By Jim Harper

What professional of a certain age hasn’t experienced an
uncomfortable conversational moment when asking someone, “Where do you work?” and
hearing the response, “Oh, I’m a homemaker,” as if that is something different
from work. It’s an uncomfortable truth that our semantics treat “work” in that
context as something done outside the home for pay, even though we all know
that the work done to maintain the home and family is just as important and
valuable.

Abstractions provide tremendous benefits. The ability to
think and communicate using them is what makes us human. Our vast economic and
social systems rely on abstractions of all kinds: words, math, maps, signage,
and so on. Our dear friend, the internet, is a product of multiple protocols
that process and communicate abstractions to be re-rendered as human-readable
abstractions for our consumption. So much of this is good, but it’s important
to be aware of how powerful abstractions are in their ability to channel our
thinking or lead us astray.

Abstractions structure our world in all kinds of ways. Yes, the word “work” somehow girds the social presumption that paid work is more important than other kinds. I’ve highlighted before that there is differential access to information about politics and public policy. Campaign finance data is rendered and published in abstract form that is easy to process, while government spending data generally is not. Is “who we elect” really more important than what they do?

As a student of privacy, I’ve taken note of a slight but
important warp that the legal reporting services inject into the law as they
abstract it for their customers. As part of their valuable services, they
provide “headnotes,” which summarize and categorize points of law coming up in
court cases. Their characterizations tell lawyers how to think.

In a recent case, the Connecticut Supreme Court dealt with an action brought by the state to deprive a mother of her parental rights. She had sought multiple delays in that civil action, hoping to testify once the separate criminal action against her had concluded. That way she could make the best case for keeping her children without risking making incriminating statements that could be used in her criminal case. The court decided that the civil action did not need to wait for the criminal one. (Trigger warning: she is not a good homemaker.)

In its decision, the Connecticut Supreme Court did not use
the word “privacy” even once. But the headnotes—these labels given to case
essentials—twice characterize points of law as having to do with “privacy.” The
court said there was a “fundamental liberty interest of natural parents in the
care, custody, and management of their child.” The reporting service called
that “privacy.” The court wrote about “the right to marry, establish a home and
bring up children” and the importance of “family integrity.” The headnote
service called that “privacy.”

There is nothing sinister or purposeful here, just as there is nothing sinister when people ask others where they work. But the legal headnote services may be a drag on the law when they reinforce the notion that family autonomy and decision-making are “privacy” issues. Over 60-some years, that notion has not performed well to create lasting, settled legal precedents.

Where else might the abstraction diverge from the reality or
cabin our thinking? It’s a subtle and subterranean power.

I worry that the US Code itself may have fallen victim to these same dynamics. When Congress passes legislation, the House of Representatives’ Office of the Law Revision Counsel consolidates and codifies it by subject matter. What influence has it had to place certain provisions in one title of the US Code when they might have gone in another? What influence has it had for agency-specific procedures to sit in the codebooks with the organic laws that created the agencies rather than going into a compendium of procedures?

The Code was a necessary improvisation given the many, many,
many, often huge bills Congress passes. And in case it needs emphasizing, there
is no sign anywhere that anyone has ever tried to influence the course of
federal law through the editorial choices inherent in codification. But over
time the effects of these choices may be like the movement of tectonic plates,
which can be big.

Abstraction has important and subtle power. We should be on
the lookout for where it changes our reality.

The post The Subtle Power of Abstraction in Public Policy appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.