Aggregates Are Important
Numbers guys, it's all about the numbers
In my last column, I talked about how public policy research exists and that elected officials should be, like, using that research (as opposed to governing based on what is essentially “vibes”). In this column, I'll tweak that argument. To sum it up in one sentence: You, as a voter and political observer, should find aggregate, dispassionate statistics considerably more convincing than the individual, heart-wrenching stories you see on social media.
Stories about totally real “ordinary Americans” are commonplace in politics. Candidates love talking about that one voter they met on the campaign trail who lost her healthcare. The candidate says stuff like “Oh no we should have better healthcare because that one lady lost her healthcare and she is sad!” Presidents love to bring a brave firefighter to the State of the Union. They say “Mr. Firefighter is here today, let’s applaud him! Yay, firefighters!” Members of Congress love to parade a victim of some policy change around the Capitol while the press takes their picture.
I’m going to go ahead and say it. It’s going to sound mean but bear with me.
I don’t give a fuck about any of those people.
I don’t know them. I don’t know if that guy is actually a firefighter. I don’t believe this mystical woman Kamala Harris met on the campaign trail is actually real. I don’t trust someone who, when a member of Congress asks “Can you walk around the Capitol and look sad so I can score some political points,” answers “Yes, yes I can.”
I feel bad for them. I’m not a monster. I even think we should help solve their problems — if we have the time and the resources to. And that’s the problem with individual stories. They are a distraction. They direct public attention toward hyper-specific problems and away from widely felt, but perhaps more boring issues. We can’t spend money helping solve an issue that is only harming a dozen people — even if those people seem really sad on TV. We cannot yet solve every one of every single person’s problems, so those people with unique problems have to go to the back of the line.
Sidenote: I think the focus on specific issues is a part of why so many Americans feel their government isn’t doing anything. If the government focuses on solving problems that only affect a small portion of Americans, most Americans’ lives won’t change.
At their best, individual stories can be used for illustrative purposes. Mary losing her Medicaid is sad, but Mary isn’t the thing to care about. The 20 million other people losing their Medicaid is the thing to be sad about. It’s important we hear about Mary so we know, in real-life, narrative English, what those 20 million people are going through. Too often politicians try to make Mary’s specific dilemma worthy of political discussion. Too rarely do politicians say “Thanks Mary you can leave now” and then turn to a PowerPoint presentation explaining how common Mary’s situation is.
When politicians don’t pair individual stories with aggregate statistics when there are aggregate statistics, voters can’t differentiate between widely applicable stories and those that aren’t. In other words, some of these stories are meant to make a problem look worse than it actually is. It is a tool for manipulating voters into caring about issues that, in reality, don’t affect that many people. When politicians convince voters to hyper-fixate on issues that aren’t widespread, those voters ignore the real problems: The problems affecting tens of millions of people, not tens of people.
I, of course, have two fairly detailed examples:
Immigration
Donald Trump and his allies love to paint immigrants as murderous, drug-peddling criminals. Last year, the right made a lot of stink about Laken Riley, a student at the University of Georgia murdered by an illegal immigrant, who tried to rape her. Obviously, this is a horrible tragedy, and Laken Riley should be mourned. Obviously, the murderer, who has been found guilty, should be imprisoned or, preferably, deported. Obviously, we should invest more in campus safety measures. Obviously, we should make it harder for people to immigrate, because immigrants are murdering people.
Notice the difference between the first two “obvious” statements and the last two.
The first two are case-specific. It was sad and it was a crime. Justice should be done and the community should do whatever it can to ease Laken’s family’s pain.
The second two are broad policy prescriptions. The second two call for changes that would affect the entire nation. Millions and millions of people. Laken Riley’s murder is a horrific tragedy, but we cannot allow individual horrific tragedies to dictate national policy.
Evidence should dictate national policy. There is evidence that sexual violence is a serious, widespread problem on college campuses. Thirteen percent of all college students experience some form of sexual violence while in college. That is a fuck ton. That’s the problem, that’s what we should be trying to do: protect students on campus, especially at night. He didn’t murder her because he’s an undocumented immigrant, he murdered her because she was unsafe on a college campus. We could have not a single undocumented immigrant in this country, and college students nationwide would face the same risk of violence on campus.
Decades of study show that, if immigration does have a connection to crime rates, it reduces crime. Those studies have looked at undocumented immigration specifically, finding no association between the concentration of undocumented immigrants in a state and that state’s crime rates.
Republicans used Laken Riley’s murder to push for the Laken Riley Act, which tangles the immigration system in litigation by allowing individual states to sue the federal government over any immigration issue. It also empowers ICE to detain immigrants accused of a crime (including minor crimes) indefinitely, with no opportunity for those immigrants to apply for temporary release, a right available to all other immigrants and one enshrined in the U.S. and many state constitutions.
There are plenty of reasons to invest in border security. It is true that border crossings were at historic highs under the Biden administration and have reached historic lows under the Trump administration. The Center for American Progress, the leading left-leaning policy think tank, recently released an immigration reform plan that calls for stricter border security and an end to potential immigrants’ abuse of the asylum system. Democrats indeed failed to acknowledge immigration’s importance until after the election.
I’m not arguing against any of these things. All I’m saying is that Laken Riley’s murder is not a good reason to have conservative opinions on immigration.
Welfare
One of the most egregious examples of a bullshit story is that of “the Welfare Queen.” Ronald Reagan started this one in the late 1970s, talking frequently about Linda Taylor, a Chicago-based criminal who abused the welfare system to the tune of $150,000 a year (some also think she killed a man, so she isn’t some normal person committing welfare fraud, she’s a legit criminal).
Reagan used Linda Taylor to persuade millions of Americans that people on welfare are lazy and they are leeching off hardworking Americans not just to survive, but to live lavishly. The result was two decades of welfare reform — championed by Republicans and by Democrats like Bill Clinton — that gutted the American social safety net. Those reforms dramatically increased rates of extreme poverty, especially among children and in households with a single mother.
Ronald Reagan transformed America’s approach to welfare by telling a single story over and over again. Millions of people, people who were already doing poorly, started doing much worse. All because of a story that doesn’t even match up with the statistics.
The government actually spends a lot of time investigating fraud in our welfare systems. A study of SNAP (food stamps) misuse found that 0.014% of households received more SNAP benefits than they qualified for. That measures out to $11 fraudulent dollars for every $10,000 given out (for context, about $1 in every $6 isn’t paid because of tax fraud, and Republicans were content to cut the IRS budget). Welfare opponents in the 1980s liked to claim that women on welfare have more children to collect more benefits. A study found that women on welfare had fewer children than women not on welfare. Opponents like to claim the poor are spending their money on stupid shit, instead of the stuff they need to survive. The Bureau of Labor Statistics checked: Families on welfare spend a greater proportion of their income on day-to-day necessities like food (cooked at home), housing, transportation, and clothing. They spend a smaller proportion of their income on wants and long-term needs like entertainment, healthcare, eating out, and retirement saving.
In other words, the story was bullshit. People ran with it anyway because they didn’t check the fucking statistics. And now a bunch of people are much worse off.
While I’m talking about poverty, I should mention an effective use of stories: The qualitative ethnography. This is a type of study where a researcher will spend months with a group of families, studying how they live, how they spend their money, and whatever else they do to survive. The researchers tell those stories combined with detailed survey data to show readers how the poor struggle narratively and how many people are facing similar circumstances. My favorite is “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America,” by Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Schaefer. If you’re interested in stories, that’s how they should be told.
For efficiency’s sake, here are some quicker examples:
Just because Republicans found one guy who used his dead dad’s voter registration doesn’t mean voter fraud was or ever has been rampant. Voter fraud is incredibly rare. Those stories are a bad excuse to make it harder to vote.
Inflation really was going down under the Biden administration. For the people who were waiting for prices to go back down, they aren’t going to. That’s not how inflation works.
Immigrants don’t take our jobs. They help the economy quite a bit.
Critical race theory is not widely taught in schools. Some teachers talk about race, yeah, but this isn’t the nationwide issue the right says it is.
University faculty are not uniformly liberal: 50% are liberal, 17% moderate, 26% conservative — they are mainly liberal, but conservatives aren’t ostracized as the right would have you think. That certainly isn’t a reason not to trust researchers.
Some think that most (or even many) of the Black Lives Matter protests turned violent. Not true — 93% were fully peaceful, and the right tries to use the 7% (who should be arrested for committing crimes) to quell the speech rights of the 93%
There are all sorts of abortion myths that the data do not uphold: That women regret abortions, that they use abortion as birth control, that they are forced to have abortions. All of those are incredibly rare occurrences, they need not be an excuse to ban the procedure for everyone.
A lot of the things politicians say are bullshit. Not to get partisan here, but the things Republicans say are generally far more likely to be bullshit than the things Democrats say. Occasionally Kamala would blame inflation on corporate greed, which is bullshit. Occasionally she’d say the prices will come back down, which is also bullshit. Sometimes Democrats act like some problems don’t exist at all because too many lack the political willpower to say “Yeah, this thing happens 5% of the time, which is small enough for us to address calmly or not at all.” Oftentimes when Democrats tell stories, they don’t bring in the statistics. That is foolish of them, but the statistics are there. Mary isn’t the only person who’s going to lose healthcare, there are 20 million other Marys.
So, here is my advice. If you are on the left, pair your stories with some actual fucking numbers.
If you are not on the left, demand more fucking numbers. If and when a politician doesn’t give you numbers, go and find some. Literally Google it. If people Googled stuff more the world would be a better place. Every single link in this column is something I looked up just now. I clicked a few links, read some different articles, and found one I trusted. It took me two hours.
When you vote, you are helping decide the fate of the world. No exaggeration. The president of the United States is the most powerful person on the planet. His decisions affect billions of lives. If that isn’t reason enough to Google what he says to make sure it isn’t bullshit, I don’t know what else to say.
Quin do you consider yourself utilitarian? Also what happens if researchers have a blind spot? Americans should trust research but why don't they?