Beware the Tradeoff Trap
In the post below, Brian S. Krueger and others reflect on their co-authored article, “Assessing Dimensions of the Security-Liberty Trade-off in the United States,” which appeared in a recent issue of Surveillance & Society.
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Some of the loudest voices in the United States are again discussing policy tradeoffs. One big problem with tradeoff frameworks is that they are a rhetorical framing prone to biasing policy debates. This time the tradeoff pits controlling COVID-19 associated deaths against economic vitality and jobs. As President Trump reminds nightly viewers tuned in to his press conference, he does not want the “cure” that involves shuttering businesses to be worse than the disease itself. Perhaps the most famous articulation of this tradeoff comes from Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who declared, “No one reached out to me and said, as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren? And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.” Vanity Fair was just one of many media outlets to reinforce framing the issue as a tradeoff, even as they criticized the message, titling an article, “In Texas Lt. Governor: Old People Should Volunteer to Die to Save the Economy.” Fortunately, there has been pushback against the idea of a clear inverse relationship between a healthy economy and saving lives by social distancing.
As we move forward in our current COVID-19 environment, with new phone apps tracking movement and thus social distancing, we need to be alert to the simplifications and distortions of elites using tradeoff thinking.
In the 2000s, a different policy tradeoff dominated the U.S. national discussion, the supposed tradeoff between privacy and security. With 9–11 still fresh in people’s minds, U.S. elected officials and the domestic media took much longer than today to push-back against this tradeoff framing of new surveillance policies favored by the Bush Administration. Excellent work, most frequently done outside of the U.S. context, has long questioned the veracity of a privacy-security tradeoff, both in terms of its internal logic and as a useful explanation for how most people contemplate surveillance and security. It remains an open question whether the tradeoff framework did structure public thinking about surveillance policies in the U.S., as the U.S. media and security context may have deviated significantly from most other countries. Our recent study in Surveillance & Society considers this possibility and finds that even during the height of the use of this framework by elites during George W. Bush’s presidency, U.S. public opinion overwhelmingly did not view surveillance policy through the lens of a tradeoff. As we move forward in our current COVID-19 environment, with new phone apps tracking movement and thus social distancing, we need to be alert to the simplifications and distortions of elites using tradeoff thinking when tracking and data access policies are debated. We can maintain our privacy and our public health and must insist on both.
