I find it more interesting that highly capitalistic countries like Hong Kong and South Korea are less libertarian than Sweden. Probably that's because their baselines are different; self-reliance in Sweden is very different than self-reliance in Hong Kong.

So I guess some people should have been a little more suspicious at the original Libertarian Girl blog. I think that an analysis at the extremes i.e. % of people who answered 8-10 might show the variation a little better in terms of 'true' libertarian people.

I think this question is kind of misleading, since the two answers are not necessarily opposed. Someone could quite conceivably agree with both statements. I know I do.

which ? would be more informative?

My Baloney Detection Kit begins grumbling whenever I read a study where they asked people to choose between conceptually-overlapping alternatives.

It's not *that* difficult to ask good questions. When people don't, that's a good reason to inquire about their motives.

YES, BUT ARE ANY OF THE QUESTIONS GOOD? i don't provide links nominally.

Actually, I take back what I said. I think I misunderstood at first. I take it that they are two seperate questions and a score of 6 means that the ratio of agreement with the statements is 6:4? It's probably a useful measure. I just wonder how many people agreed with both. It could be measuring something else, like people's tendency to criticize others which I think men are more likely to do... I'd probably say the first question, about taking responsibility is the more ambiguous one.

perhaps splitting the results into 1-10 scales for agree / disagree for each question would reveal more.

To answer your question, razib: After taking a look at the root surveys, it seems to me that many of the binary-choice questions do not present options that are logically distinct. Ideally one option should be the negation of the other, stated in such a way as to split up the response space into two parts.

There may be a few good questions, hidden somewhere in the surveys, but as a whole I'd say they're of low quality and extremely limited usefulness.

I think a good analogy would be surveys where they ask the two questions "should government spend more to help people" and "should taxes be lowered". People will reply "yes" to both questions even though they are somewhat opposed to each other.