Cause-and-effect is one of the first abstract ideas the human brain learns to deal with. The tiniest baby knows within his first few hours that if he cries, his mom will feed him. Even my little dogs know that if they bring me one of their chew toys at the right time of day, I’ll fix their supper. We know that the worst thing that can happen to a child is to be born into a family where this cause-and-effect dance doesn’t happen. We now know that neglect is far more damaging than abuse. To neglect a child is to break that all-important connection. The only power an infant has is his grasp of cause-and-effect; it gives him a tiny bit of control in an otherwise hostile world.
Conversely, cause and effect is one of the hardest ideas to prove, for our world is incredibly complex — every effect is just swimming in possible causes — often unforeseen and indemonstrable.
This is why it’s such a struggle to find solutions to our problems. To rectify an errant policy, we need to know what caused it, or at least we need to be able to forecast what ramifications a change in that policy will set off. We also need to know which is the cart and which the horse.
Thomas Sowell talks a lot about cause-and-effect and he points out that too often those making policy decisions don’t think past the first level; they’re oblivious to outcomes lurking behind the second and third levels of inquiry. So, we want to solve the problem of poverty. The obvious solution would be to give the poor more money. Problem: poverty, solution: more money. So, let’s raise the minimum wage. More money = less poverty. Unless:
- Companies can’t afford to pay out more in wages, so they eliminate positions. The ultimate effect is that more people are poor than were in the beginning.
- Because these companies can no longer keep enough workers on staff, they pile the extra work onto those few workers left, and eventually, they quit and hope against hope there’s an opportunity elsewhere. So we lose workers.
- Last week 10,000 California workers were let go due to the increase in the minimum wage. That’s 10,000 sources of government revenue gone, at least temporarily. Now even the government is poorer. And that’s just three ripples moving out from this “solution.”
The point is that superficial “solutions” are no solutions at all.
How do we manage to avoid this kind of knee-jerk reaction to problems? This thin, third grade approach has us sending our kids to schools that advertise their inability to protect our children (Gun Free Zone!). It has us welcoming sexual deviants into our schools to do what? — to practice making perversion normal? How do we start thinking ahead more responsibly?
Kurt S
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