Many of you are new to this site from the 3NR or MDTA forums. Hi. My overarching project for this site is writing a new guide for debaters that I'm calling Picking Up. Hope you like it
One of my flaws as a coach is that I tend to get ahead of myself too often. Telling a novice debater to "make smart arguments as to why your evidence is better than theirs" is good advice in general, but it's pretty much useless if I haven't taught that debater how to compare evidence in the first place.
This article really should have been written a long time ago, because comparing evidence is at the root of so much in debate. You need to pick your best cards to go at the top of your blocks, you need to win our cards are better than their cards arguments to effectively debate a round, you need to be able to know what a good card looks like in order to cut one, and so on. The problem with teaching something so fundamental is that it gets taken for granted. By the end of the average high school debate career you've evaluated so many pieces of evidence that the process becomes automatic, so much that you don't have to think about it. Intuition is awesome, but it's hard to teach.
I'm going to do the best I can at breaking down the process, but remember that the best way to get good at comparing evidence is to do it a lot: write a lot of blocks, cut a lot of cards, debate a lot of rounds.
So, Card A or Card B, which is better? I like to think of this process as a number of tests, like a checklist that I run in my brain. Think of it like a driving test: almost everybody is going to make a few mistakes, but the instructor is looking for overall competency and making sure that no flagrant violations occur.
The most important test for a piece of evidence to pass is the "says what they say it says" test, or do the tag and the text of the card agree? First read the underlined portion of the card: does the tag do the author justice, or has the author's point been overstated? Some common stretches that you'll see include taking a card that mentions "nuclear war" and tagging it "extinction," taking a card that says "conflict" and tagging it "nuclear war," or taking innuendos and suggetions and turning them into explicit claims. This is a pretty common practice, unfortunatley, mostly because too many debaters let their opponents get away with over-tagging their evidence.
Next, look at the part of the card that isn't underlined. Here you might find caveats (this will happen unless that thing happens), weasel words (possibly, some have argued that), alternate causalities (poverty leads to obesity, but so does lack of exercize, no after-school activities, and crappy school lunches), and other evidence that the argument is weaker than it looks. Rarely will a team go so far as to intentionally distort the direction of evidence (underlining around the word "not"), but the magnitude of the evidence will often be stretched, at least a little bit.
After evaluating the agreement between tag and text, I usually give a second thought to the argument presented in the text itself: do the author's conclusions logically follow from the presented data? Does the author commit any popular logical fallacies? Is the argument missing an important piece of data? Does the author answer the obvious objections to his or her position? This sounds like pretty basic stuff, but you'd be surprised how often major publications print stuff that fails this test.
The last set of tests that I want to mention center around the citation. I list this one last because it's easiest; new debaters tend to focus on date comparisons and shallow "bias" claims at the expense of the tests above. However, there are still some important citation comparisons that you want to be ready to make.
More recent evidence can be important, but only when it's important. Here's a pro tip: if you can't think up (or better yet, prove) an event that happened that would make the information in their card outdated, it's usually not worth your while to point out that your card is newer.
The qualifications of a card also matter, but comparing qualifications is usually not straightforward. Cards can have an institutional legitimacy - IE they are from a trusted publication or author with a history of providing accurate information. Cards can also come from someone with field expertise, they're respected, prolific, and/or have professional qualifications on the subject in question. Cards can neutral, or free of bias and conflict of interest. Cards can take more, better, or more appropriate data into account, or otherwise have a better methodology. Cards can also go through peer review, fact checking, or other editorial processes that lend more credence to what they say.
So a major national newspaper, a republican party strategist, a phd in physics, a non-partisan think tank, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, a JD candidate, and a political blogger are all "qualified," but they aren't all qualified for the same reasons, nor are they equally qualified to talk about the same things. Evaluating whether your author is better than theirs requires connecting the reasons that an author is qualified to reasons that it matters for this particular dispute. Don't just compare, compare and impact your comparisons.
In fact, that's pretty good advice for evidence comparisons in general. "Your evidence" is bound to pass some tests that "their evidence" does not, and vice versa. The arguments about which tests matter more are going to be very dependent on what is being argued, and eventually winning that debate becomes much more important than winning that your card is newer by 3 days.
Showing posts with label Picking Up. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Picking Up. Show all posts
Utilitarianism and Deontology, or, the only time I'll ever argue against bacon
In my last post about impact comparisons, I made the point that "magnitude" is usually a straightforward comparison - which war is worse, which policy harms the economy more, which impact should we avoid if we want to save the most lives. Comparing the size of two impacts is easy if they are both measured in dollars or lives, but what if there is no such apples-to-apples comparison? How do you compare an economic collapse to the existence of institutional racism? How do you evaluate a policy which ends a human rights violation, but risks starting a war?
On the scale of governments, this weighing of different impacts is a normal fact of public policy, but when you ask these kinds of questions of individuals, you've begun a study of ethics. After all, individuals have to weigh costs and benefits for nearly every decision they make. There are many ways that individuals or governments could resolve these apples-to-oranges impact comparisons, but there are two particularly important tools from the world of ethics that debaters tend to find useful. Though you might not have heard the terms for these decisionmaking systems, you most likely use both of them everyday.
Consider, for a moment, the vegitarian. Most people aren't raised vegetarians (a least among people of my own cultural background), which means most vegetarians made the choice at some point in their lives to stop eating meat. Every person who makes this choice makes it for different reasons, but there are a few common justifications for vegetarianism.
1. Meat production takes more resources. To take grain, feed it to chickens or cows, and then feed people with the resulting chickens and cows takes more grain than it would take to feed the people directly. Meat production also uses up a lot of land and other resources that could be better used to grow more food for more people. If everyone stopped eating meat, world food prices would go down, and more people would be able to sustain a healthy diet. Even if eating meat is enjoyable, vegetarianism does the greatest good for the greatest number.
2. Animals have rights. The animals that we consume for food are sentient beings that make decisions and feel pain. If we can avoid it, it is wrong to inflict pain on another creature. Animals raised for human consumption are caged, forced to ingest chemicals that modify their body chemistry, and are killed in ways that are far from painless. Even if an individual's decision not to eat meat does not end animal suffering, choosing to eat meat is still wrong.
Not only are these two arguments independent (you might agree with one, or the other, or both, or neither), they are based on completely different ethical systems.
Vegetarian argument #1 is an example of utilitarianism. A utilitarian decision-making process seeks to maximize "utility," which usually means minimizing pain or loss of life. If we did not eat meat, then fewer people would starve to death or face the pain of too little nutrition. Notice that evaluating a utilitarian claim requires looking at an action's consequences (whether or not it leads to less starvation), which is why we say that it is a consequentialist framework.
Vegetarian argument #2, and its claims about "rights", is rooted in the language of Deontology. In a deontic ethical framework, there are certain actions that one should never do, regardless of consequences. Unlike utilitarianism, which presents "conditional imperatives" like "we shouldn't eat meat if meat-eating leads to more hunger," deontology is based around categorical imperatives, things we should or should not do regardless of the consequences. These categorical imperatives are tightly linked with the concept of human rights (or animal rights, as the case may be).
Not all impacts fit neatly into these two categories, but usually we can distinguish between utilitarian and deontic arguments. Any argument about preventing a war or calamity that would happen some time in the future is utilitarian. Disads are largely utilitarian, by consequence. Arguments that seek to establish a "moral obligation," "decision rule," or "you must..." are drawing heavily on deontology.
So when will these two systems come into conflict? If you've been paying attention, they already have. There are two distinct claims built into a tagline like "You must vote aff to overturn a racist government policy." These claims are (1) removing racist policy is a categorical imperative and (2) that the existence of such a categorical imperative means we ought to discard other considerations, usually other utilitarian impacts in the round.
If the negative just extends their impact within a utilitarian framework ("war kills more people than racism"), they aren't going to make it far in this debate. It doesn't matter how many lives the status quo saves if the neg drops the claim that we ought to ignore the consequences of plan. To re-gain the upper hand in this debate, the neg needs to do one or more of the following:
The neg (or aff, whoever is arguing against the deontic impact) generally has a few more common-sense responses to make as well. On balance, most of the claimed categorical imperatives are over-stated, especially upon a close reading of the impact and link cards in play. The opponents' impact also might not be such pure deontology as they claim it is. There is a wide gap, for instance, between "overturning a racist policy" and "solving racism." You shouldn't let teams claim they are doing the latter when their plan merely does the former.
One last piece of advice: the "utilitarianism vs. deontology" debate tends to revolve around a few obvious arguments against both systems. You could probably think of all of these arguments if you put your mind to it. But no policymaker (or individual) accepts "utilitarianism" or "deontology" in full - we all let both of these philosophies inform our decisionmaking. As such, debaters who can focus their utilitarian/deontic on the plan in question rather than in general can usually get a leg up in these debates.
On the scale of governments, this weighing of different impacts is a normal fact of public policy, but when you ask these kinds of questions of individuals, you've begun a study of ethics. After all, individuals have to weigh costs and benefits for nearly every decision they make. There are many ways that individuals or governments could resolve these apples-to-oranges impact comparisons, but there are two particularly important tools from the world of ethics that debaters tend to find useful. Though you might not have heard the terms for these decisionmaking systems, you most likely use both of them everyday.
Consider, for a moment, the vegitarian. Most people aren't raised vegetarians (a least among people of my own cultural background), which means most vegetarians made the choice at some point in their lives to stop eating meat. Every person who makes this choice makes it for different reasons, but there are a few common justifications for vegetarianism.
1. Meat production takes more resources. To take grain, feed it to chickens or cows, and then feed people with the resulting chickens and cows takes more grain than it would take to feed the people directly. Meat production also uses up a lot of land and other resources that could be better used to grow more food for more people. If everyone stopped eating meat, world food prices would go down, and more people would be able to sustain a healthy diet. Even if eating meat is enjoyable, vegetarianism does the greatest good for the greatest number.
2. Animals have rights. The animals that we consume for food are sentient beings that make decisions and feel pain. If we can avoid it, it is wrong to inflict pain on another creature. Animals raised for human consumption are caged, forced to ingest chemicals that modify their body chemistry, and are killed in ways that are far from painless. Even if an individual's decision not to eat meat does not end animal suffering, choosing to eat meat is still wrong.
Not only are these two arguments independent (you might agree with one, or the other, or both, or neither), they are based on completely different ethical systems.
Vegetarian argument #1 is an example of utilitarianism. A utilitarian decision-making process seeks to maximize "utility," which usually means minimizing pain or loss of life. If we did not eat meat, then fewer people would starve to death or face the pain of too little nutrition. Notice that evaluating a utilitarian claim requires looking at an action's consequences (whether or not it leads to less starvation), which is why we say that it is a consequentialist framework.
Vegetarian argument #2, and its claims about "rights", is rooted in the language of Deontology. In a deontic ethical framework, there are certain actions that one should never do, regardless of consequences. Unlike utilitarianism, which presents "conditional imperatives" like "we shouldn't eat meat if meat-eating leads to more hunger," deontology is based around categorical imperatives, things we should or should not do regardless of the consequences. These categorical imperatives are tightly linked with the concept of human rights (or animal rights, as the case may be).
Not all impacts fit neatly into these two categories, but usually we can distinguish between utilitarian and deontic arguments. Any argument about preventing a war or calamity that would happen some time in the future is utilitarian. Disads are largely utilitarian, by consequence. Arguments that seek to establish a "moral obligation," "decision rule," or "you must..." are drawing heavily on deontology.
So when will these two systems come into conflict? If you've been paying attention, they already have. There are two distinct claims built into a tagline like "You must vote aff to overturn a racist government policy." These claims are (1) removing racist policy is a categorical imperative and (2) that the existence of such a categorical imperative means we ought to discard other considerations, usually other utilitarian impacts in the round.
If the negative just extends their impact within a utilitarian framework ("war kills more people than racism"), they aren't going to make it far in this debate. It doesn't matter how many lives the status quo saves if the neg drops the claim that we ought to ignore the consequences of plan. To re-gain the upper hand in this debate, the neg needs to do one or more of the following:
- win that the government policy in question is not racist
- win that racism is not a categorical imperative
- win a stronger categorical imperative that the affirmative violates (support of capitalism will be a popular objection this coming year)
- win that utilitarianism is a better framework, IE that categorical imperatives do not exist
The neg (or aff, whoever is arguing against the deontic impact) generally has a few more common-sense responses to make as well. On balance, most of the claimed categorical imperatives are over-stated, especially upon a close reading of the impact and link cards in play. The opponents' impact also might not be such pure deontology as they claim it is. There is a wide gap, for instance, between "overturning a racist policy" and "solving racism." You shouldn't let teams claim they are doing the latter when their plan merely does the former.
One last piece of advice: the "utilitarianism vs. deontology" debate tends to revolve around a few obvious arguments against both systems. You could probably think of all of these arguments if you put your mind to it. But no policymaker (or individual) accepts "utilitarianism" or "deontology" in full - we all let both of these philosophies inform our decisionmaking. As such, debaters who can focus their utilitarian/deontic on the plan in question rather than in general can usually get a leg up in these debates.
Talking Fast (With charts and graphs!)
I'd like to talk a little bit about talking fast. I haven't touched on this topic yet mostly because it's just not that big a deal. At least it's far less important a topic than you might think having seen, say, a TV news segment on competetive debate. Lots of novices are intimidated by how fast us crazy debaters can flap our jaws, though, so I figure I ought to give some concrete advice.
But before I go into the how of talking fast, let's talk for a moment about why debaters talk fast. Remember when I layed out the three laws of debate strategy? Well, one of the fundamental rules of the activity is that an argument, if conceded, becomes true. This gives us an incentive to make lots of arguments, because our opponent might drop one, or in their rush to cover all arguments their answers might be lacking in depth or strategy.
It follows, then, that a good tactic is to make many arguments in our speech. Think of your speech as conveying information, and we want to convey the maximum amount of information in a given time. Remember that.
So how do you learn to talk at 100 miles per minute? You read the words on the page. Only do it faster. This may be dissapointing, but I swear that's all there is to it. All the things that make you a good reader at normal pace - standing up straght, deep breaths, clear diction, and lots and lots of practice - are what give you ability to hit the gas pedal. Sure, there are some training exercizes that help you develop a bit faster, but they pretty much all boil down to "practice reading a lot." Just like if you wanted to train to be an olympic weightlifter, most of your excercizes are going to involve lifting a lot of increasingly heavy things.
But just like you need proper form when lifting heavy things so you don't damager your back, you need to be mindful of a few things while you practice reading so you don't develop bad habits.
First of all, remember Clarity is King. New debaters tend to want to push themselves too hard, especially during actual rounds. The problem with this is that everybody starts to develop "speed artifacts" as they push the envelope of speed. You start to slur your consonants, you cut off the end of words, your pitch is too high or your volume too quiet, you start gasping for breath, etc. Don't do that. If your speech is any less understandable than normal speed, you need to slow down.
That advice is not followed very widely in the high school community, so allow me to justify my position on the matter a little more. In my experience, debaters tend to see clarity as a binary proposition, either I'm "unclear" or I'm "clear." They want to push their speed as hard as possible until the judge yells at them, thinking that they will be able to squeeze in a few more args. Their mental model of clarity looks like this:
They think that the faster they try to go, the more information they convey, until they become "unclear" (and the judge will surely warn them of that).
As it turns out, though, clarity isn't a binary proposition. Sure, if a debater is so unclear that I can't understand anything I'm going to let them know, but there is a whole lot of gray area. If I'm catching 80%, 75%, maybe even as low as 50% I can still flow, but I'm going to get less of the speech. I'm going to understand the cards less, I might make minor flowing errors, I'm going to have a harder time piecing together the debater's story. Remember our goal for talking fast - Maximise information? If I can go "10% faster" but the judge only catches 75% of my slurred words, I've defeated the entire purpose of talking fast
To use another poorly-drawn chart, the real model of clarity looks like this:
I drew the red dotted line in the same place, but see how the information conveyed slopes downward as you push it too hard? You want to avoid that. The sweet spot as fast as you can without any speed artifacts, or maaaaaybe just a little bit faster to keep improving your baseline speed.
The other important piece of advice to remember about talking fast is All information is not created equal. Your speech isn't just one homogenous blob of text, so don't treat every word the same. It doesn't matter how well I'm flowing your cards if I didn't realize you moved on to a new disad, is it? Here's a rough list of the kinds of information in the average debate speech, ordered by importance.
We might quibble over which item goes where on the list, but the point is that you need to treat different types of information differently. Phrases like "Next off is the Healthcare Disad!" are the most important bits of your speech - they need to be clearer, slower, and with more "dead space" on both sides to allow people to flip paper. Don't mash the end of one card into the beginning of the next, or else I won't realize that there are two different arguments here. The tag and cite should be set out from the text in some way - louder, slower, more dynamics, something.
Note that this heirarchy doesn't give you an excuse to be unclear during the text of the card. Even there, you want a judge to be able to understand every last word. You (or someone) spent blood, sweat, and battery life cutting these cards, and you want them to have the maximum impact. If your cards aren't important enough to articulate clearly, why are you even reading them?
But before I go into the how of talking fast, let's talk for a moment about why debaters talk fast. Remember when I layed out the three laws of debate strategy? Well, one of the fundamental rules of the activity is that an argument, if conceded, becomes true. This gives us an incentive to make lots of arguments, because our opponent might drop one, or in their rush to cover all arguments their answers might be lacking in depth or strategy.
It follows, then, that a good tactic is to make many arguments in our speech. Think of your speech as conveying information, and we want to convey the maximum amount of information in a given time. Remember that.
So how do you learn to talk at 100 miles per minute? You read the words on the page. Only do it faster. This may be dissapointing, but I swear that's all there is to it. All the things that make you a good reader at normal pace - standing up straght, deep breaths, clear diction, and lots and lots of practice - are what give you ability to hit the gas pedal. Sure, there are some training exercizes that help you develop a bit faster, but they pretty much all boil down to "practice reading a lot." Just like if you wanted to train to be an olympic weightlifter, most of your excercizes are going to involve lifting a lot of increasingly heavy things.
But just like you need proper form when lifting heavy things so you don't damager your back, you need to be mindful of a few things while you practice reading so you don't develop bad habits.
First of all, remember Clarity is King. New debaters tend to want to push themselves too hard, especially during actual rounds. The problem with this is that everybody starts to develop "speed artifacts" as they push the envelope of speed. You start to slur your consonants, you cut off the end of words, your pitch is too high or your volume too quiet, you start gasping for breath, etc. Don't do that. If your speech is any less understandable than normal speed, you need to slow down.
That advice is not followed very widely in the high school community, so allow me to justify my position on the matter a little more. In my experience, debaters tend to see clarity as a binary proposition, either I'm "unclear" or I'm "clear." They want to push their speed as hard as possible until the judge yells at them, thinking that they will be able to squeeze in a few more args. Their mental model of clarity looks like this:
They think that the faster they try to go, the more information they convey, until they become "unclear" (and the judge will surely warn them of that).
As it turns out, though, clarity isn't a binary proposition. Sure, if a debater is so unclear that I can't understand anything I'm going to let them know, but there is a whole lot of gray area. If I'm catching 80%, 75%, maybe even as low as 50% I can still flow, but I'm going to get less of the speech. I'm going to understand the cards less, I might make minor flowing errors, I'm going to have a harder time piecing together the debater's story. Remember our goal for talking fast - Maximise information? If I can go "10% faster" but the judge only catches 75% of my slurred words, I've defeated the entire purpose of talking fast
To use another poorly-drawn chart, the real model of clarity looks like this:
I drew the red dotted line in the same place, but see how the information conveyed slopes downward as you push it too hard? You want to avoid that. The sweet spot as fast as you can without any speed artifacts, or maaaaaybe just a little bit faster to keep improving your baseline speed.
The other important piece of advice to remember about talking fast is All information is not created equal. Your speech isn't just one homogenous blob of text, so don't treat every word the same. It doesn't matter how well I'm flowing your cards if I didn't realize you moved on to a new disad, is it? Here's a rough list of the kinds of information in the average debate speech, ordered by importance.
- The "Highway Signs." When have you moved on to a new position? What is that position's name?
- The "Street Signs." When have you moved on to a new argument within a position?
- Poiting out major drops, voting issues, other stuff you want the judge to extra-special-remember
- Overviews of your argument that "tell the story"
- The Tags of cards
- The Tags of your analytical arguments
- The Cites of cards
- The Text of your analytical arguments
- The Text of your cards
We might quibble over which item goes where on the list, but the point is that you need to treat different types of information differently. Phrases like "Next off is the Healthcare Disad!" are the most important bits of your speech - they need to be clearer, slower, and with more "dead space" on both sides to allow people to flip paper. Don't mash the end of one card into the beginning of the next, or else I won't realize that there are two different arguments here. The tag and cite should be set out from the text in some way - louder, slower, more dynamics, something.
Note that this heirarchy doesn't give you an excuse to be unclear during the text of the card. Even there, you want a judge to be able to understand every last word. You (or someone) spent blood, sweat, and battery life cutting these cards, and you want them to have the maximum impact. If your cards aren't important enough to articulate clearly, why are you even reading them?
Economics: learned a lot about the company dough
One of the important skills to gain this year to be successful in debate, especially at the novice level, is a firm grasp of economics. That sentence is going to scare the crap out of some of you. Don't let it. Economics isn't numbers and spreadsheets and TPS reports, at least not at the outset. Economics is the decisions you make every day, the story behind the objects you interact with on a daily basis.
Consider, if you will, a backpack. You probably have one, what would you say it is worth? What value does your backpack posses?
There are obviously lots of ways to answer this question. We could look at a backpack's ability to hold and organize things, we could look at all the work it took to assemble the backpack from raw materials, we could just ask you what it's worth, etc. One particularly useful way to measure value is price. When you went to a store and paid 50 dollars for your backpack, you sent a clear signal that that backpack was worth $50 to you at that place and time.
Price is a useful measure of value in that it can be easily recorded and compared. We can measure the value not just of your backpack, but of every backpack sold in the United States this year. Add in all the other clothing, food, televisions, cars, orange peelers, all the consumer products that are sold in the US. Plus all the services people pay for: mechanics, gardeners, lawyers. Plus all the items that businesses invest in to provide these goods and serviecs: sewing machines, delivery trucks, orange peeler molds. Plus all the stuff that the government buys: fighter jets, roads, $120 ashtrays. Add all that up, and you've got a measure of all the value produced in the US this year, a measure of the value of the US Economy at large.
This particular measure is so important that we give it a name: GDP, or Gross Domestic Product. GDP is a high-level metric for the state of the economy, not so much in the actual number, but in what direction it is moving. Is our GDP from this year higher than it was last year? If it is, that means that our economy is growing, and growth has been the goal of the US economy since it's inception. It may sound strange for an economy to "have a goal," but not every economic theory holds that growth is good or even possible. But in the United States, the mainstream economic theory (capitalism) maintains that growth is good.
So why should the economy grow? Well, a growing economy means businesses need to hire more people to produce more goods, which means more jobs. Growth frees up capital; if you have some extra cash laying around, you can loan it to me, and I can hopefully use it to get even more money for the both of us. Growth means that we can afford to spend money on items outside our basic survival needs and improve the collective standard of living.
It's also important to look at what happens when the economy runs in reverse. Long periods of no-growth (flat GDP, a recession) or negative-growth (falling GDP, a depression) correlate with massive unemployment, increased poverty, lowered standard of living, and worse. For instance, There's a general consensus among historians that the great depression contributed to the outbreak of World War II, which claimed millions of lives.
So, what makes the economy grow? Or, if the economy is growing, what makes it stop? Well, a lot of stuff. The beast that we call "The US Economy" represents millions of people and businesses making billions of economic decisions every day. It's impossible to say things like "X caused the recession" without vastly over-simplifying beyond comprehension. However, the study of economics gives us a variety of tools to look at macro- and micro-level behavior and make conclusions about the past and predictions about the future.
You'll be introduced to many of those tools in this guide and in your debate career as a whole. For right now, though, I'd like to introduce a principle that is at the bottom of many of them, something you need to understand before you really "get" anything else in economics: the principle of Supply and Demand.
Think back on your backpack, on the moment that you put your $50 on the table in exchange for a new bag. Two conditions had to be met for this transaction to happen: you had to want a backpack (demand) and the store had to have one for sale (supply). Of course price also factors into this transaciton, IE you had to want this backpack enough to spend $50 dollars on it and the store had to be willing to part with this backpack for $50 dollars.
So what if one of these conditions changes? Let's say that tomorrow there's a global shortage of ripstop nylon. Suddenly the backpack manufacturer is going to have to charge the store much more for that backpack to make a profit, so in turn the store prices it at $100. But you aren't going to spend more than $50 on a backpack, so the transaction never happens. Lower supply of ripstop nylon with the same demand raises the price. You can imagine a similar interaction if demand moves. A new trendy (high-demand) backpack can be sold at a higher price, but if schools everywhere ban backpacks (cutting off demand), stores will have to cut their prices to keep selling backpacks.
Now, It's easy for me to show in the abstract that high supply/low demand means low prices and low supply/high demand meand high prices, but in the real world it's not always so simple, especially when we get to the macroeconomic (large) scale. A common argument amongst economists is the chicken/egg question of whether the government should focus on supply or demand when trying to coax a hurting economy into growth.
Another important consequence of the supply/demand principle is that a mismatch of supply and demand creates incentives. Return to our nylon shortage. Right now the store is losing out on your business (and, perhaps, the business of others in a similar situation) because their backpacks are too expensive. This demand-without-supply creates an incentive. If someone discovered a new, cheaper method of manufacturing nylon, they could sell a backpack for half the price. Their $50 backpacks would be flying off the shelves while the $100 backpacks collect dust. One of the foundational tenets of modern economics is that people, in general, respond to incentives.
Consider, if you will, a backpack. You probably have one, what would you say it is worth? What value does your backpack posses?
There are obviously lots of ways to answer this question. We could look at a backpack's ability to hold and organize things, we could look at all the work it took to assemble the backpack from raw materials, we could just ask you what it's worth, etc. One particularly useful way to measure value is price. When you went to a store and paid 50 dollars for your backpack, you sent a clear signal that that backpack was worth $50 to you at that place and time.
Price is a useful measure of value in that it can be easily recorded and compared. We can measure the value not just of your backpack, but of every backpack sold in the United States this year. Add in all the other clothing, food, televisions, cars, orange peelers, all the consumer products that are sold in the US. Plus all the services people pay for: mechanics, gardeners, lawyers. Plus all the items that businesses invest in to provide these goods and serviecs: sewing machines, delivery trucks, orange peeler molds. Plus all the stuff that the government buys: fighter jets, roads, $120 ashtrays. Add all that up, and you've got a measure of all the value produced in the US this year, a measure of the value of the US Economy at large.
This particular measure is so important that we give it a name: GDP, or Gross Domestic Product. GDP is a high-level metric for the state of the economy, not so much in the actual number, but in what direction it is moving. Is our GDP from this year higher than it was last year? If it is, that means that our economy is growing, and growth has been the goal of the US economy since it's inception. It may sound strange for an economy to "have a goal," but not every economic theory holds that growth is good or even possible. But in the United States, the mainstream economic theory (capitalism) maintains that growth is good.
So why should the economy grow? Well, a growing economy means businesses need to hire more people to produce more goods, which means more jobs. Growth frees up capital; if you have some extra cash laying around, you can loan it to me, and I can hopefully use it to get even more money for the both of us. Growth means that we can afford to spend money on items outside our basic survival needs and improve the collective standard of living.
It's also important to look at what happens when the economy runs in reverse. Long periods of no-growth (flat GDP, a recession) or negative-growth (falling GDP, a depression) correlate with massive unemployment, increased poverty, lowered standard of living, and worse. For instance, There's a general consensus among historians that the great depression contributed to the outbreak of World War II, which claimed millions of lives.
So, what makes the economy grow? Or, if the economy is growing, what makes it stop? Well, a lot of stuff. The beast that we call "The US Economy" represents millions of people and businesses making billions of economic decisions every day. It's impossible to say things like "X caused the recession" without vastly over-simplifying beyond comprehension. However, the study of economics gives us a variety of tools to look at macro- and micro-level behavior and make conclusions about the past and predictions about the future.
You'll be introduced to many of those tools in this guide and in your debate career as a whole. For right now, though, I'd like to introduce a principle that is at the bottom of many of them, something you need to understand before you really "get" anything else in economics: the principle of Supply and Demand.
Think back on your backpack, on the moment that you put your $50 on the table in exchange for a new bag. Two conditions had to be met for this transaction to happen: you had to want a backpack (demand) and the store had to have one for sale (supply). Of course price also factors into this transaciton, IE you had to want this backpack enough to spend $50 dollars on it and the store had to be willing to part with this backpack for $50 dollars.
So what if one of these conditions changes? Let's say that tomorrow there's a global shortage of ripstop nylon. Suddenly the backpack manufacturer is going to have to charge the store much more for that backpack to make a profit, so in turn the store prices it at $100. But you aren't going to spend more than $50 on a backpack, so the transaction never happens. Lower supply of ripstop nylon with the same demand raises the price. You can imagine a similar interaction if demand moves. A new trendy (high-demand) backpack can be sold at a higher price, but if schools everywhere ban backpacks (cutting off demand), stores will have to cut their prices to keep selling backpacks.
Now, It's easy for me to show in the abstract that high supply/low demand means low prices and low supply/high demand meand high prices, but in the real world it's not always so simple, especially when we get to the macroeconomic (large) scale. A common argument amongst economists is the chicken/egg question of whether the government should focus on supply or demand when trying to coax a hurting economy into growth.
Another important consequence of the supply/demand principle is that a mismatch of supply and demand creates incentives. Return to our nylon shortage. Right now the store is losing out on your business (and, perhaps, the business of others in a similar situation) because their backpacks are too expensive. This demand-without-supply creates an incentive. If someone discovered a new, cheaper method of manufacturing nylon, they could sell a backpack for half the price. Their $50 backpacks would be flying off the shelves while the $100 backpacks collect dust. One of the foundational tenets of modern economics is that people, in general, respond to incentives.
About Picking Up: A Debater's Guide
About the Author:
My name is Ryan Ricard, although people in debate circles tend to call me Lucy. I coach debate at Rosemount High School in Minnesota, where I myself competed in debate many moons ago. I was never one of the best debaters in the country, but I did have the pleasure of debating some of them. I'm not one of the best debate coaches in the country, but I have had the pleasure of working with some of them.
About the Guide:
This is a guide to competitive debate, especially competitive debate at the high school level. The guide is made up of a series of articles, each focusing on a particular topic. Subjects covered include preparation, in-round strategy and tactics, and some more mundane questions like "which debate event should I choose?" It's written to be accessible to beginners, but I'd hope that experienced debaters/coaches get something out of it as well.
Reading the Guide:
Well, you can read it any way you want, obviously. I'm not going to stop you. But I don't think you'll get as much out of this guide if you try to tackle it all in one sitting, "cover to cover." Like your mom told you about your Halloween candy, Picking Up is meant to be consumed a bit at a time. Read an article a few times a week on the bus, skim an article on the topic you covered at practice after you get home, maybe go back and read some of the first articles after you have a few rounds under your belt. This book is best served with face-to-face instruction and plenty of ice cold experience.
My name is Ryan Ricard, although people in debate circles tend to call me Lucy. I coach debate at Rosemount High School in Minnesota, where I myself competed in debate many moons ago. I was never one of the best debaters in the country, but I did have the pleasure of debating some of them. I'm not one of the best debate coaches in the country, but I have had the pleasure of working with some of them.
About the Guide:
This is a guide to competitive debate, especially competitive debate at the high school level. The guide is made up of a series of articles, each focusing on a particular topic. Subjects covered include preparation, in-round strategy and tactics, and some more mundane questions like "which debate event should I choose?" It's written to be accessible to beginners, but I'd hope that experienced debaters/coaches get something out of it as well.
Reading the Guide:
Well, you can read it any way you want, obviously. I'm not going to stop you. But I don't think you'll get as much out of this guide if you try to tackle it all in one sitting, "cover to cover." Like your mom told you about your Halloween candy, Picking Up is meant to be consumed a bit at a time. Read an article a few times a week on the bus, skim an article on the topic you covered at practice after you get home, maybe go back and read some of the first articles after you have a few rounds under your belt. This book is best served with face-to-face instruction and plenty of ice cold experience.
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