TALA versus Targeted Persuasion
It is a balancing act.
In my occasional series on targeted persuasion, which I am just realizing I haven’t posted on in a year and a half, I try to reach opponents of my policy positions by speaking to what I believe are their points of view. I hope to find a receptive audience by being sensitive to what they are sensitive to identifying common ground and building from there.
I want to be truthful and clear. The only deception I potentially commit is simply ignoring arguments for my position that the intended audience would recoil from.
Economist Alvin Roth, whose latest book is Moral Economics, has spent his career in the trenches of the issues for which I think targeted persuasion is keenly needed. His recent interview with Nick Gillespie (video here) is an insightful look at his thoughts on solving fraught issues—not necessarily winning by changing minds but rather solving the underlying problems given hardheaded repugnance preventing mind change.
Roth’s area is just the extreme of the much larger realm of good economics being disconnected from acceptance. This is a big problem needing solution(s). And opinions vary on how to get there.
I don’t fully disagree but nor can I fully endorse what Benjamin Nadelstein is laying out here. Some of it is too clever by half.
People who want free market reforms have a branding problem.
On paper, many market reforms are clean and elegant. They increase coordination, reduce deadweight loss, expand the feasible set of positive-sum trades, and generate more surplus with fewer distortions. (Are your eyes glazing over yet?)
And yet the public reaction is usually the same:
Absolutely not! No! Never!
The issue is rarely that the economics fails to pencil out. It’s that the language around the proposals fails to persuade.
. . .
Successful marketers like Rory Sutherland and Frank Luntz understand that perception is a crucial part of the product.
Sometimes it is the product.
If broader adoption of market-friendly reforms is the goal, optimizing mechanism design isn’t enough.
It’s time to invest just as much effort — if not more — in optimizing the framing.
If economists spent even a fraction of the time they devote to modeling Pareto improvements thinking up better names for their policies, they might achieve most of the adoption gains with a fraction of the effort.
People need to be met where they are, and, sadly, many have a low ceiling on what they can handle intellectually (how’s that for off-putting marketing?). Yet that hot take is true, which is an unsaid point in Nadelstein’s post.
It is also true that people can exceed expectations. More importantly they should always be treated with respect. Condescension is both undignified on the part of the presenter and unappealing from the perspective of the audience.
I have a guiding principle that we should treat adults like adults (TALA). This is both in what is legally allowed and tolerated as well as in communication between adults (and I would argue children too) when the topic is difficult or positions opposing.
There is some tension between TALA and targeted persuasion. If the targeting is too selective or too salesy, it violates TALA. Strict adherence to TALA can completely neuter persuasion.
The solution is the messy truth of sometimes this and sometimes that in varying degrees. I tend to agree that the slogan should be helpful—this is sales 101. At the same time we have to be willing to make the hard arguments, which requires facing ugly truths.
My recent post on the minimum wage is a case in point. I didn’t pull punches erring on the side of assuming my position on the topic of minimum wages since the purpose of the post was to understand why these (assumed) bad laws maintain high levels of support. Had my purpose been to persuade, I would have taken a different tack.
At the same time, I did intend an element of persuasion that I think has a role in the bigger scheme of things. That is to inspire second thoughts among opponents by direct challenge—even if I use a bit of insult to do it.
This is where I am being faithful to my TALA principle. The strategy in this case goes as follows:
I think you’re wrong with strong confidence.
I have expertise in this area.
I assume you grant that I have some expertise.
I proceed to make a strong statement that at least indirectly calls you out.
Therefore, my bluntness may lead you to at least consider second guessing your position.
In order for it to work, item 3 is perhaps a crucial component. Notice that with the hoped-for conclusion (5) I am only striving for some opponents to consider opening their minds.
In the general case this strategy would indeed fail, but almost all persuasion attempts fail when it comes to positions like this. And I think this strategy risks little in the way of pushing opponents further away. Low risk - low expected return.
Back to Roth, his calm demeanor coupled with a brilliant mind gives him a targeted persuasion superpower. Not all possess this, obviously. I wish I did. And even he suffers from a small audience. He has been out in the field doing the work solving around where minds cannot be persuaded. Because of this, he speaks from strong credibility when he points out the failures of policy that defies economic truth and the ethics of liberty.
All of this comes full circle with one of my favorite Steven Landsburg quotes:
So Alvin Roth wins the Nobel Prize for, among other things, figuring out the best way to allocate kidneys subject to the constraint that you’re too damned dumb to use the price system.
This is very congruent with my minimum wage post but more so. When Steven Landsburg says you’re “too damned dumb”, it should make you stand up and listen. He checks hard every item in the 1-5 strategy above.
Persuasion contains multitudes. At times we should take the time to persuade with patience and generosity. At other times we don’t have time for that, and the most ignorant positions don’t always deserve it.