People who dedicate their lives to researching proposed policies still don't agree about their effects.
A quick search will find the leading arguments pro and con, but no way to know which arguments are right.
> A quick search will find the leading arguments pro and con, but no way to know which arguments are right.
This is an incredibly significant milestone in understanding an issue though. There are many many many people who entirely lack exposure to one half of the discourse on an issue; this is exacerbated by the fact that it's increasingly en vogue to consider it a moral failing to even consider the other side's arguments (even for the purposes of rebuttal).
Consider, for example, the science on minimum wage experiments performed in different cities and at different time intervals. The outcomes are conflicting in some cases and, perhaps, are not reproducible elsewhere.
How can we expect a layman to really understand the effect a policy may have, especially 20 years down the line? That's something even experts struggle with.
I'm not talking about competence. I'm talking about people not leaving or even attempting to leave the state of willful ignorance.
> How can we expect a layman to really understand the effect a policy may have, especially 20 years down the line? That's something even experts struggle with.
It's obvious that my comment wasn't a plea for universal omniscience. None of this is relevant to my complaint about people deprioritizing the effects of a policy, as if it's not close to the _only_ thing that's important.
> Consider, for example, the science on minimum wage experiments performed in different cities and at different time intervals. The outcomes are conflicting in some cases and, perhaps, are not reproducible elsewhere.
This is a perfect example, thank you. Do you know what I would say if asked what I thought the effect of min wage changes are? _I would say I have no idea_, and anyone who tells you they do for sure is lying to you. Accepting that doesn't mean throwing up your hands in hopelessness, but it does suggest a different understanding of the effects of each policy than simply what feeling you get from hearing the one-line description.
Policy, and the world in general, generally isn't as simple as people would like it to be. In democracies, one's insistence on pretending that things work the oversimplified way you want them to has concrete costs to those affected by those policies and is more than a little despicable.
> Recent research shows conflicting evidence on both sides of the issue. In general, the evidence suggests that it is appropriate to weigh the cost of potential job losses from a higher minimum wage against the benefits of wage increases for other workers.
1. https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economi...
The sad fact is, the vast majority of people are far more interested in how policies look, what they signal, and how voicing support for them makes them look. The actual effects the policy may have is way, way down the list of motivating factors, if it even enters their mind at all.