Think Again

PART II
Interpersonal Rethinking
Opening Other People’s Minds

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A
CHAPTER 5
Dances with Foes
How to Win Debates and Influence People
Exhausting someone in argument is not the same as convincing him.
—
TIM
KREIDER
t thirty-one, Harish Natarajan has won three dozen international
debate tournaments. He’s been told it’s a world record. But his
opponent today presents a unique challenge.
Debra Jo Prectet is a prodigy hailing from Haifa, Israel. She’s just eight
years old, and although she made her first foray into public debating only
last summer, she’s been preparing for this moment for years. Debra has
absorbed countless articles to accumulate knowledge, closely studied
speechwriting to hone her clarity, and even practiced her delivery to
incorporate humor. Now she’s ready to challenge the champion himself.
Her parents are hoping she’ll make history.
Harish was a wunderkind too. By the time he was eight, he was
outmaneuvering his own parents in dinner-table debates about the Indian
caste system. He went on to become the European debate champion and a
grand finalist in the world debate championship, and coached the Filipino
national school debate team at the world championship. I was introduced to
Harish by an unusually bright former student who used to compete against
him, and remembers having lost “many (likely all)” of their debates.
Harish and Debra are facing off in San Francisco in February 2019 in
front of a large crowd. They’ve been kept in the dark about the debate topic.

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When they walk onstage, the moderator announces the subject: should
preschools be subsidized by the government?
After just fifteen minutes of preparation, Debra will present her
strongest arguments in favor of subsidies, and Harish will marshal his best
case against them. Their goal is to win the audience over to their side on
preschool subsidies, but their impact on me will be much broader: they’ll
end up changing my view of what it takes to win a debate.
Debra kicks off with a joke, drawing laughter from the crowd by telling
Harish that although he may hold the world record in debate wins, he’s
never debated someone like her. Then she goes on to summarize an
impressive number of studies—citing her sources—about the academic,
social, and professional benefits of preschool programs. For good measure,
she quotes a former prime minister’s argument about preschool being a
smart investment.
Harish acknowledges the facts that Debra presented, but then makes his
case that subsidizing preschools is not the appropriate remedy for the
damage caused by poverty. He suggests that the issue should be evaluated
on two grounds: whether preschool is currently underprovided and
underconsumed, and whether it helps those who are the least fortunate. He
argues that in a world full of trade-offs, subsidizing preschool is not the best
use of taxpayer money.
Going into the debate, 92 percent of the audience has already made up
their minds. I’m one of them: it didn’t take me long to figure out where I
stood on preschool subsidies. In the United States, public education is free
from kindergarten through high school. I’m familiar with evidence that
early access to education in the first few years of children’s lives may be
even more critical to helping them escape poverty than anything they learn
later. I believe education is a fundamental human right, like access to water,
food, shelter, and health care. That puts me on Team Debra. As I watch the
debate, her early arguments strike a chord. Here are some highlights:
Debra: Research clearly shows that a good preschool can help
kids overcome the disadvantages often associated with poverty.
Data for the win! Be still, my beating heart.

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Debra: You will possibly hear my opponent talk today about
different priorities . . . he might say that subsidies are needed, but
not for preschools. I would like to ask you, Mr. Natarajan . . . why
don’t we examine the evidence and the data and decide
accordingly?
If Harish has an Achilles’ heel, my former student has told me, it’s that his
brilliant arguments aren’t always grounded in facts.
Harish: Let me start by examining the main claim . . . that if we
believe preschools are good in principle, surely it is worth giving
money to subsidize those—but I don’t think that is ever enough of
a justification for subsidies.
Debra has clearly done her homework. She didn’t just nail Harish on data—
she anticipated his counterargument.
Debra: The state budget is a big one, and there is room in it to
subsidize preschools and invest in other fields. Therefore, the idea
that there are more important things to spend on is irrelevant,
because the different subsidies are not mutually exclusive.
Way to debunk Harish’s case for trade-offs. Bravo.
Harish: Maybe the state has the budget to do all the good things.
Maybe the state has the budget to provide health care. Maybe it
has the budget to provide welfare payments. Maybe it has the
budget to provide running water as well as preschool. I would love
to live in that world, but I don’t think that is the world we live in. I
think we live in a world where there are real constraints on what
governments can spend money on—and even if those are not real,
those are nonetheless political.

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D’oh! Valid point. Even if a program has the potential to pay for itself, it
takes a lot of political capital to make it happen—capital that could be
invested elsewhere.
Debra: Giving opportunities to the less fortunate should be a
moral obligation of any human being, and it is a key role for the
state. To be clear, we should find the funding for preschools and
not rely on luck or market forces. This issue is too important to not
have a safety net.
Yes! This is more than a political or an economic question. It’s a moral
question.
Harish: I want to start by noting what [we] agree on. We agree
that poverty is terrible. It is terrible when individuals do not have
running water. It is terrible when . . . they are struggling to feed
their family. It is terrible when they cannot get health care. . . .
That is all terrible, and those are all things we need to address, and
none of those are addressed just because you are going to
subsidize preschool. Why is that the case?
Hmm. Can Debra argue otherwise?
Debra: Universal full-day preschool creates significant economic
savings in health care as well as decreased crime, welfare
dependence, and child abuse.