The question's not why it's bad, but why it's getting worse

Confusing correlation with causality (or insisting that the former implies the latter) is ubiquitous in public debate on pretty much any given topic. Sometimes this particular error in reasoning seems to be brought about by another type of fundamental mistake, lurking at a deeper level. I'm talking about confusing stock with flow, level with change.

Two examples.

First: we often hear that the recent growth in obesity among low-income Americans is caused by the fact that rich people have better (meaning healthier) food options than poor people. It is definitely true that the poor have worse food options than the rich do. As an explanation, it is also completely irrelevant. What we're trying to explain is the change in obesity among the poor, not the difference in levels of obesity between the rich and the poor. In other words, the question is not why poor people are more likely to be obese than rich people, but why poor people today are much more likely to be obese than poor people were in, say, the 1930s. In order for the availability of healthy food to be the driving force behind that change, it would have to be the case that the contemporary poor eat worse than their counterparts from the past did. And that is patently untrue: as unhealthy as poor people's food options are today, they are much healthier than they were fifty years ago. So no, this can't be it.

Second: homelessness. How often do we hear it's mostly caused by drug addiction and/or mental health problems? And yet, recently, homelessness has been growing while rates of mental health problems have been stagnant, and numbers of individuals with severe addiction problems declining. So again: no, this is definitely not it.

Spontaneous order and analogies

Mathematician John Allen Paulos (widely known as the author of "Innumeracy"), has some time ago written a column dealing with an interesting aspect of the intelligent design movement. Paulos notes that the majority of intelligent design proponents are also proponents of the free market as the most efficient mechanism of resource allocation. This, Paulos says, is logically inconsistent. On the one hand, you claim that the incredible complexity of modern free market economy did not require any planning in order to come about; that the fact that in almost any neighborhood you can find your favorite candy bar, or your favorite style and size of shoes, etc., does not mean there's some superior intelligence overseeing the economy and designing its workings so that everyone's shoe and candy needs are met. On the other, you claim it's impossible that the incredible complexity of life on earth could have come about without there being an intelligence overseeing the inner workings of living organisms and the interplay between species, in order to make sure that life proliferates and improves.

Or, simply put: apparently one part of your brain believes that spontaneous order is possible while the other believes it's not.

This is a very good point, especially because, in their usual form, intelligent design arguments against evolution aren't really arguments against random mutation/natural selection as an implausible specific instance of spontaneous order, but rather are statements attacking the very idea of spontaneous order being possible at all, under any circumstances. But if that's the case, it shouldn't be possible in market-like situations either; hence the contradiction.

To me, this contradiction is just one more piece of evidence that ideological alliances are by and large a matter of historical accident. It just so happened that, in the U.S., some pro free-marketers and some anti-evolutionists have at some point in time been united by a common cause (read: common enemy). The rest is just our rationalizing minds at work, telling us that each part of our worldview follows from some set of first principles, regardless of what that particular worldview might be.

Here's why I think this is such an interesting example. In my native Poland, the correlation pointed out by Paulos doesn't exist. The majority of Polish anti-evolutionists are also vocally anti free market. Why would that be? Unless you have a story that explains why an average American anti-evolutionist is more hypocritical than a Polish one, or why a Polish anti-evolutionist cannot grasp the concept of spontaneous order even with a half of his brain, you have to conclude that this particular alignment is mainly due to some accidents of history.

And that's what most ideologies are: lengthy chains of stunning non sequiturs, produced by changing political alliances.