Before I resolve this I'm gonna try and actually find someone who would answer YES. I'm incredibly confident at this point it's a fluke ... but even then what kind of fluke? I've tried just joining random 'gen z' discords and asking them, and universally got the 'lol that is ridiculous wtf?? it must be a joke' response.

Anyone have any idea what kind of bubble / self-selection I'd have to break through to potentially reach the supposedly surveillance-loving person?

"believe" and "CATO Institute" are not words that should often go together

Do you think they're too left-wing or too right-wing?

And the CATO institute are right about plenty of things. Most 'serious' and significant organizations are. They may have problems, even deep and awful problems, but that doesn't mean all their publications are wrong

@jacksonpolack you're right that they're far less egregious than other think tanks, but I guess I find it hard to consider any of them "serious" just considering their structure, especially when the result of their study fits so neatly into a narrative (although i do agree there is probably something true about gen z privacy nihilism under the surface here).

as far as too left or right-wing, I'm confused as to how they could be anything other than right-wing considering their extensive history of funding and collaboration from key right-wing figures (Koch, Murdoch, Yoo, etc.), i know sometimes they fight with the GOP establishment about libertarianism vs. state-conservative stuff but i don't think that would classify as anything related to the left-wing

as far as too left or right-wing, I'm confused as to how they could be anything other than right-wing

there are plenty of people who think that they are 'liberals' and 'libertarians' this means they are evil libs. in particular they're often against protectionism

Those numbers look insane to me. Maybe do a poll on manifold? Also wouldn't that be against your 4th amendment?

Their methodology is here:

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2023-05/cato-cbdc-survey-toplines.pdf

"The respondents were

matched to a sampling frame on gender, age, party identification,

race, and education."

They say:

"

They lost me from here onwards:

The matched cases and the frame were com-

bined and a logistic regression was estimated for inclusion in the

frame. The propensity score function included age, gender, race/

ethnicity, years of education, and region. The propensity scores

were grouped into deciles of the estimated propensity score in the

frame and post-stratified according to these deciles.

The weights were then post-stratified on 2020 Presidential vote

choice, and a four-way stratification of gender, age (4-categories),

race (4-categories), and education (4-categories), to produce the

final weight."

I studied statistics at University and don't know what that means, so I am inclined to say it's probably a dodgy result. Seems like an overcomplicated methodology which can only distort things.

I'm not an expert but I believe that's standard practice in political polling and is mostly fine

@jacksonpolack I don't have much confidence in standard practice in political polling

My main issue is with the choice of what vairbales to control for. That's the classic way to fudge these things.

Standard political polliing seems to predict election results fairly well? Many reasons it'll do that better than 'measure opinion' on questions like this, but it does pick up on real differences, if you poll people on religiosity and age you get the expected difference, so I don't think it's useless in that sense. At the same time I generally don't think non-election polling is that useful or important

Here's the source from Cato.

Doesn't seem like they played funny business with the question itself:

we asked respondents whether they “favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity.”

https://www.cato.org/blog/nearly-third-gen-z-favors-home-government-surveillance-cameras-1

The crosstabs are really funny. For total favor on camera question, Regular church attendance, being Roman Catholic or being muslim/hindu were all at 30% with this. The strongest so far is among those who are 'very familiar' or 'extremely familiar' with the Federal Reserve, which was at 47/49. Ok, now - those who supported the federal reserve were at 53%, while those who oppose were at 2%. Same with CBDCs. That is ... weird? That actually does not make sense.

Browsing the quote tweets/replies because sometimes there's useful info there. aside from the usual 'this proves <group i dislike> (leftoids/nazis/cuckservatives/blacks/big tech) will be the downfall of civilization' i didn't find much, other than "sturgeonslaw: The methodology here isn't bad, so unfortunately there's likely something to this.", and I agree the methodology isn't obviously bad. He replies "In general, it seems to me like Gen Z has different views on privacy than previous gens due to growing up online and having it constantly violated."

Fav quote was "Interestingly, I am in favor of forcing nearly a third of Gen Z to wear shock collars to train them to stop coming up with stupid ideas." or perhaps "Yuri robots were programmed in a specific manner" (?). Discourse.

Anecdotally, the survey seems way off. I'm not sure I've ever met someone my age or younger who supports that level of government surveillance, regardless of their other political views.

Same. In principle this could just be a selection effect like the ssc post but I think it's something weird going on with polling.

Nit: the survey says “3/10” or “nearly 1/3”

29%

I cut that to make the title fit lol