Debate in politics is an art. To hear a good debate in politics is a beautiful thing. It’s like going to a professional orchestra concert where you can just sit back and enjoy. When you listen to a bad debate, you feel more like you are babysitting third graders on a sugar high, and you must take a completely different role. Instead of being able to take each argument in, the listener must actively become the moderator. The problem of bad debating in politics is all too comMonday, and it usually boils down to a problem of scale.
Scale is a concept that’s very simple to understand but almost impossible to master. It is not just a problem of comparing the size of two slices of pie, but also of knowing how big the pie is to begin with. Politicians can usually get by without explaining scale. An explanation of a project’s scale does not fit into a good sound bite, and it is usually easier to convince someone of something by appealing to their emotions.
Thus, it becomes more the listener’s responsibility to understand the scale of any issue. However, a government with 307 million people is naturally a big entity and the numbers politicians deal with – such as budgets, population statistics, and other data – are inherently large, and it’s impractical to expect the general public to comprehend these numbers on their own. A good way to understand this is by examining how referees look at the replay when a call in the NFL is challenged. If the call looks bad from one angle, it must be a bad call. This might not be apparent until you get to the third camera angle, but as soon as you see definitive proof, you can be sure. By giving more context about a statistic this way, the public gets a better sense about the validity of an argument.
In order for the public to be persuaded, it is necessary for the listener to understand scale. Politicians can slice and dice facts however they want and still be factually correct. For example, the Bush tax cuts lowered taxes on the top two percent of income earners, which consists of those families making more than $210,000 a year, or about 12 percent of families in Evanston.
Another good example of this problem in action is during the 2008 presidential election when John McCain spoke out notoriously against pork barrel projects, an important tenet of his economic policy. He explained how $18 billion was spent on pork projects in Congress in 2007 alone. However, when one considers the U.S. annual budget is $2.9 trillion, McCain’s statistic seems far less important.
In both of these cases, it is the listener’s responsibility to determine the correct scale of the statistic and draw their implications.
The responsibility to solve the problem of scale could either fall on politicians, news organizations or the listener themselves. Since politicians don’t have an incentive to correctly describe the scale of a problem, and it becomes difficult and time-consuming for people to research on their own, this responsibility should fall on the media. However, once the public starts to understand and grab onto certain numbers, like the size of the federal budget or the population of their city, they will be able to better extrapolate for themselves when new situations and statistics appear.
Ben Rothschild is a Weinberg senior. He can be reached at [email protected].
