For example, is it better to force us all to pay to investigate the crimes some people are victims of, or to give us more private resources which we can choose to use to protect ourselves? That’s one we’ve answered pretty definitively in favor of “pooling for the common good”, but it wasn’t always that way. The Boston Police Department, founded in 1838, was the first paid professional police department in the country.
I think we as a nation have a tendency to answer the above question based on the status quo: If it’s something we already pool resources for, we think it makes sense to do so; if it’s something we don’t, we view the idea with trepidation and reluctance. That’s why we try so hard to avoid having a public health care system, even though most of our peer countries think that makes sense. I believe if we had one, we’d think it makes sense too, but since we don’t, we resist.
P.S. David followed the portion I quoted above with this:
“Should they be made to subsidize some lawyer at Ropes & Gray who wants to extend her already-generous paid maternity leave by another 12 weeks on the state’s nickel?”
Here, I think we’re just getting into Republican tropes. The initial question was legitimate, but this followup sentence is the equivalent of throwing the cry of “welfare crack-mothers!” into the debate. When debating the application of this common good vs. private benefit principle, as Democrats, lets take care not to reframe issues in Republican terms. We’re talking about the majority of working mothers for whom this proposal could be a great boon, not the far smaller number of extremely highly paid women for whom this bill wouldn’t make much difference anyway, because it would only replace a small portion of their income.
So, how would you apply this principle to the question of paid family leave? Pool for the common good, or leave it to the individual?
UPDATE (by David): To clarify the nature of the paid leave program: it is not limited to new kids. It also covers caring for a sick family member, as well as recuperation from one’s own serious medical condition (a form of disability insurance).
This is where it becomes very important to frame the issue to people. Most voters will be against this because most serious voters are beyond the age where they will take advantage of this.
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So frame it like this when you’re talking to someone:
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“Don’t you think it’s worth $2.50/week so that your daughter can take 12 weeks off from work to be with her new baby? Or do you think that your grandchild should be in day-care right away?”
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Because if you don’t frame the issue right, someone will frame it as “why should my money go to subsidize those lazy…”
That’s a good point, to talk in terms of the voters’ children, not necessarily the voters themselves. Obviously that depends on who you’re talking to. But more broadly, I think it’s very important to frame it in terms of the tradeoff between pooling for common good, vs. private resources. The way you put it still encourages people to think entirely in terms of private benefit vs. private resources, though in this case “private” encompasses their family.
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When people form opinions about public policy by focusing exclusively on private benefit vs. resources, I think it leads to the wrong decisions for society a lot of the time. It unbalances us in the wrong direction. I think it’s very important to frame the issue in a way that gets people to think about the other side: mutual responsibility, pooling resources, the common good, and a healthier society. Not just what they might get out of it personally and directly.
I think that after 30 years of conservative think-tanks equating “common good” with “evil socialism”, that’s not an argument you can easily win.
It’s not an argument, it’s a frame. It’s a field upon which to have an argument. The goal isn’t to “convince” someone, the goal is to get them thinking about the issue in terms of the frame. It’s subtler than asking them to agree with a statement – it’s merely mentioning the concept as you talk about other statements, to activate different associations and different kinds of reasoning about the statements you’re making.
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“Common good” has many associations. For example, there’s the preamble to the Constitution, one of the few bits of the Constitution that many people recognize (though a lot of them are confused about whether it’s part of the Declaration of Independence :/). I don’t think conservatives have successfully tarred it. If you can show me the polls to demonstrate they have, I’m interested in seeing them.
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If you don’t like that phrase, use some of the others I mentioned. Speak in terms of mutual responsibility, a strong healthy society, anything that gets people thinking about the common good even if it’s not directly through those words. The point here isn’t to convince people that a certain phrase is a good thing, but to get them thinking about the actual issue you’re talking about with these values in mind.
Let me preface this by saying Iâm not crazy about this new family leave proposal, but if it is to be framed, letâs frame it right.
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I don’t think the two framing suggestions are what Lakoff had in mind. Framing is not a sentence or a broad term (like common good) It is a very specific, common sense catch phase like “Death Tax” or “Working Poor” etc… You need to immediately understand it and associate a positive or negative connotation to it.
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I havenât come up with a good frame for this but it needs to be two or three words that are positive â like some combination of preservation family bonding or other easily understood positive words. How can you be against preserving the family unit and enabling bonding between mother or father and child? That in my opinion is how we should frame.
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For those that haven’t read it yet, Moral Politics is the real book everyone should be reading about framing and understanding why Republicans think the way the do.
In Lakoff terms, a “frame” is none of the things you mentioned. It’s not a sentence, it’s not a broad term, and it’s not a catchphrase. It’s not a slogan, either. A frame is not words. A frame can be evoked by words, but it is not those words.
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A frame is a well known, well understood concept within which we reason about things – it’s a direction from which to look at the things we reason about. Most things can be thought about using a variety of frames. What Lakoff suggests in Don’t Think of an Elephant is that we need to talk about issues using words that evoke frames more favorable to us, and avoid using words that evoke conservative frames.
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A frame takes a long time to build up. It’s not something you can “think of” or come up with on the spot, no matter how smart or clever you are. Because, a frame does no good unless everyone (well, most everyone) is deeply familiar with it. A frame is big and broad and has a large system of associations. Your choice of words cannot be a frame, but it can make someone think of the already existing frame you want them to think of.
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Lakoff’s favorite example that he uses in talks illustrates this: “tax relief”. The use of the word “relief” associates taxes with a frame conservatives would like people to think about taxes through. What does “relief” evoke? The concept of affliction, which is “relieved”, which makes things better by removing the affliction. By saying “tax relief”, the speaker makes people think of taxes as an affliction, and therefore, the “relief” of that affliction as an inherently good thing. The speaker hasn’t invented a frame. Everyone already knows about relief from affliction, and already thinks of it as a good thing. The speaker has merely come up with a clever use of words to suggest to the listener that taxes are an affliction which it would be good to relieve.
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My favorite example, which I use when giving talks about framing, is the social security debate. You might have noticed that when Bush spoke about social security, he always peppered his speeches with the words “invest” and “investment”, over and over and over. Hardly ever did he mention the word “insurance” even once – despite the fact that the official full name of the program in question is “social security insurance” and the tax we pay to fund it is the “Federal Insurance Contributions Act” tax.
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Why did Bush avoid “insurance”, while repeatedly saying “investment”? Because insurance and investment are two well known frames and he wanted his listeners to think about social security through the investment frame, not the insurance frame that is more naturally associated with it.
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Here are some things most people know about investment: – the goal is get a good return – you invest in a private account
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Here are some things most people know about insurance: – the goal is not to be out of luck when bad things happen – you pool your risk with as many people as possible
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Can you see why Bush wanted to reframe social security as “investment” instead of “insurance”?
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Frames form the ground on which debates are held. Control the frame, and the advantage is yours.
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One of the most important points, that’s often missed in the pop coverage of Lakoff, is that you can only use existing frames through language. You can’t create them like that. Creating new frames takes a lot of time and effort – decades’ worth, sometimes, even if you do it deliberately. That’s what the right wing think tanks have been doing that we haven’t. To create a useful frame, you need to not only come up with a broad idea, you also need to communicate it to the general public and let it take root.
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But, frames abound, and there are plenty out there already that we can use.
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Moral Politics is the real book everyone should be reading about framing
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I’ve read Moral Politics, and keep it as a reference. It’s one of the very small number of books I keep in my bedroom in this little apartment. But Moral Politics doesn’t talk about framing very much. It is Lakoff’s older, academic book, where he lays out his theory of how liberals and conservatives in the US reason about politics through metaphor. There are only a few short sections about framing, near the end. Still, I highly recommend this book. I think Lakoff’s theory is extremely valuable.
You frame an issue with words. Words are the tangible portion of the conceptual frame. They are used to frame. So yes, technically words evoke frame and frames are conceptual. Is this the real crux of the issue?
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The point I was trying to make is that if you are to frame an issue, you need to do it with a very specific, common sense catch phase like “Death Tax” or “Working Poor” etc… You need to immediately understand it and associate a positive or negative connotation to it and get a lot of people saying it. As you pointed out, the great thing about the catch phrase “tax relief” is that it is easly understood and repeated.
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Moral Politics has everything to do with framing. You canât properly frame an issue without trying to understand the people you are trying to convince. That is what Moral Politics is all about. It empowers you to frame. Itâs like saying math has nothing to do with Physics.
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Anyway enough talk about framing framing. I really appreciated you original post and response. Letâs get more people talking about framing.
if you are to frame an issue, you need to do it with a very specific, common sense catch phase like “Death Tax” or “Working Poor” etc…
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I vehemently disagree. I think this feeds into a lot of the popular misunderstandings of “framing”. You can use a common sense catch phrase, and there are some very clever ones around that do invoke frames well. But that’s one of many ways to frame in issue.
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Look at the example I gave: Bush trying to reframe Social Security from insurance (which is how most people have always thought of it) to investment. He didn’t do it with a catchphrase, he did it by:
The investment frame is well understood. It doesn’t apply well to Social Security. But by speaking within that frame, and using its concepts, every time he spoke about Social Security, Bush got many of his listeners to think about Social Security in the frame of investment. That made many of his ideas about it seem to make a lot more sense than they did to people who were thinking in the insurance frame that Social Security was designed for.
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The key to framing isn’t the use of catch phrases. It’s understanding what frames are out there, picking good ones to use for the issues you want to talk about, and finding ways to talk about those issues that invoke the frames you’ve chosen.
It is ironic that the example you gave didn’t use a catch phrase and was a failure. All the other successful ones you and I mentioned involved catch phases. You made my point.
Attacking Social Security was a very tough thing to do – it has been called the third rail of American politics. Touch it and you die. Also, our side finally fought back with strength and vigor, something we hadn’t been doing before.
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The catchphrase examples were “death tax” and “tax relief” – cutting taxes, something that was alreadypopular and likely to be successful; and “working poor” – how exactly has that been successful? I think it is working, but the book is still out on the results, and if you blithely dismiss Bush’s attempt to reframe social security, you might as well blithely dismiss this one. They’re still poor.
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These pat, quick conclusions tell us nothing about what framing is or how to do it.
I didn’t say Moral Politics “has nothing to do with” framing, I said it doesn’t talk about framing very much. You’re right, it does empower you to frame issues for American politics (but doesn’t do much to empower you to frame other sorts of issues, or politics outside the US, necessarily). That’s because it helps you understand the concepts Americans use to reason about politics. But it doesn’t spend much time talking about framing specifically. Don’t Think of an Elephant is the framing book.
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A more apt analogy would be to say that a math textbook won’t teach you engineering, but if you want to be a good engineer, you ought to learn math. In that analogy, Moral Politics goes into math in depth, while Don’t Think of an Elephant is an engineering quick-start with some math, but just the parts you need to know at first, not the underlying concepts and tools to derive things on your own.
I know this is going to sound heartless, but we really have to think; is having paid for family leave really the common good? Doing so encourages people to have children. Which in turn increases our need for social and community services, creates greater consumption and reduces resources. I honestly think that things like the child tax credit are unfair and ill conceived, as is this idea. People are ensured their jobs already under the Family and Medical Leave Act. Why should someone be paid to have a child while another single person who gets ill or needs surgery is not paid during his or her recovery? To me it is an issue of fairness. It is yet another bias toward encouraging large families while we should be working to reduce our population growth.
“…while we should be working to reduce our population growth.”
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said Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. It’s true. Look it up.
But still the issue remains the same. How can we say that we are doing what is best for the community by encouraging people to put greater strains on the resources of the community? I told you it would sound heartless, but it is an aspect of policy decisions and planning that is rarely if ever taken in to account. I am not saying we adapt something crazy like the Chinese system, but at the same time we need to evaluate the true cost of the plan including the long term services from the community required to raise a child and then evaluate if encouraging people to have more children through tax incentives is a good idea. Personally I am not sure it is and I would like to see the Senator present that kind of total cost analysis for his plan.
I would think that any society that works to reduce its population growth is going to be one that is only known through history books.
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Look at what Europe is going through.
And of course I would like to see the benefits of encouraging increased population too. I would rather see the same resources put in to creating a better quality of life for a smaller number of children.
… but are you really suggesting that nobody have kids? That having kids just isn’t important at all?
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No? Well, then what are we going to do about it?
Well, a better quality of life for an ideal number of kids, which I actually think is more than the number of kids we have now. But yes, that’s exactly what we’re trying to promote. The more we support mothers and children, the more we allow them to plan and make choices they’re comfortable with, and the more likely we’ll have a reasonable replacement level of population with a higher quality of life.
Yes, it’s true – there are a variety of problems that come with population growth. However, there are just as many that come from population decline. Right now the US isn’t doing too badly, but we’re still below the replacement rate. Having more old people than young people leads to system-wide problems of economic security. Social Security’s running out of money? Population flowing out of MA? These are things we talk about here all the time, and they’re directly related to having a birth rate below the replacement rate. Yes, more children means more consumption of services, but it also means more young people paying in to the tax system relative to the number of old people who don’t work and frequently have to be supported. The economies of European countries ranging from Italy to Sweden have had to undergo major overhauls in the past 15 years to avoid going into population-related crisis because they spent too long discouraging family growth. We needn’t necessarily encourage HUGE families, but a) we do need to encourage some population growth, b) initiatives like this take a long time to really show effects, so starting before we hit serious economic problems makes sense, and c) the effects of this kind of policy on increasing family size, while real, is small.
..and if you can quantify the argument that by doing this we will increase the number of young earners in the state I could be convinced it is a good thing. However I am not sure it does. I would think having reasonable housing rates, a stable job market, and community services capable of supporting the population would be more important. This plan does little to encourage people to stay and puts more of the burden of tax on those that best support the state, young, single earners with no children, encouraging those people to leave. Though children may grow up here there is no reason to expect they will stay in to their adult earning years. If it encourages their parents to stay, perhaps it is worth it. Show me the numbers.
I agree that we want to prevent rapid population growth. Ideally, we should have a steady replacement with some small growth. In context, of course, we want MA’s population to grow relative to the rest of the country, to make up for what we’ve been losing recently. But all that aside, you’re making a huge unwarranted assumption: That public support for the process of having and raising children, will increase the population.
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At a very simple level, this seems to make intuitive sense. But actual research tends to show the opposite, for a number of reasons. Some factors you need to look at:
Putting all these things together, there’s been a fair amount of research that suggests that the more support we give mothers, the more able they are to view childbearing as a comfortable choice they can plan for, and consequently, the longer they wait to have children and the fewer children they have.
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So they choice is not between “support mothers and have more kids” vs. “don’t support mothers and have fewer kids”. For society as a whole, the choice is between supporting mothers and having a rate closer to replacement level, with a higher percentage of them healthy and educated, or don’t support mothers and have more kids, who are more likely to be poor, undernourished, and uneducated.
I am new to this topic, so I would love to reads some of the research you are referring to. Any chance you could post a few links?
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That said, as in my post above, even if reaching this slow growth level through birth helps we need to find better ways to keep young adult earners here. To me that should be the priority right now. Our problems as a state due to population are immediate, not something we can deal with 20 years from now. Even assuming that children born here will stay here we need to address the immediate emigration from the state problems first. I fear that this law will come at the expense of addressing that problem.
I’m fairly certain that there are bills pending (or whatever the term is) that deal with sick leave and taking time off to care for a sick family member, and while I certainly think those are important issues, they don’t line up with maternity leave as an either/or proposition.
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I’m skeptical of the assertion that people will have more children because they get 3 months off. How many people have a child just for a tax credit? I hope the answer is not many.
A different way to ask the question is, how many women either delay having children, or simply don’t have them because they’re worried about the impact on their budget and/or job?
Wouldn’t MANY more ‘young earners’ just wind up paying the surcharge instead of having kids themselves?
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Lessee. We just decided they must buy health insurance or forfeit their tax refunds, we only give age based auto insurance discounts to those over 65, and now we want to charge for people to stay home and take care of their kids.
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I’m 25 and single – yeah, I’M really gonna stay here and blow off that job in Rhode Island….
We want to keep people like yourself here. How can young single people be contniually asked to support programs that target them as a source of income for our state programs, yet don’t recieve as many of the benefits as other demographics and THEN be expected to want to live here. This program hurts those we need most, young single workers and small businessses. Instead of creating financial incentives to increase the strain on our state’s resources we should be creating incentives for more young earners to move here and become a sources of revenue.
Hell if that is the point I do not wnat my taxes spent on anything that has nothing to do with me personally. Therefore, a list of things that I would like deducted from my bill,
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* All St. Patricks Day Parades because I am not Irish therefore I do not see why my taxes should be spent on this.
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* I have a strict travel itinerary between home, work, church, the mall and various famly and friends homes, therefore, I do not want to pay for road construction not electricity for street lamps on routes I do not use.
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* I have no children so I do not want to pay for teachers, schools, book, buses etc., if and when I am feeling generous I will donate to the schools that my nieces attend.
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* I hate swimming and nature so I do not want to pay for the up keep of municipal parks and swimming pools.
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* I practice non violence so please deduct expenditures for the Mass National Gaurd.
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* I only have two garbage bags of trash per week therefore, I do not want to pay for trash collection other than my home.
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* I do not live in Boston and would like to be refunded on monies spent on the Big Dig.
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It is shameful that people can not see that the US is the ONLY industrialzed country with no national laws on maternity leave.
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My first job at 13 years old was baby sitting for a woman who had 4 boys. She was lucky because she did have 6 weeks maternity leave but afterwhich she had no option (finance) but to entrust her six week old baby to a 13 year old. I remember her teaching me how to clean his umbilical cord because it was still attached.
Bill Clinton and the Democratic Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act early in his first term. It’s unpaid leave, but it does prevent employers from firing employees for taking time off to care for a sick relative or newborn or newly adopted child.
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And the population growth is a side-track, I think.
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New babies are born in Massachusetts, and it’s a stressful, sleepless time for the new parents for many weeks. Every baby deserves time to bond with its parents in this tender time. You’re absolutely right, TrueBlueDem, that mothers of new infants have been chased out of the home too soon to earn rent-money.
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Trav’s plan is a good start for protecting the bond between mother and baby from the harsh demands of this Republican economy.