Michael Moore's new film Capitalism: A Love Story premiered last night. I'm going to see it tonight, and in preparation, I am thinking about Capitalism. This led me to a bigger concept and something that I learned in college. I would like to examine the idea of a Mental Model and how it relates to the very real disconnect between progressives and conservatives.
I am lucky. Very, very lucky. I grew up poor, the kind of poor where sometimes the question wasn't "what's for dinner" but "will there be a dinner." It wasn't because my family was lazy, we were just unlucky. My father worked for Lyden Oil, they owned all the Amoco Gas Stations in Northeast Ohio, where I grew up. When I was 6, he was diagnosed with Kidney Cancer. At the time he was a Regional Manager with a company car, good health benefits, and a nice salary. The cancer changed all that. My father was a strong man, he had a kidney removed, my mom has told me that they told him they would have to remove his wedding ring, he refused, and they covered it in surgical gauze and medical tape so he could keep it on. He beat the cancer, and survived for a long time after that.
Story doesn't sound too bad so far, but there is a part I skipped over. Lyden Oil realized that the cancer treatments and surgery would be quite expensive and that his medical insurance would be even more expensive afterwards. They couldn't fire him, but they could demote him to a Store Manager, and revoke his medical benefits, which is what they did. My father lived for a while after that until 2 successive heart attacks took him away from me, I was heartbroken.
But you see, I was lucky, most of our family's debt, and with Cancer, 2 Heart Attacks, and 4 children, you'll have your fair share, was in his name only. His death hit the financial reset button for our family, we had Social Security survivor benefits, but my mom still works 2 jobs to keep food on the table for my younger brothers, and to keep the lights on.
I was also incredibly lucky because I was born gifted. I excelled in mathematics and science, and I was given a full scholarship to the college I attended, Bowling Green State University. I loved every minute of it, in pursuing my general science minor and mathematics requirements for my computer science degree, I feel in love with numbers, and double majored in theoretical mathematics. It was all made possible because of that scholarship.
In studying to become a Computer Scientist one of the courses we had to take was called Usability Engineering. Its the science of making software usable. One of the ways we go about this is to try and figure out the user's Mental Model.
Mental Models are great things to build up, and we build them about everything. We can't see the inner workings of most of the devices we use, but we try to understand the cause and effect, we intuitively sift through the patterns of our interactions and at the end we've built a Mental Model. When it works its great, but when our Mental Model is convincing and wrong, it can lead us down terrible blind alleys.
A great example of a broken Mental Model is the early Earth Centric Universe. Looking up at the night sky or watching the sun lazily drift across the sky, without any deeper understanding of the universe it is easy to see why the Earth Centric Mental Model would take root. When a Mental Model takes root, it can be very difficult and uncomfortable to displace it. But as time went on, there were things that the mental model couldn't explain, stars moved in weird ways, planets had to be dancing in great spirals, the Model became convoluted and could no longer help us explain the motion of heavenly bodies. As we advanced our Mental Model was displaced with a better one, built out of a greater understanding.
The Mental Model of the Right is deeply flawed, to the point of being broken. It is a convincing Mental Model, and what's doubly seductive is that it is one that we WANT to believe. It goes a little something like this: Success is a function of hard work.
In mathematical terms, the Model of the Right, looks like this success(work). We like this idea, because hard work goes in, and success comes out. The more work you put in, the more success comes out, easy as that. It plays into the whole concept of the American Dream, we see it in our history, we believe it with every red, white, and blue blood cell.
It is a seductive Mental Model, so elegant, so sleek, but as with the Earth Centric Universe, cracks start to form.
There is the CEO, who is very successful.
The overall CEO-to-worker pay gap is exceptionally high; S&P 500 CEOs in 2008 earned 319 times more than the average worker.
So if our Mental Model holds up, success(work), this must mean that the CEO works 319 times harder than the average working man. But how can this be so. The coal miner works harder, but that's physical labor, so maybe it doesn't count. The trucker works longer, but that's just endurance. The scientist works harder, but that's just thinking. The brain surgeon works harder, but that's just stress and skill. In many ways all of these people work much harder than the CEO does, the Mental Model starts to show its weakness.
Does a lawyer work "harder" than a single mom working 2-jobs? Does the garbage man have it "easier" than the ad-exec? Is working at McDonald's such a wonderful vacation that they make so little?
This is the fundamental flaw of the Right's Mental Model, and it is a very large part of the Capitalist system. success(work) isn't true. Your success is not a function solely of hard work. The Mental Model that would be more accurate looks something like this:
success(work / 100, luck * 100, opportunity ^ 3, position ^ 100,...) or in English
Success is a function of your hard work, luck, opportunity, your position in life, and a million external forces you can't control.
This is the key difference, this is the point that needs to be driven home, that people who work hard can fail, and people that are lazy can succeed. That there are enumerable external forces that have a lot to do with our success, and that our success shouldn't be used as a metric for our worth. That we are all worthy, worthy of healthcare, worthy of a good job, worthy of safety and security.
This Mental Model is taken as truth now, it will be hard to uproot, but it must be done. It wasn't easy for people to move the Earth from the center of the Universe, they replaced it with the sun and then the galaxy and finally we know the truth, we are a tiny speck orbiting an average star, in the outer arm of an average galaxy, no where near the center of anything. Many people had to be dragged kicking and screaming to this conclusion.
We must do the same with this myth of hard work. It shouldn't be hard, we all know people who worked hard, played by the rules, and are getting screwed. We need to dispel the myth that hard work in, success out. It will bring us much closer to a society where we take care of one another, not because of our net value, but because of our intrinsic value as people.