Slippery-Slope Logic vs. Health Care Law - Economic View - NYTimes.com

Slippery-Slope Logic vs. Health Care Law - Economic View - NYTimes.com:

There is a DirecTV ad that humorously illustrates the basic form of the slippery-slope argument. A foreboding announcer intones a list of syllogisms that are enacted on screen: “When your cable company puts you on hold, you get angry. When you get angry, you go blow off steam. When you go blow off steam, accidents happen.” Later, we reach the finale: “You wake up in a roadside ditch. Don’t wake up in a roadside ditch.”

Although this ad is intended to be funny, arguments that make no more sense can and do affect public policy. The idea is that while Policy X may be acceptable, it will inevitably lead to the terrible Outcome Y, so it is vital that we prevent Policy X from ever being enacted. The problem is that such arguments are often made without any evidence that doing X makes Y more likely, much less inevitable. What percentage of people who are left on hold on the telephone end up in a roadside ditch?

The anecdotal track record of people making slippery-slope predictions in the political domain is replete with bad forecasts. An opponent of women’s suffrage once predicted that giving women the right to vote would create a “race of masculine women and effeminate men and the mating of these would result in the procreation of a race of degenerates.” Another opponent, noting that women represent more than half the population, predicted that allowing women to vote would mean that all our political leaders would soon be women. For the record, women now hold 17 percent of the seats in Congress.

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