February 24, 2015
The Metric System: Framework Debates, Poverty Measures, and Easy Ballots
By Christian Chessman
The February 2015 topic is perhaps the most complicated debate topic that the Public Forum Debate community will encounter this year. Though globalization is undoubtedly the broadest subject area that the community has dealt with, the difficulty and complexity that inure to the resolution do so because of its impact metric: worldwide poverty alleviation.
The seemingly simple concept of poverty becomes complicated as debaters seek to provide definition, scope, and measure to poverty1. The process of turning poverty from a concept into a measurable variable2 is no simple task – and is arguably yet to be successfully done by scholars in the field. Scholars have debated the proper measure of poverty and thus the proper measure of poverty alleviation for decades3. Settling that debate is far beyond the scope of this article; rather, this article will focus on introducing debaters to finding the literature on poverty measures, extracting poverty measures from the literature, and then deploying them strategically in round.
It's Going Down; I'm Yelling Voter4
The debate over the definition of poverty establishes whether poverty is going up or down. It does not speak to the resolutional requirement that poverty alleviation be worldwide. The exact text of the resolution reads, in pertinent part, "economic globalization benefits worldwide poverty reduction."
There are two reasonable readings of the topic. The first reading of the topic treats "worldwide" as a modifier of "reduction". In other words, the reduction of poverty must be "worldwide" as opposed to being localized in particular states or regions. The second reading of the topic treats "worldwide" as a modifier of "poverty". Under that interpretation, "worldwide" simply establishes the scope of the topic – all poverty in the world – and asks debaters to speak to the "on balance" majority of that poverty.
Though seemingly similar, the two foregoing interpretations of "worldwide" have drastic implications for a common affirmative position on the topic. For a variety of reasons, a number of affirmatives have selected one or two large countries – typically China and India – and tried to prove poverty reduction there. Because the majority of worldwide poverty is located in these countries, these affirmatives are topical under the second interpretation of the topic. However, they are not topical under the first interpretation of "worldwide" which requires reduction across the world.
Debaters reading "big country" affirmatives should be ready for this debate, identify it clearly when it occurs in round5, and establish reasons to prefer their interpretation of the topic. I think this interpretation is the most defensible – it is not clear how worldwide is worldwide enough to meet the alternative interpretation6 - but debaters need to be clear when actually defending the interpretation in round. Failure to do so may result in easily avoidable losses when judges implicitly use an undiscussed (or under-discussed) framework to render their decisions and ignore the substance of an affirmative case.
The Poverty of Theory and the Theory of Poverty
After a metric for determining the scope of "worldwide" is established, debaters need a framework7 for evaluating poverty. The metric debaters select has the potential to drastically affect the way rounds play out: if debaters successfully win a framework for evaluating poverty, that argument alone can eliminate an opponent's entire case from weighing. I will discuss the amount of development this type of strategy needs below but it should suffice to say that these arguments are profoundly important.
One criterion debaters might use to frame poverty alleviation is the type of poverty. I will discuss three examples: acute and chronic poverty and extreme poverty and relative poverty.
It is well settled that an enormous portion of the global poor are only transiently poor; people who are temporarily unemployed, temporarily hungry, or otherwise temporarily disadvantaged. These people are accurately characterized as "acutely poor". People who are acutely poor exist in situations that are likely to self-correct quickly; for example, a person who is temporarily unemployed because their company went bankrupt is likely to find another job in a short amount of time. In contrast, the chronically poor are people who live in poverty, and whose situations are likely not to change in the foreseeable future. These persons are likely located in rural areas disconnected from infrastructure and access to goods and services.
Teams might strategically argue that the transiently poor are irrelevant to the round because their situations are likely to improve regardless of globalization. These people fit less closely into the category "poverty" because they are overwhelmingly not poor. "Poverty" is an inaccurate classification of their economic status because their status can be determined over time, rather than by particular moments. An analogy is helpful: if a debater who won the TOC three times has a bad debate in her senior year – and then goes back to win the TOC a fourth time – it would be inaccurate to call her a "bad" debater because of that round. She would more accurately be classified as a good debater who merely had a bad round. In the same way, persons who are only transiently economically disadvantaged are less accurately characterized as "poor" and more accurately characterized as "temporarily disadvantaged".
A smart negative can argue that only the chronically poor – like those in rural areas – are relevant to the round, and can then argue that economic globalization does not reach rural places because they lack access to infrastructure that would deliver the benefits produced by globalization. If the negative wins the framework debate, they essentially win the round by definition.
A second possible poverty type distinction is the distinction between extreme and relative poverty. Relative poverty is what it sounds like: poverty is measured by the relative level of wealth in any given state. Under a measure of relative poverty, every state has persons in poverty: they are the people at the bottom of the economic class. For example, in the United States the relative poverty line is just short of 12,000 dollars per person (i.e. the threshold of a family of two is 23,000). Though that cash income is poverty in the United States, it might be classified as relatively affluent in some developing countries. For this reason, measures of relative poverty are more expansive, and likelier to include persons considered poor in developed countries8.
An alternative to relative poverty as a measure is extreme poverty. Typically, extreme poverty is measured by a universal threshold beyond which persons fall or do not fall. For example, debaters may have encountered statistics that indicate that "X number of people live in less than $2.00 per day". This is an example of an absolute measure of extreme poverty. There are other absolute measures of extreme poverty; some scholars merely shift the line of income per day (i.e. $1.25 per day, or $1.00 per day). Others measure poverty by various quality of life measures; for example, persons chronically at risk of food insecurity might be classified as poor. Still others look to poverty as measured by social mobility and access to status improvement9.
There are advantages and disadvantages to each measure, which is part of the reason poverty remains an unsettled concept. Absolute daily income lines are relatively arbitrary (why $2.00 instead of $1.99?); the social utility of a particular income varies drastically in different locations in terms of purchasing power (one dollar in Costa Rica will purchase far more goods than one dollar in South Florida); the conversation rate is imprecise at best10. Quality of life measures are perhaps the most precise because they capture the essential issue with poverty – subsistence – but they are hard to operationalize (how does one measure "access to food"? What if someone could get food, but only if they walk several days to get it? Do they have "access"? How hard does it need to be to get food before people do not have access?). Social mobility represents a clever innovation in the field's attempt to measure poverty, but is unlikely to meet the topic because it only represents the potential for poverty reduction (i.e. how easy it is to get out of poverty) rather than actual poverty reduction (i.e. the number of people who actually got out of poverty).
It is also important to emphasize that absolutely none of the scholarship that debaters will encounter actually counts the number of people in poverty. Every study uses estimation to varying degrees, because actually walking through countries and manually counting the number of people who could be considered "poor" is both cost prohibitive and conceptually incoherent11. Debaters should be sure to check the method for estimation in their opponents' evidence, because shoddy estimation work may lead to inflated results. For example, if a study finds a ten percent reduction in poverty in an area, and then estimates they have 100,000 people instead of 50,000 people, their study will suggest that 10,000 people were helped instead of 5,000. Debaters should make evidence comparisons in rounds where the debate boils down to conflicting statistics.
Because of the difficulty of measuring an exact number of people, some scholars have abandoned the process entirely. Instead, they use various national indicators of human welfare as proxies12 for poverty. These indicators include state GDP, state GDP per capita, regional development, and a host of other measures13. Each has its own flaws. GDP and GDP per capita are drastically skewed by unequal distributions of wealth14 and data measurement irregularities15; regional development assumes homogeneity in regional distribution and access.
Since every metric has weaknesses, the ability to indict an opponent's metric and defend your own metric might be independently enough to win a round. Champion debaters on this topic will be thoroughly literate in the ways the literature measures and quantifies both poverty and poverty alleviation.
Why You Care
The measure of poverty is a gateway issue16. If a debater wins that the only valid method of measuring poverty is X, and their opponent's case and evidence only discusses poverty according to Y metric, the judge should disregard the opponent's entire argument set.
I cannot overemphasize the following point: if you rely on framework as an argument, construct the round around it. All too often, debaters make two mistakes that are fatal to winning a round on framework. First, debaters underdevelop the argument. I have not seen a debater spend more than ten to twenty seconds on the framework debate during the entire year of judging. Framework arguments require investment; in part, because they are typically complicated enough that it is impossible to execute them well without time and development. At a strategic level, they also require investment to make judges comfortable voting on them. As a judge, it is personally difficult to tell a team "I dropped you based on fifteen seconds of questionable argument"17. A judge is much more likely to feel comfortable voting on an argument if they feel it was a substantial part of the round as opposed to a throwaway at the top of the case. The second fatal mistake is that even when debaters develop framework, they then fail to tie contention level arguments into framework18.
These two fatal mistakes regularly prevent debaters from winning rounds on framework, which may cause some debaters to believe that it is generally impossible to win rounds on framework alone. This belief is wrong. Debaters who hold this belief mistakenly conflate execution errors with the success ceiling for framework arguments generally. Debaters who avoid these two mistakes by developing their framework arguments19 and then typing contention level arguments into the framework will win rounds. When framework is a central and prominent feature of the round – and is explicitly and consistently identified as the criterion by which the judge measures contention level arguments – its effectiveness as an argument skyrockets.
Even if debaters are unwilling to fully bank on framework arguments, they can use them as impact weighing arguments. For example, debaters can suggest that if their opponent's measure of poverty is suspect, their impact is less certain and therefore less probable. If the affirmative's measure of poverty is uncontested while the negative's measure of poverty is questionable at best, the judge should assign proportionately less weight to the negative evidence because of the doubt cast on it by the methodology arguments. Reserving this strategic possibility can help debaters make time allocation choices; if debaters want to extend a framework argument as an impact weighing mechanism (instead of a complete bar to evaluation), they need not spend nearly as much time developing it or explaining its procedural impact on the round.
Conclusion
Champion debaters will either make framework arguments effectively, or not make them at all. To deploy an effective framework teams must explain both its justification and its impact on the round, including the relationship between their contentions and the framework. Misconceptions about framework stemming from poor execution have led to stereotypes about its ability to succeed as a ballot winner. These misconceptions are belied by experience in every other debate event in the history of the NSDA. What heavily distinguishes framework in other events (though perhaps to a lesser degree in LD) is the level of development it receives from debaters. Debaters who draw insight from this lesson have a crucial strategic advantage over inflexible opponents that underestimate the impact of an effective debate framework.
Works Cited & Footnotes
[1] Many definitions of poverty are self-referential or circular; for example, Google's typically reliable dictionary defines "poverty" as "being extremely poor". It offers "indigence" as a synonym for poverty…but then defines indigence as "a state of extreme poverty". The difficulty in providing workable definitions is not coincidental, but instead deals with the complexity of establishing standards for "poverty".
[2] The process of turning concepts into variables is called "operationalization". "Operationalization" is a term of art that will queue up literature on quantitative methods; when combined with topical terms (e.g. "poverty operationalization"), it queues up topic specific literature on defining poverty.
[3] Two excellent papers (both in terms of their accessibility and their ability to be carded) on operationalizing poverty are available here: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/inequality/Seminar/Papers/Bane06.pdf for some depth into the academic discussion and potential reasons to prefer one metric to others; and http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/qmss/measurement/conceptualization.html for a series of possible metrics explored in an extremely accessible way.
[4] Pitbull – "Mr. Worldwide" – actually has an album called globalization. Really. #operationalize #dale http://www.billboard.com/artist/1490081/pitbull/chart
[5] Debaters should explicitly highlight that the issue is a clash of competing interpretations of the topic. Topicality debates require the most precision and clarity because they deal with the procedural issue of topical interpretation rather than the substantive issues underlying the resolution.
[6] It is clearly impractical to force debaters to discuss every single one of the roughly 190 countries in the world. It is similarly impractical to ask debaters to discuss each region of the world – in part because it is not clear how many "regions" there are globally, it is not clear what the lines between those regions are, and in part because the number of regions to discuss is impossibly large using any of the commonly accepted metrics for global division.
[7] Throughout this article, the terms "metric", "measure", and "framework" are used interchangeably and in the sense commonly understood in the literature on debate theory.
[8] It may be easy to dismiss relative poverty in the United States as unimportant when measured against poverty in developing countries. This response is profoundly misguided both an economic and moral sense. Economically, the larger income rate is balanced by lower purchasing power (for example, a person may have more money to buy food, but food costs more). Ethically, the part we find objectionable about poverty is the personal destitution caused by an inability to subsist. In the US, 1 in 100,000 people die of starvation every year – that is more people than the number killed in the attack on September 11, 2001. It is a misguided and insidious myth to suggest the poor in the United States live a cushy life (even when measured relative to developing nations). Death from starvation is no less important because it occurs in the United States; the high wealth ceiling does little to change the low wealth floor. I think this argument is sufficient to mount a strong defense of relative measures of poverty: people who starve in Somalia do not die "harder" than people who die in the US. A death from poverty is a death from poverty, regardless of geographic location.
[9] Some scholars further refine this measure to focus on social mobility for uniquely vulnerable populations, such as women and disabled people. Though effective at highlighting the uniquely damaging effects that poverty has on such populations, this subset of scholarship is unlikely to fully answer the resolutional question.
[10] Though scholars regularly peg the subsistence rate in terms of dollars (e.g. one dollar per day), the overwhelming majority of the world's poor uses a currency other than dollars to conduct their daily activities. As currency conversion rates between dollars and local currencies change, the amount of actual money required to meet or surpass the threshold shifts. Thus, even a "dollar per day" standard shifts depending on whether a dollar is worth more or less of a given currency.
[11] Even if the funds for a manual count could be acquired, any such project would take so long to complete that the numbers would change during the counting. People are constantly being born and dying; such a project would impossibly require constant recounting to fully encompass the total number of people at any given moment.
[12] A proxy is a variable that stands in for a less measurable secondary variable. A common example is using GDP per capita as a proxy for quality of life; people using that proxy would suggest that a higher GDP per capita indicates a higher quality of life. As should be obvious, proxies vary with the strength of their predictive ability – not all proxies perfectly represent the variables they are selected to match. Using the same example, the United States has a relatively high GDP per capita, but still has people who starve to death. The high GDP per capita does not perfectly predict the experience of every individual; and the degree of imperfection varies by variable and concept.
[13] For more examples, see: http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/412711-National-Indicators-and-Social-Wealth.pdf
[14] For example, in a country with two people – where one makes one million dollars per year and the second makes zero dollars per year – the GDP per capita is $500,000.
[15] GDP per capita still requires a rough approximation of the number of people in a country – thus the same objections that apply to direct estimations of poverty also apply to this measure. This makes GDP per capita affirmatives particularly susceptible to income inequality arguments by the negative.
[16] This is a term from policy debate that refers to an issue that debaters must deal with before reaching the substance of the case, much like a person must get through the "gateway" to a house before actually entering the house. If the gateway bars a person – or the gateway issue bars evaluation – then further consideration is unnecessary.
[17] This reality deals less with the actual content of the debate and instead recognizes the pressure on judges to make good decisions. Judges are people who face social requirements and scrutiny, much like debaters in the community. Smart debaters will recognize that judges are far from neutral blank slates, and instead play to the social dynamics underpinning judge decision-making calculus to tip rounds in their favor.
[18] For example, I have heard teams that say "prioritize long term impacts" but never explain how their contentions are "long term impacts", how their opponent's contention(s) are not "long term impacts", and how the interactions between the arguments relate to "long term impacts".
[19] A crucial part of developing a framework argument is explaining its procedural impact in the round. A simple, extremely generic example is: "judge, if we win the framework argument, you can only evaluate [insert specific framework]. If they don't tie their arguments to this framework, they can't win the round". The amount of explanation involved in articulating the procedural impact of framework is inversely proportional to the amount of experience a judge has with a debate. In other words, a lay judge needs a lot of explanation of how framework affects the round, and a debater who has former experience with policy debate needs nearly none.
