When Framing Works

"A genuine debate about Social Security is almost impossible to have given the systematically misleading way economists and journalists insist on using language," sounds like a typical liberal's complaint about the sad state of things. In fact, it's frustrated privatization advocate Will Wilkinson. Liberals have taken up the notion that "framing" is important over the past couple of years in a manner that suggests our side discovered it for the first time in 2003. But as I coincidentally happened to be discussing with a friend last night, many of liberalism's most successful framing initiatives are so successful that liberals hardly even notice that they exist. This is, needless to say, exactly how good frames work.

Kevin Drum did a good post on a related theme using as his example the success of the "civil rights" frame. It's worth noting that this frame encompasses not merely the idea that the government shouldn't discriminate against people on the basis of race, which is a very clear and intuitive consequence of widely shared values, but also the idea that the government should prohibit private companies from doing so, which isn't nearly so clear. But Will was talking about what is, perhaps, the greatest framing success of them all -- over the meaning of the term "cut." The word, as applied to a government program over a period of years, is ambiguous between a variety of possible meanings. Some viable contenders include:

• Fewer nominal dollars are spent in Year X than were spent in Year X-n.
• Fewer real dollars are spent in Year X than were spent in Year X-n.
• Fewer real dollars are spent per capita in Year X than were spent in Year X-n.
• A smaller proportion of GDP is spent in Year X than was spent in Year X-n.
• Spending in Year X is lower than spending in Year X would be if current law as of Year X-n were extended until Year X.

Unlike Brooke I'm not going to pretend to believe that using language in a manner that uniquely comports with my political preference happens to be the only way to make language "comport with reality." One could offer a long Quinean or even Rortian story about this. Or not. I prefer not.

The upshot, however, is that there are real consequences to which uses of language -- which is to say, which frames -- prevail. The fact that liberals have established the principle that a change in law that would make Social Security benefits in Year X lower than what the existing law says Social Security benefits in Year X will be constitues a "cut in Social Security benefits" is an important success. If conservatives managed to entrench the principle that a program has not been "cut" unless nominal expenditures are cut, then it would become much easier to shrink the size of government. This rightwing-friendly framing of cuts is by no means wholly at odds with other uses of the word cut. My salary doesn't come with an automatic COLA adjustment. But if my nominal salary stays constant over a twelve month period we don't say I "got a pay cut." If I get a raise tomorrow that's actually so small as to be inadequate to offset the rise in the CPI (or perhaps more to the point, inadequate to offset the recent price increase at the coffee shop downstaird from our office) I'll still call it a "raise."

We don't normally talk about federal programs this way. And good for us -- I'm not complaining! But it serves liberals well to remember that the frame game is one that we do, in fact, know how to play.