Dissecting My Recent Argument (Are Error Theories Offensive?)

Conor here: In the following, Matt Bruenig dives into argumentation theory using his first argument at The Argument as a jumping off point.

By Matt Bruenig, who writes about politics, the economy, and political theory, with a focus on issues that affect poor and working people. He is currently the president of 3P, a think tank founded in 2017. The primary mission of 3P is to publish ideas and analysis that assist in the development of an economic system that serves the many, not the few and aims to fill the holes left by the current think tank landscape with a special focus on socialist and social democratic economic ideas. Bruenig previously worked as a lawyer at the National Labor Relations Board and as a policy analyst at the Demos Think Tank. Originally published at his website.

The discourse is full of argument but mostly devoid of argumentation theory. Most people read arguments impressionistically in much the same way that most people read novels, listen to music, or watch movies. There are people who have learned to technically dissect these forms and who, as a result, consume them much differently and can explain in great detail why a particular work is good or bad, but they are the distinct minority.

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of The Argument, a new publication that debuted last week that intends to, among other things, have real people argue real things directly against one another. How will people consume these arguments or make sense of them in a discursive environment devoid of generally-accepted notions of what makes an argument good or successful?

The overwhelming response to the first head-to-head clash — between myself and Kelsey Piper over the importance of cash welfare — provided a good opportunity to answer this question. This response proved the theory that this is a potentially very entertaining and engaging form of content. But it has also confirmed that there is no consensus at all on how to actually evaluate the argument that everyone just read.

Rich Yeselson read the exchange and concluded that it amounted to “Matt Bruenig eviscerat[ing] a hapless lib out of the gate” while Logan Bowers read it and found that he “agreed more and more with Piper after each successive [Bruenig] paragraph.” These are just two tweets, but based on my scan, they are reasonably representative of the thousands of other tweets reacting to the debate.

If you think there is something to evaluating argument itself, not just agreeing or disagreeing with conclusions or people, there is something really strange about the inability to reach some kind of consensus about the exchange. It should be possible to say this or that person got the best of it in a way that is mostly detached from your own views. But to do this well requires the ability and willingness to technically dissect an argument, not just impressionistically consume it.

When I looked at Kelsey’s first piece from a pure argumentation perspective, what I saw were two moves that go as follows:

1. She contends that cash welfare does not really help much. She presents a few recent studies showing null results for cognitive and health outcomes. She doesn’t present an explicit framework for evaluating whether a particular welfare policy is good, but implicitly adopts an evaluative framework that says welfare programs can be deemed good or bad by looking at the extent to which they promote human capital and related indicators.
2. She presents an error theory to explain why leftists, liberals, progressives and so on are not reacting much to these studies despite the fact that they are, based on her implicit evaluative framework (human capital promotion), devastating to the pro-cash-welfare argument. The error theory is essentially that they are dishonest actors who refuse to acknowledge inconvenient facts.

My response was specifically designed to clash with Piper’s on every argumentative level:

1. I make what debaters would call a kritik in which I challenge Piper’s implied framework for evaluating the success or failure of welfare programs. Rather than looking to see whether a welfare program promotes human capital (Piper’s preferred framework), I argue that we should look to the more traditional goals of the welfare state: eradicating class difference and social alienation, reducing inequality and leveling living standards, compressing and smoothing income and consumption, providing workers and individuals independence and refuge from coercion by reducing economic dependence on the labor market and the family, among other things. To make it clear that this is not some ad-hoc framework I am constructing to reach a preferred conclusion, I cite other authorities on the welfare state that also use it, including perhaps the most celebrated theoretical work on western welfare states,The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism.

2. I present an error theory to explain why Piper failed to account for these other goals in her argument. The error theory is that (a) she is unfamiliar with them, (b) she has unreflectively adopted recent ideas about the (mostly child-focused) welfare state that present it as an “investment” in human capital, (c) she is drawing upon an effective altruist idea to use direct cash transfers as an economic development strategy in the third world and mistakenly applying that logic to the developed-world welfare state in America.

3. I directly respond to Piper’s empirical claims by pointing out that there are contrary studies that do find positive results on the outcomes she focuses on. I anticipate her argument that those are “lower quality” because they aren’t RCTs by pointing to an RCT that was even higher quality than the ones she relied on.

4. I directly respond to Piper’s error theory by attacking the premise that nobody is acknowledging these studies by pointing out that the New York Times covered it. The kritik also functions as a response to the error theory: maybe it’s not that people dishonestly refuse to acknowledge the studies, but rather that the studies are just irrelevant to the main justifications for the welfare state.

In theory, if we care about evaluating arguments themselves, we could get some agreement that these were the moves and then from there get into the more contentious questions of how they were executed, who won the various clashes involved, etc. In practice, with a few exceptions, people don’t really digest arguments in this formalistic way.

One of the things I’ve found funny in the aftermath of the clash is watching people object to my argumentative style, which they describe as being mean or dismissive or personal or whatever. What these people are actually reacting to is my error theory about how Piper reached (what I regard as) an incorrect conclusion. My error theory is essentially that she is ignorant of the rationale for developed-world welfare states and has been led astray by recent liberal ideas about human capital and effective altruist ideas about third-world development policy.

The reason I find the reaction to that interesting is that Piper also spends a good deal of her piece on an error theory. This error theory is sprinkled throughout the piece but it essentially accuses others of dishonesty. Indeed, she concludes the piece by calling them liars:

We’re in a dangerous epistemic environment. One where widespread agreement on basic facts is scarce and noble lies have permeated the halls of truth-seeking organizations like the media. Those of us who care about ending poverty have to choose the integrity of our work over trying to play 5D chess and hoping no one else knows the rules.

As I said above, I designed my arguments to directly clash with Piper’s. She presented an error theory that her opponents are liars. I presented an error theory that she is ignorant. Why is my error theory offensive and hers isn’t?

There is no actual difference between the offensiveness of our error theories, but there is a psychological difference in how people process them. Piper called a general group of people liars who selectively disregard inconvenient facts while I called a specific person ignorant. Abstractly, it would seem Piper has actually done the more offensive thing because she’s said something sort of insulting about a lot of people while I have only said something sort of insulting about one person. But people don’t process it this way because they are more affected when they can personalize the insulted party than when they can’t.