Thoughts on Social Policy and Science Literacy
I don’t know what city that is, but I know it doesn’t look like a nice place to live. Air pollution is undeniably bad for people. Like any other social problem, you don’t have to work hard to find people who have ideas for solving urban air pollution.
When we talk about social issues, the air can get polluted by misconceptions, manipulations, and lack of information. Over many hours (many!) reading and watching YouTube videos I noticed lots of social science abuse and lots of honest mistakes. The honest mistakes aren’t so bad, but the deliberate abuse and misrepresentation seem like big problems.
Costs and Risks
I think people underestimate the importance of at least trying to understand how society works. No one really doubts that having good health information is important. Most of us want accurate information on environmental problems, so we aren’t supporting bd policies. Use wrong information or ill-informed ideas to make health decisions is, well, unhealthy for you. Social policy is exactly like health and the environment — deciding what to do on the basis of bad information is going to cause problems.
Whenever we decide to support or oppose some social policy, or ballot initiative, or law, or program, our decisions can introduce new costs and risks to society. That’s why I think it is so important for the average Joe and Jane to acquire some social science literacy. I’ll come back to this subject later.
For now, take a minute to consider each of these costs and risks (a risk could happen a cost is something you are spending time and money on, in case you were wondering):
- Wasted Time
- Wasted Money
- Missed Opportunities
- Effects on Health and Safety
I think those items are easy enough to understand, but let’s focus on a hot-button topic of the Left and Right — banning “assault weapons.” Never mind what an assault weapon is, for the definition makes no difference to the outcome. The point of this ban is to increase public safety by away rapid-firing guns that use rifle-sized rounds and use large magazines.
Criminals use these weapons in a tiny, tiny percentage of all violent crimes where a gun is used. So, let’s make the waste of time and money more obvious by assuming there is a mandatory buy-back program. You turn in your gun and get the market value of the gun. Sounds great! But, we’ve established that assault weapons aren’t used that much. And, how much will this cost? If Americans turn in 200,000 assault weapons and get an average of $600 for each one, that’s $120 million. How much time will law enforcement officials invest in this program? Millions of hours perhaps.
Bear in mind that assault weapons are a minor issue. Compare them to teen pregnancy, drug addiction, suicide, and homelessness. How many peoples’ lives are ended or ruined by suicide and drug addiction.
Impacts
Bad social policies cost time and money and waste opportunities. People who act on bad information increase the odds of bad social policies being born and sticking around. People who don’t know anything about causality, experiments, statistics, and scientific theories can make bad choices even without being influenced by politicians and pundits. Every social issue attracts politicians, pundits, and availability entrepreneurs. All of them want to “sell” a worldview and a solution that’s consistent with that world view. What’s the solution to teen pregnancy? Abstinence-only sex education.
I see people being encouraged to overlook problems with ideas like this. For example, research might show that abstinence-only sex education makes teen pregnancy more common. Research on gun safety might reveal that encouraging gun owners to use trigger locks reduces accidental shootings more than gun safety education does. Now, if Jane or Joe Public want to believe in abstinence-only sex education, that’s not a big problem for them.
Self Protection and Social Policy
Fighting social science abuse in the political arena has two aspects to it. Individuals need a dose of social science literacy to protect themselves from supporting ideas that might hurt them and their families. Even if you can’t be hurt physically, your understanding of the world can be clouded by the social pollution that comes from politicians, pundits, and availability entrepreneurs. As with natural sciences, a dose of social science literacy can keep you from wasting time and money by supporting something unwise because it “sounds” good.
As a society, the United States doesn’t really have a ton of labor hours and money to waste on programs and policies that sound good from a religious or political viewpoint but that don’t help. If mandatory gun buy-backs aren’t likely to help, implementing them anyway is a waste of money. If privatizing K-12 schools will hurt more than help, it shouldn’t matter if the idea is “conservative-friendly” or not.
Social Pollution Needs More Attention
Finally, I know perfectly well that people oppose new gun laws or comprehensive sex education for religious reasons, or emotional reasons, or ideological reasons. If you are a Republican who leans libertarian, you have no interest in gun control laws. In future articles, I will write more about the social pollution problem and why I think it needs my attention.
Please follow me and share my stories if you like them and you think social science literacy is an underappreciated skill.
