SETUMO MOHAPI | An idea is not evidence - TimesLIVE

What is the difference between the madman at the corner, the dreamy professor in the basement, the visiting associate professor with dodgy data, the tireless politician carrying a bagful of hampers and half-truths, the friendly face hitherto a heartless hater, and the ringleader of the revolution who rigged the bridge, when each pronounces on what will fix our ills without the bother of the data?

At the moment the idea is conceived — before the error, seduction or deception that may follow — perhaps very little.

Each has an idea. Each can explain what has gone wrong. Each can propose a remedy. Each can appeal to something capable of moving people before the evidence has had its turn: hope, grievance, fear, loyalty, history, compassion, identity, anger, belonging or love itself.

Some may have studied the problem for decades. Others may rely on ideology, intuition, experience, grievance or instinct. Some may be sincere. Others may be opportunistic. None of these characteristics, by itself, determines whether the idea is right.

An idea can be beautifully expressed and wrong. It can be advanced by a decent person and wrong. It can arise from legitimate historical grievance and still contain a faulty diagnosis. It can be endorsed by a professor or a minister, a party or a parliament, a majority or a minority, rich industrialists or struggling workers, and still rest on weak reasoning. It can even be motivated by genuine love for the people it seeks to help and still harm them.

The danger begins whenever affection, moral purpose, authority, identity or political legitimacy is allowed to perform work that belongs to evidence.

While love, compassion, solidarity and justice are powerful reasons to care about a problem, they do not establish that the diagnosis is correct or that the proposed remedy will work.

It’s okay to love the moral appeal of the message and the messenger. But we need to love the evidence-based causality of the message more.

A belief created and nurtured in the privacy of a world where one is accountable only to oneself may well survive on intuition. However, an idea that asks society to legislate, spend, regulate, tax, borrow, redistribute, prohibit, subsidise or reorganise institutions acquires a different burden, because others must live with its consequences, far from the comforts of its original proponent. It is therefore not unreasonable to demand that the proponents must carry the obligation to justify it.

Does the problem exist in the form claimed? Does the remedy bear a credible relationship to the desired outcome? Can it work under actual legal, economic, technical and political conditions? Can we afford it? Can the responsible institutions implement it? What could go wrong? Who carries the loss? And how will we know whether it worked?

Winning an election does not answer any of these questions. An election determines who is authorised to govern. It does not turn assumptions into facts. A parliamentary majority can authorise a programme without proving the theory behind it. Academic expertise can reduce ignorance without eliminating error. Institutional position can confer authority without establishing soundness. Popularity can establish support without establishing feasibility.

Authority and evidential validity have different sources. Consider a municipality struggling to collect revenue. One explanation is simple: residents refuse to pay. Accept that diagnosis, and stronger enforcement follows naturally.

But suppose the evidence reveals inaccurate meters, incorrect customer information, dysfunctional billing, incomplete indigent registers, historical account errors and unreliable service delivery. Non-payment may still matter, but enforcement alone cannot repair the system.

A policy can be competently implemented and still fail because it was competently solving the wrong problem.

The same mistake recurs across public life. Define unemployment out of context and the wrong causes receive attention. Misdiagnose why firms are not investing and incentives are directed at problems businesses never had. Misunderstand educational failure and the intervention may address an output while leaving the outcome untouched.

Public policy too easily mistakes doing something for changing something. Training 10,000 people is an output. Ten thousand additional people earning sustainable incomes is an outcome. Building an industrial precinct is an output. Viable businesses, occupied premises, investment and jobs are outcomes. Installing smart meters is an output. Reducing the losses they were intended to address is an outcome.

The distance between activity and effect is where causal reasoning belongs, followed by cost and capability. A facility funded by a grant may be cheap to build and expensive to own. If recurring revenue cannot pay for staff, electricity, security, maintenance and replacement, the grant has created both an asset and a future budget problem.

A mandate does not create capacity either.

Policies are implemented by real institutions with actual people, systems, budgets, procurement processes and limitations. If the machinery required to deliver the promised result does not exist, a policy can remain an aspiration long after it has acquired the vocabulary of execution.

And every serious public proposition must retain the possibility of being wrong. What is supposed to improve? By how much? By when? At what cost? Who is responsible? What assumptions must remain true? What evidence would show that the intervention is failing? At what point would we change course?

A political system loses the ability to learn when authoritative ideas are protected from failure. Success then confirms the policy. Failure proves that too little money was spent. Resistance proves that hostile interests interfered. Delay proves that institutions are weak. Poor outcomes prove that implementation must go further.

Any of these explanations may sometimes be correct. The danger appears when the original idea itself disappears from the list of things that might be wrong. Then the proposition can neither lose the argument before implementation nor be disproved by failure afterwards.

Society learns about bad ideas through the most expensive method available: living with their consequences. Government cannot wait for perfect knowledge. Decisions must be taken under uncertainty. Evidence may be incomplete. Crises may require speed. Politics also involves values and priorities that data cannot settle.

The standard, therefore, is proportional justification. The greater the authority an idea seeks, and the greater the consequences of getting it wrong, the greater the burden of evidence it must carry.

A speculative idea can remain speculative. A pilot needs a plausible theory and measurable results. A programme committing billions of rands demands stronger evidence on demand, cost, capability and likely effects. A proposal that restricts rights, creates major fiscal liabilities or reorganises important institutions carries a heavier burden still.

That leaves us free to think, argue, imagine and experiment while imposing discipline at the point where ideas acquire power over other people. And election season is precisely when that discipline becomes hardest to maintain.

Promises become abundant. Diagnoses become simpler. Villains become clearer. Remedies become cheaper. Certainty becomes louder. Affection for “the people” suddenly becomes universal.

The data, unfortunately, remain stubborn.