David McElroy

There’s nothing like a good old fashioned tragedy on the news to make a political point. Whether we admit it or not, most of us unconsciously feel this way. An anecdote is a cheap and easy way to score a point, but is it really good in the long run for public discourse? Maybe not.

You might have heard about the knife attack at a Houston college campus Tuesday that injured at least 15 people, sending 12 of them to hospitals. As soon as I saw the news, I thought about what gun-control advocates would be saying about the story if the assailant had used a gun. So I posted a sarcastic comment about it on Facebook.

“Police in Houston say 15 people were stabbed on a college campus there today,” I wrote. “This is proof that it’s time to get serious about banning assault knives — since they clearly have no purpose other than stabbing innocent people.”

A number of other people who agree with me on the issue of gun rights agreed and chimed in with their own comments. It felt good, because there was a story that illustrated very clearly what we believed. We felt that it made our point and that felt emotionally good.

I’ve been thinking about this tendency to use “anecdote as argument” a lot lately, and I’m not really happy with it, even though I do it as much as anybody else does.

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We all think that what we believe is right. We’ve been taught principles of right and wrong all our lives. We’ve thought about what the principles mean and we’ve decided which narrative of morality we believe is right. Sadly, most of us want something else, too. We want others to endorse our view of morality.

The whole issue of gay marriage has become a battle between two sides wanting to “make a statement” about right and wrong — and forcing others to go along with them — rather than finding a legal solution that respects everybody’s rights. This battle is fierce enough that passionate people on both sides aren’t really interested in a principled solution to get government out of the marriage business. For those people, it’s a social battle to force “society” to endorse their position.

On the surface, the issue seems to be about how everyone can be treated equally by the law while respecting individuals’ very different beliefs about the underlying issue of homosexuality. If that were truly the only issue to deal with, we have a solution. Eliminate marriage licenses and get government out of the business of deciding what a marriage is. But that’s no longer what this is about. Here’s what the two sides really seem to be saying:

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Why do people seem shocked to find out that if you give people incentives not to work, many of them are going to take advantage of that if they can get away with it?

This American Life has an episode this week about the explosive growth of the $200-billion-a-year federal disability program, but the reporter and host seem shocked that people could be doing what the system gives them incentives to do. Even after an hour of reporting — in which there was discussion of poverty, job prospects and more — there wasn’t any mention of the simple economic fact that people do what they have incentives to do.

This episode is reported by NPR’s Planet Money, and the reporter seems to be going out of her way to come up with as many semi-legitimate excuses for the problem as possible. Overall, she sounds like a progressive liberal who’s confronted with evidence that a progressive government program doesn’t work — and she’s trying to avoid offending other progressives by pointing that out.

(Other progressive are offended, though. The left-wing organization Media Matters for America has blasted back at the allegedly “error-riddled story.”)

The piece goes to great lengths at times to attempt to explain away the problem as a simple matter of poor people turning to the disability program because they have no other choices. What the reporter doesn’t seem to understand is that people react to incentives. If they’re going to starve or be homeless in the place where they are (with the skills they have), people tend to find a way to do something about it — whether that entails migrating or learning something new.

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