Arthur Laffer was on Fox News yesterday talking about Obama’s energy plans, and he said something that I found quite amusing:
And then he goes on and he talks about, you know, energy independence. I can’t think of anything more silly in economics than having independence in production and jobs and products.
Well, I can think of at least one thing that’s sillier than that. Mr. Laffer’s most (in)famous contribution to the world, the thoroughly-debunked Laffer curve and related supply-side economics.
Today, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial by Laffer which goes even further. In it, he suggests that ‘energy independence’ means literally nothing more than not using imported oil. Which is a bit of a stretch, to put it charitably. But he also suggests that the Obama administration has taken nuclear energy ‘off the table’. While it may be fair to say that Obama has been lukewarm towards the prospects of nuclear energy, his position has been exactly the opposite of tabling it. On the topic he has said:
So it has not been an effective option. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be an effective option, but we’re going to have to figure out storage and safety issues. And my attitude when it comes to energy is there’s no silver bullet. We’ve got to be—we’ve, we’ve got to look at every possible option.
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My point in this post isn’t to rail against Fox News or to show that News Corp is presenting things that simply aren’t true. Quite frankly, there’s way too much of that happening all the time, (from every angle), and it’s very obnoxious.
Of course, I have done exactly that, but (hopefully) in order to make a larger point that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
While I’m clearly vexed by the distortion, and felt it necessary to point out Laffer’s many flaws, I wonder if it is at all worthwhile to do so. And I don’t mean this in the obvious sense that pretty much no one reads this blog, and I therefore won’t be changing any minds. Rather, in a more abstract sense, I wonder if it would be worthwhile for anyone to engage Laffer on this harangue.
Because I’ve grown up in the age of cable news, I tend to assume that every argument that I disagree with should be rebutted. The implicit reasoning is that falsehoods need to be countered directly, lest they be treated as fact by the audience.
But this notion seems silly when I step back and reflect on it for a bit. By reacting to every argument I disagree with, I risk legitimizing the argument to at least some part of the population. I’m also entirely failing to take into consideration the extent to which anyone cares about the issue. And most importantly, I’m refusing to consider how much a legitimate argument can actually persuade anybody.
For me, the best example of this occurred a few years ago in college. A Neo-Nazi group had planned a rally on the steps of the state capitol, and the reaction from so many of my like-minded students was to figure out the best way to organize the largest counter-rally possible.
The response was predictable: a tiny number of white supremicists held a silly little rally, while hundreds of college students banded together to denounce their position. But what did this achieve? I highly doubt that there are really that many people who saw or heard about the rally who were on the fence about the white power issue, as it were. But the huge numbers drew a lot more media attention.
More importantly, if there were any borderline white supremicists out there, I really doubt that the sight of a bunch of overeducated hippies full of energy would do anything other than push them away.
Before the rally occurred, I tried to explain this to people who were trying to organize a counter-rally, but to no avail. For them, this was a black-and-white issue: the positions supported by the white supremacists was so vile that it simply must have been countered.
That is an extreme example, of course, but the lesson is very simple. When trying to persuade, strategy should always be the absolute first consideration.
Audiences don’t carefully take into account all opposing sides of an issue, using perfect information and flawless processing to arrive at a ‘correct’ position. Past information, biases and heuristics define conclusions to a large extent. The precise interaction of these elements with a message is what ultimately determines mass persuasion.
None of this is groundbreaking, I know, but it is of central importance to politics. And it is a simple fact that is far more difficult in execution than in theory, and something I need to learn to understand if I am to achieve what I want.
It’s also something that I see go unnoticed all too often. A failure to recognize this is (in my opinion) at the root of the ‘open debate’ movement. It can be seen every day in primetime on Fox News and MSNBC.
And it is of such great concern to me, as a progressive, because I feel that it can explain a large part of the failure of progressivism from Jimmy Carter through (at least) W. Voters consistently agreed with Democrats and progressives on the issues (if framed in generic terms) throughout that span. Yet progressives never had anything approaching real influence during the entire period.
The reason for that disconnect, as it is abundantly clear, had little to do with our positions, but everything to do with our arguments.
