The anecdote has its place. It is sometimes the only way to illustrate stark, numbing statistics to a reader. The problem with the anecdote, however, is when it takes over from hard data and honest analysis. In such cases, the anecdote becomes a pernicious a tool for lazy, deceptive, and distorting argument, on a par with any skewed statistic or appeal to fear.  

Perhaps the most prevalent use of the anecdote in the public debate—at the expense of any sort of hard facts—is the nasty and acrimonious affirmative action debate. In light of the U.S. Supreme Court deciding to revisit the issue, it is worth noting that the debate has been characterised as a dichotomy between “hard-working” white kids not getting into top universities because “less deserving” minorities were favoured by admission policy. Looking at the issue through this lens favours the anecdote over the reality. It allows us to imagine this “victimized” kid instead of evaluating the bigger picture and evaluating the policy on its stated goals: is it correcting social inequities in education? If not, how can it be improved? Is this a worthy goal? Is the problem it is supposed to correct real? These are the questions that need to be asked of affirmative action, not discussing the policy in terms of individual students. 

Another realm in which the anecdote can wreak havoc on reasonable policy is government spending. Spending pools like science or arts grants can easily be targeted. For example, an initiative spearheaded by the House Republicans after their election in 2010, fittingly called “YouCut,” sought to give voters the tools to dig through the morass of science projects to find grants deemed “wasteful”—namely projects in the social sciences, as part of an attempt to delegitimize the larger science funding scheme.

The problem is that by pinpointing a $750,000 grant being used to study a subject one does not immediately find useful does not imply that the entire grant system, or even the allocation of grants, is wasteful. Even worse, politicians often use such arguments about these grants to argue that cutting these programs will balance the budget. A familiar sight in these sort of crusades is an upstart congressman holding a press conference backed by an easel board with the titles of such projects (“$5,000 to study the mating habits of Chesapeake Bay Crabs”) to show a supposed need for toughness on government spending. 

Staying on the subject of government spending, perhaps the most infamous example of the anecdote taking over the policy discussion is the “welfare queen.” Popularized by Ronald Reagan in the late seventies, the story spoke of a woman who had “80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards … [and] income alone is over $150,000.” In the intervening decades since, there has been much handwringing among both academics and civil rights advocates over whether this term played into white racial resentment of the poor (yes, in my view), but this story—apocryphal, as it turned out, demonstrates the problem with anecdotes. 

Whether or not this supposed “welfare queen” existed doesn’t actually have any bearing on how much welfare one should benefit from, or how long one can stay on the system. Maybe the system did need reform. Maybe there should have been an even bigger benefit. What made the “welfare queen” story so unconscionable, aside from the obvious race baiting, was the fact that it changed the terms of debate from whether it is economically efficient to whether there are people abusing the system. If there are people “abusing” the welfare system, this does not actually matter as long as the net economic effect is a positive one.