The difference between positive and normative statements is
something that every person should be able to understand. Generally, we already
intuitively know the difference between a fact and an opinion but sometimes the
difference can be a little nuanced so it is good to apply technical terms to
the different types of statements which is why it is useful to know how to recognize the
difference between normative and positive statements. First, normative
statements are generally opinion or belief based... you may think of a
normative statement as something that someone thinks should be normal or
standard across society. Alternatively, a positive statement is a statement of
"what is" and is generally a statement that can be determined to
either be true or false. A trick to remember that a positive statement is testable
is to think of a blood test for a disease, it generally either comes back
positive or negative.
The rest of this post will go over several statements to practice
how to recognize the differences between these example normative and positive
statements in the real world.
1. August is the hottest month of the year.
This is a positive statement because it can be tested, we
can find available data on temperatures throughout the different months of the
year and then compare the average highs or means to see which is really the
hottest month. A normative statement would be more opinion based and probably
say something similar to "I think August is the hottest month" or
"August is so hot I think I am going to die".
2. The most popular animal in the world is a rabbit.
This is a normative statement because it is an opinion or
belief that cannot be tested. Unfortunately, there is no standard way to
measure popularity. However, we could make this into a positive statement by
saying that rabbits are the most common pet in Europe, or that rabbits
represent the most purchased picture from ebay.
3. A Universal basic income is required for a society
to be just.
This is a normative statement because it cannot be tested
and is a belief. We don't know what metric should be used to figure out what is
just or not, but we could test a similar statement that measured average GDP
per capita or something similar (eg. countries with a universal basic income
tend to have higher GDPs per capita than those without).
4. Food is a basic human right.
 |
| Is food a human right? |
Again, this is a normative statement. It is something that
people believe should be rather than a statement of something that is, however
we could slightly change the wording to make it a positive statement.
5. France treats food as a basic human right.
This is a positive statement because we can easily look up
how France regards human rights and food to see whether this is in fact true or
not.
6. It is raining.
This is a positive statement and not a normative statement
because it is testable and is not an opinion, we can see whether or not it is
raining and generally this fact is not open for debate. However...
7. It is raining too much.
This is a normative statement because we don't really know
what too much is. It is an opinion or belief that cannot be tested with any
sort of accuracy. We just have to do our best to understand that person making
the statement as to whether or not there is in fact too much rain.
8. The rich should pay their fair share of taxes.
This is a normative statement because it is an opinion.
9. Tax cuts for the rich tend to trickle down and help
poor people.
This is a tricky one but is in fact a positive statement
because we can test it. However, most empirical tests of this statement have
found it to be false or somewhat true at best. The reason is that the world
doesn't occur in a vacuum and it is hard to isolate exactly why poor people end
up better off or not.
10. Minimum wage hurts job prospects for the unskilled
and youth.
This is a positive statement, we can test it with data to
see whether it is true or not.
You can see from the previous examples that the main
difference between positive and normative statements is whether o not the
statement is an opinion or a statement of what is. If the statement is a
hypothesis that can be tested it will be a positive statement but if it is an
opinion or belief that can't be legitimately tested then it will be normative.
The easiest way for me to remember the difference is that
normative statements stress what should be normal while positive statements can
be tested to figure out whether they are true (positive) or false (negative).
