are Christian sites, which put the “disabled people should be killed” position in the hands of some hypothetical atheist and then goes on to talk about How Christ Loves Everyone Alike. A few others are obvious trolls who then get knocked down by thirty or forty other people. We fill out the rest with mostly denunciations of politicians allegedly claiming disabled people should be killed, along with demands for the politician involved to resign.

I searched through the first thirty search results for “disabled people should be killed”, and I could not find one single web page which was unambiguously an essay in favor of the proposition. Thirteen were outrage porn railing against the fact that some other vague person or organization was even considering the question, and the other seventeen were a complicated mixture of things which admittedly did include a very few comments in favor although they all looked like they were written by thirteen year olds.

But there’s an even bigger problem here, which is that Google loathes everyone in the world with the burning fury of a million suns.

Type in “French people should…” and the single AutoComplete suggestion is “French people should die”. “Germans should” gets you “Germans should die” and “Germans should be exterminated”, as well as the equally-scary-for-different-reasons “Germans should have won”. “Jews should” gets you “Jews should all die”, “Jews should leave America”, and the comparatively reasonable “Jews should apologize for killing Jesus.”

This isn’t just Google’s oppressive WASP user base hating foreigners and minorities either. “White people should…” brings up four options: “white people should be slaves”, “white people should die”, “white people should go back to Europe” and “white people should be killed”.

“Homosexuals should…” gives you “…should be killed”, but “straight people should…” gives “straight people should die” as well. Is there anyone who Google doesn’t think should die? Apparently yes! “Hitler should…” gives you “Hitler should have won the war” and “Hitler should have finished the job”.

Google AutoComplete has complicated political beliefs. “Obama should…” gives “Obama should die” and “Obama should be killed”, but “Bush should…” gives “Bush should be in jail.” Type in “rich people should” and you get “rich people should die”. Type in “poor people should”, and you get, unsurprisingly “poor people should die” (as well as “poor people should be sterilized”). Google thinks “Republicans should be ashamed of themselves” and “Republicans should be killed”, but also that “Democrats should be shot” and the somewhat nonsequitur “Democrats should be confiscated”. Christians should “be killed”, atheists should “shut up”, and Muslims should “be exterminated” (or at least “not be allowed in America”). Some of Google’s opinions are bizarre: it seems to feel very strongly (all its suggestions are variants of this same phrase) that “dead people should stay dead”.

Even the user herself doesn’t escape Google’s universal crushing misanthropy. Type in “I should…” (without a space), and your second option is “I shouldn’t be alive”. Nor does the species as a whole: type in “humans should” and number two is “humans should die” (number four is “humans should go extinct”.)

It seems kind of ironic that a company whose motto is “Don’t Be Evil” has a flagship product that believes virtually every demographic group should be murdered en masse. I don’t know if this is a weird quirk of the search algorithm or if pretty much everyone who makes should-statements on the Internet is recommending genocide.

But I hope that this problem gets solved before Google tries to build a recursively self-improving artificial intelligence.

Here’s an image I got from a few places earlier this week. The title was something like “Hours Working Per Week At Minimum Wage Needed To Afford A Two-Bedroom Apartment In Different States”, and it was usually associated with some text about how it was outrageous that the minimum wage isn’t nearly enough to live on:

California might be an unfair example because it’s particularly high. The state I’m visiting right now, Utah, is a bit more representative, at 77 hours/week. But even this requires eleven hours a day, seven days a week. So people’s outrage seems justified.

What’s the catch?

The first catch is that this has nothing to do with the minimum wage. The federal minimum wage sets an effective floor for state minimum wage; many states exceed the federal number but none are allowed to go below it. The states that have the best minimum wage apartment affordability – Arkansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia – all have this minimum permissible minimum wage. On the other hand, the states with the highest minimum wage in the country – Vermont, Washington, and Nevada – have exceptionally poor apartment affordability. I don’t have numbers to put into SPSS, but a very quick eyeballing suggests apartment affordability as measured by this map and minimum wage are actually anti-correlated, probably because high minimum wage implies leftist politics implies dense urban population implies costly housing.

The second catch is related to the first catch: there is no way raising minimum wage could solve this problem. For example, suppose we decided that it was unfair to make people work more than the standard forty hour workweek. What level could we set minimum wage in order to achieve this noble-sounding goal? In California, we would have to multiply the minimum wage by 3.25x, making it $26/hour. I think even most leftists would start to worry that might cause certain problems down the line.

The third and most important catch is that these numbers don’t mean what you think they mean and probably don’t mean anything at all

I first noticed this when I tried to calculate the price of an apartment in California from this data. California minimum wage is $8/hour, so a quick $8/hour * 130 hour weeks needed * 4 weeks/month = average apartment in California costs $4160/month. Renting apartments in California is horrible, but not that horrible.

So I Googled this until I finally found an article in the New York Times where this image had previously appeared, which unlike every instantiation of the image I have seen on Facebook explains the methodology. The numbers are not about how many hours are needed to pay for rent, they’re about how many hours are needed to afford rent, where afford is arbitrarily defined as “be able to pay for rent using no more than 30% of your income”. This brings the cost of a California apartment in the sense everyone is naturally interpreting the picture as meaning back to a slightly-less-unreasonable $1250/month and brings the number of hours per week our hypothetical minimum wage laborer needs to work to pay for rent down to 39 – still worrying, but markedly less so (her Utah counterpart only needs 23.1, which actually sounds doable and liveable).

But we’re still not done here. The graphic specifies that we’re affording a two-bedroom apartment. The best reason to demand a two bedroom apartment is that you are, in fact, two people. Suppose we’re talking about a couple, both of whom earn minimum wage. Now each partner in California only has to work 19.5 hours per week. Each partner in Utah only needs 11.5. This is starting to sound pretty good.

Can we bring these numbers down further? We might note that even if the average California apartment requires 19.5 hours/week, a minimum wage earner might not be going for the average apartment. They might be after something more modest. How much does a modest apartment cost?

I briefly wondered whether the Internet would be able to tell me which Californian county had the exact median land value for California. Then I remembered this is the 21st century and went straight to Wikipedia’s list of California locations by per capita income, which ought to track land value well enough. The exact median is Amador, but since I don’t know where that is I chose Sacramento, which is just next to the median, as my experiment. I asked http://sacramento.apartmenthomeliving.com/ to tell me the rent of two bedroom apartments in Sacramento. Its “sort by price” feature is hopelessly buggy, so I wasn’t able to find an exact median, but I am prepared to believe it is about the $1040 the graphic suggests. And yet it is easy enough to find decent 2 bedroom apartments for as little as $650. If we pretend this case is typical, we can declare that a cheap (but liveable) apartment costs about 62.5% of an average apartment. That means each partner in the Californian couple only has to work 12.2 hours/week, and each partner in Utah only has to work 7.2 hours/week.

In fact, these are still overestimates for a bunch of reasons. Minimum wage earners are probably concentrated disproportionately in poorer areas of a state, so taking the exact median area of a state overestimates the affordability challenges minimum wage earners face. Most couples share a bed, so they’re probably not after a two bedroom apartment and can look for a cheaper one bedroom apartment. And if they really need to, they can do what my roomates do, which is move into a larger house with more rooms and split up the rent even more. In my own living arrangement (two bedroom house where one bedroom is occupied by a couple and the other is occupied by a single person), each partner of the couple only has to work half as hard as the partners in the couple above.

But let’s ignore these additional factors and conclude with our 12.2 number for California. Note that this is less than a tenth of the number on the original graphic, and is probably a heck of a lot closer to what people think when they read what the graphic is trying to do.

I don’t mean to trivialize the problems that minimum wage earners go through trying to pay rent, and certainly not the problems they would go through if they don’t work full-time, or are supporting a non-working family member. It’s just that this image has nothing to do with these problems and its numbers might as well be generated with random dice rolls for all the good they do anyone.