Fun stuff via Kevin Drum: the Pew Research Center’s News IQ quiz. It’s 12 multiple choice questions that I imagine no one here will have any difficulty acing — i.e., a perfect score only gets you into the 94th percentile. I tried answering without looking at the choices first, and although I got everything correct in the multiple choice format, I would have put the Dow about 1,000 points higher than it is, the unemployment rate 2 percent lower than it is and military deaths in Iraq a couple hundred fewer than there have been. I guess in addition to being an apocalyptic skeptic, I’m also something of an optimist. In other words, knowing that everything ends badly, I still tend to think things are going somewhat better than they objectively are.
