Let's go ahead and do this example. Label the following statements as positive statements with p or normative statements with n. Alright. The first one. The government should provide health care to all of its citizens. Okay. So a keyword here that you should be looking for when we're doing positive and normative statements, it's right here. Should. This is telling us that it's an opinionated statement. It's telling us how the world should be, not how it actually is. So, when you see should, automatically think normative statement.
Let's go on to the next one. Minimum wage laws are a bad idea because they cause unemployment. So, this isn't really telling us anything about how the world is, right? It's telling us more about how it should be. It's telling us that if there are minimum wage laws, we should get rid of them because they're a bad idea. This is another one of our key normative statement keywords here; when you see 'good idea' or 'bad idea' something like that, that's a cue, and it should signal you that it's a normative statement. Let's try the next one.
Rising gas prices cause people to buy less gas. This statement is not really instilling any kind of opinion here, right? We don't see any of our keywords, and what we see is it's making a statement about how the world is. In this world, when gas prices go up, people buy less gas. How it's phrased, regardless of it being true or false, the way it's phrased is in the form of how the world is. It's a positive statement. And remember, another key with positive statements is something that you could test. So, we could test what happens when gas prices rise. Do people actually buy less gas? We could conduct a test in the market with that.
How about the next one? Minimum wage laws cause unemployment. Again, it's telling us something about how the world is, and it's something that we can test. Again, we're talking about a positive statement here, right? We don't see any of our keywords, so it's pretty easy to know that it's a positive statement.
How about the last one? The government ought to increase the minimum wage. Here we see one of our keywords, ought to. And I'm going to say 99% of the time when you see a normative statement, it's going to use should. When you see that word, automatically think normative, but it's nice to have these other backups because the next most common ones say things like 'ought to do it this way' or "this is a bad idea." These are normative statements. So, keep your eyes open for those words, and it'll make this a lot easier.