What Every Debater Should Know About Economics

by David Beers, Ph.D. candidate, George Mason University

Why Economics?

As a policy debater or extemper you are a spinner of tales. Your art is to tell a story that is well-reasoned, persuasive, fresh -in a word, compelling. And you must ply your art better than the speakers who come before or after you in the round. The best, most believable story usually wins.

To be sure, the stories you tell are of a special sort: they have a distinctive structure, sometimes involve specialized lingo, and they tend to quote an awful lot of outside sources to convince the listener that they are true. But beneath the surface every good debate or extemp speech has the hallmarks of a good tale. It introduces characters (politicians, business people, voters, etc.) who face or create some sort of conflict (in debate we sometimes call it a "harm scenario") and it brings about a resolution to the conflict (sometimes good and sometimes bad) through the course of these characters' interactions with each other. Like every good story a debate or extemp speech describes action and consequence, sometimes stringing together long chains of actions and consequences (often ending in nuclear war if you do cross-examination debate!)

And this is where economics comes in.

You see, economics is the science of human action and its unintended social consequences. Economists, too, are storytellers. And the art with which they tell their stories is a highly refined form of reasoning based on simple, mostly self-evident facts about human action. This "economic way of thinking" has been developed over centuries to clarify, systematize and correct all manner of assertions about the way society works. Economics is not a series of settled conclusions about public policy, rather it is, in the words of the economist John Maynard Keynes, "a technique of thinking which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions." A debater who is proficient in this technique of thinking can analyze circles around his opponents' arguments, identify fallacious links, and quickly sift out promising affirmative and negative positions for further research.

As an extemper you will find that economics opens up a whole range of fresh approaches to tired old questions and strengthens your personal voice. This will free you from relying exclusively on other peoples´ analysis and give you the capacity to evaluate media assertions with authority and clarity. Whichever event is your favorite, an understanding of a few basic economic principles will help you tell compelling, well-reasoned stories that will leave your opponents wondering, "how'd they do that?"

So where is a student or coach to turn for a practical introduction to these principles?

A slim volume titled What Everyone Should Know About Economics and Prosperity, by James Gwartney and Richard Stroup is a superb place to start (a Canadian version is available at: www.fraserinstitute.ca/publications/ books/econ_prosp/index.html). Unlike many otherwise excellent introductory economics books, this one has the virtue of unsurpassed brevity. Clocking in at only a little over 100 pages it is astonishing how much of the basic core of economics is explained. Each short chapter begins with a simple, one-sentence summary of the point to be made in that chapter. And you would never know the authors were economists by their writing style: the exposition is lucid, punchy and to the point. Mostly what has been left out are the parts of economics that drive college freshmen crazy in Econ 101: the strange terminology, the counterintuitive assumptions, and the inscrutable graphical models. But you will not find watered down or dumbed down economics here. Of the many of books I've used or considered using for high school debaters and extempers over the years, this is the one I have found to be the most practical and helpful. With the tight constraints on our time and curriculum, no book I can think of provides an easier way to learn the economic principles that are most relevant to extemp and debate.

If You Could Only Know 10 Things...

For those of you who need to have the "opportunity cost" of learning economics lowered still further before they will tackle the task, or who need further verification from an experienced debate coach that it's really a task worth tackling, I offer you the following essay. Here is my take on the top ten things every debater and extemper should know from this book. I urge you to accept this essay as an appetizer, rather than the main course. But by the time you are finished digesting it I think you'll have your own reasons for wanting to learn more about using economics as a tool for debate and extemp. Once you begin to catch on you will be astonished at the power of the economic way of thinking for making and rebutting arguments about government, the market, and society.

So here is my list of the top things you should know about economics:

Some of these items may seem simplistic or trite. Simple to state, perhaps, but rich in their application to real-world problems. In economics the skill is usually in the application; the concepts themselves are remarkably simple. I will give plenty of examples to illustrate the applications. Some of the items may seem counter-intuitive or paradoxical. Before I'm through I hope you will see that each is grounded in ordinary common sense -which is good news, since that's often the standard by which your judges will critique your arguments. But before I go on, a clarification of terms is in order.

A Brief Clarification of the Term "Wealth"

Before explaining why these ideas are so useful for debaters and extempers, I'd like to clarify a commonly misunderstood term that plays a central role in much of the discussion that will follow. The word "wealth" is often considered to mean an accumulation of material things or money. Thus, the pursuit of wealth is frequently contrasted with other more elevated pursuits, such as peace, compassion, justice, or spiritual enlightenment. In debate rounds we often hear about a supposed trade-off between economic growth (increasing wealth) and the environment. This is confusion. In fact, wealth is a term that encompasses anything that people place value on -material, moral, environmental, spiritual, or otherwise. Wealth can be defined for the purposes of economic analysis as the range of opportunities available to people¹.

When people become wealthier in this sense, it may be (and probably will be) seen as an increase in peoples' money incomes -a higher income, after all, is one of the most obvious ways someone's range of opportunities may be increased. But increases in wealth may also be seen in the enhancement of other difficult to quantify values such as security, a beautiful environment, or good health. For one thing, having a higher income allows one to pursue all manner of "non-material" goals as well as "materialistic" ones. For example, higher money incomes permit more charitable giving, better health care, safer, less polluting automobiles, and better speech and debate programs.

At another level we recognize that the distinction between material and non-material values is artificial and unnecessary. People make daily decisions of how to employ their limited time and resources to enhance their lives, balancing material and non-material goals in a single scale of value to achieve the greatest personal happiness. To arbitrarily separate out the "material" goals for the purpose of defining wealth might help someone put a dollar figure on wealth (a questionable endeavor) but it creates an artificial concept of progress that no thoughtful person would be likely to endorse. Economists, by and large are thoughtful people, so they generally reject the idea that there is a conflict between increasing wealth and increasing "other things people value" - wealth to them is defined by what people value.

Unfortunately, economists themselves unwittingly promote the myth that wealth is material when they spend so much time looking at statistical measures of economic activity. This has caused non-economists of all stripes to think of economists as "bean counters" who are concerned about "economic performance" rather than quality of life. In fact, statistics and forecasts play almost no role at all in the economic way of thinking -they are just a business that some professional economists have spun off to make a little money on the side!

When statistics are used to amplify an economic argument, it is implicitly recognized that the numbers are imperfect shadows or "proxies" for the real, unmeasurable values that underlie them. No serious economist who extols the value of economic growth would exclude progress in health, culture, the environment, etc. from his definition of growth, even though the value of these things is often difficult to measure. All these valued goals are within the increased range of opportunities that economic growth makes possible. Moreover, the extent to which each of them are pursued depends upon the value attached to them by individuals, not on the economic system which generates that wealth or creates the opportunities in the first place.

Conclusion

The economic way of thinking begins with just a few common-sense ideas: that goods are scarce, that incentives affect peoples' behavior, and that the consequences of individual actions and government policies usually extend far beyond the obvious short-term effects on their immediate beneficiaries. But as you begin to apply these common-sense ideas you will often come to conclusions strikingly different from what you are accustomed to hearing. This is because few people make the effort to be consistent and persistent in tracing the logic of human affairs. Learning to do this will put you at a tremendous advantage in analyzing policy issues before and during your tournaments. And it will give you the rare capacity to make reasoned, independent judgments on complex issues, without always having to uncritically accept the opinion of self-proclaimed "experts" in the media or the political arena. That's a powerful edge to have in competition and in life.

¹I owe this definition to Paul Heyne, The Economic Way of Thinking, 1994, p. 178