Since I posted that comment, I’ve mentioned the article to a number of people, some of whom remember it when it came out, and the common reaction (among my rather lefty set) is that the problem it highlights is the conservative notion that “you deserve what you get.” Maybe that’s true, and I was misreading the article as more neutrally directed at everyone, including those (like me and my friends) who tend to eschew such a sensibility. What struck me about the article was that even for people who maximally valued compassion, many conventional systems were in fact less compassionate than they appeared–not just ethical optics, but really deep conceptual optics.

That’s what many, many Americans need to get over — the notion that if you don’t have health care, it’s either because you didn’t want it or couldn’t earn it, and that either way, you deserve what you get.

The numbers, for Gladwell, are a way to outflank this ethos. But it’s too hard. That’s why the politics of an apartment for Murray don’t work — even if the utilitarian calculus works, the ethical optics fail.

I do think part of the problem with Douthat’s proposal is that it’s not a proposal, it’s rhetoric; in his rhetorical deployment of seeming synonyms (everyday, routine) we get lost in the difference between ordinary and frequent. The mud created by willful confusing the time/frequency domain and the intensity/rarity/dangerousness domain ruins the piece.

The Gladwell article seems very interesting, but in a slightly different vein. It speaks of a conceptual confusion that’s less willfull. Your prospective in-law’s perspective seemed to have a specific world view valuing self-sufficiency and toughness, and blind to the physicality of chronic illness or addiction. That seems very much a matter of culture, philosophy, and social mores to me. Other cultural viewpoints have different values, different blind spots. Gladwell points out more fundamental, quantitative cognitive deficiencies—ways we humans are all bad at grasping large scale phenomna. I’m not sure there’s any society that has successfully incorporated multi-scale numeric thinking into all layers of its aesthetics and philosophies. And I say that as someone in a religious tradition that is slightly obsessed orders of magnitude.