As a conservative or liberal, what is the fairest way you can explain the views of the other side?
I’m going to explain this with regards to the welfare state.
And to do this, I’m going to once again borrow a concept from medical statistics: specificity and sensitivity.
When you test for the presence of a thing, there are 4 broad outcomes:
True positive: the thing is present and your test tell you that it is.
False positive: the thing is not present but your test tells you that it is.
True negative: the thing is not present and your test tell you that it is not.
False negative: the thing is present but your test tells you that it isn’t.
Sensitivity is the likelihood that a positive result will be found if it is there. In other words, the number of false negatives will be low in a very sensitive test. A test that is 100% sensitive will detect what you’re looking for 100% of the time, if the intended target is present. This is usually what you want in screening tests. You don’t want to miss anything so you want a really high sensitivity. The problem is that highly sensitive tests are often associated with a high number of false positives. In other words, the price to pay for getting every single true positive out there is that you’ll also end up with a fair number of things that are wrongly deemed to contain what you’re looking for.
This is why we often couple screening tests, chosen for their high sensitivity, with confirmatory tests, chosen for their high specificity.
Specificity is the likelihood that a negative result will be found if it is there. In other words, the number of false positives will be very low in a highly specific test. A test that is 100% specific will be able to tell you every single time that your intended target is absent.
So, assuming that you have a very good screening test and a very good confirmatory test, you’ll get a huge number of positives after screening but expect that a fair number of them will really be falsely positive. You’ll then put them through the sieve of the confirmatory test and a large number of the false positives will be revealed as such.
Still with me? Good. What on earth does that have to do with the welfare state?
If you’re a liberal, you want to maximize how many people you help, even if you end up with some undeserving people also receiving money and benefits from the government. To you, it’s much more problematic to have a system with any starving family than it is to have a system where, in order to prevent people from gaming the system, we end up failing to help many poor families. In other words, you want the welfare state to be sensitive, even if you end up losing on some specificity.
If you’re a conservative, the idea that people might be gaming the system and receiving benefits they don’t deserve is much more painful and problematic to you than the idea that some poor people will go without help. What you want are stringent requirements to make sure that every single person that receives benefits from the government is deserving of that help. In other words, you want the welfare state to be specific, even if you end up losing some sensitivity.
In a welfare state system designed by conservatives, you’d end up with this:
Every single beneficiary (left side) will be deserving (blue) but a fair number of deserving people would go without help.
In a system designed by liberals, you’d end up with this:
Every single deserving (blue) person will be a beneficiary (left side) but a fair number of undeserving people will also get benefits.
The proportions above are exaggerated but I think the concept as a whole does a good job of capturing where each side is coming from.
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