The (old) Licquia Family Blog
This is the old blog site, powered by a simple blogging system called Blosxom. It's here to keep old links from breaking, and for whatever historic interest might remain.
Here's the current site.
This is the old blog site, powered by a simple blogging system called Blosxom. It's here to keep old links from breaking, and for whatever historic interest might remain.
Here's the current site.
Just read an interesting post (thanks, Chris) that starts out about economics (mentioning the minimum wage debate in passing) and ends on a general note about bias. The interest isn't so much in what Jane Galt says, but what her commenters say, and how the advocacy on each side influences the debate.
The first data point to recognize is that I'm a total non-entity in economics. I can only talk about it in the most general way, and quickly get lost in the details when the conversation starts getting at all technical. This means that I can't really make a decision based on logic; I'm too uninformed.
But let's assume that I have to. Let's say that I'm to vote on a referendum on the minimum wage soon, and I want to have as informed a vote as possible. Given that I must make a choice between competing views, and given that I'm otherwise incompetent to make such a choice, my thought process is going to be anything but logical. Fallacies will abound because they have to.
And the prime fallacy I'm going to rely on is the argument from authority. What else? I'm going to judge the level of trust I have in each side, and totally give the side I trust the most the whole sausage. Logical? Nope. Necessary? You bet.
In assessing trust, given the data in that article alone, I've got several points to ponder. First, Jane's whole point in the article is to discuss bias, not the minimum wage; it's an incidental point, and one she only defends in reaction. Since her point is about bias, and she doesn't pretend to be immune herself (and specifically disclaims as much in the comments), she gets big bonus points.
Second, her opponents on the minimum wage center their efforts on a throwaway quote from the article:
It does not tell us, as many advocates have argued, that we could raise the minimum wage to $10 with salutary effect on poverty.
When her opponents start pounding her on this, she responds briefly, and then tries to remind us that this isn't the point:
But this isn't about the minimum wage... This is about the temptation to advocacy, which is what y'all are doing by leaping on stupid irrelevancies rather than focusing on the discussion at hand.
The response?
But don't think of yourself as being unaffected by the ideologies you have soaked in your education & experience - just like me, you, and everyone else.
...given the context, I think it was wrong of you to confuse the two. At the very least, you should have made it clear that...
I disagree that you have treated Card & Krueger's study fairly.
In other words, continuing to focus on the throwaway quote, and even beating her on the head with her own argument. This is a big negative. None of them seems interested in even paying lip service to the original point. This smacks of fanaticism, and a power-inequity approach to debate: play to win, not to learn. And in my book, people focused on the battle of wills instead of the search for truth are not to be trusted.
More information: Jane Galt does research and posts links. Cites and links in Jane's comments: 9. In opponent's: 2, one of which was an irrelevant witty quote. And this ignoring Jane's cites in the original post, and with multiple opponents. (I didn't count pro-Jane commenters who weren't Jane.) Again, Jane comes off looking better.
The only thing I see going for the opponents is that they seem to have confounded Jane on one issue: whether anyone was really advocating a $10 US minimum wage. Her last comment sounded almost like a concession, ending as it did.
So, from this little article, where am I at on the minimum wage? I'm more against raising it than I was before I read the article, based on Jane's rationale (which I'm incapable of really critiquing), combined with the lame performance of her opponents.
Now, some people really want to take me to task right now. I obviously have no business commenting on the minimum wage in any meaningful context. But here's the point: I'm reproducing the thought process many, many people use when forced to make a decision about something that they don't know squat about. People like voters, or Congresspeople, or town councillors. These are the considerations that people are going to use when making important decisions, decisions which in some cases may affect the very experts debating the issues back and forth.
It's important, therefore, to tailor your advocacy appropriately. One would assume that the commenters on Jane's blog are posting because they really want to convince people that they have a point. Yet their writing clearly worked against that goal.
Of course, I don't pretend to be perfect in this arena. I've done my share of "foot-in-mouth" advocacy. But I shouldn't, and neither should anyone else. If one doesn't care to convince anyone, one should probably keep one's mouth shut.
May 12, 2003 | Comments are no longer available