Jeremy

I have heard three mental models being identified during this forum .  Business is free and unencumbered.  Consumers are personally and rationally responsible for the choices they make. I think there is a third model which is that government can’t solve anything.  Don’t turn to the government for help, because all they do is encumber businesses and make everything more expensive and bureaucratic. The DMV is used as the key example–all of us have sat there for two or three hours waiting to get our license. It is much better to do it online and have it sent to you through the mail. But if you have to go to the DMV, the poor service is used as an example of what government is like.  Yet, the same people say that the government must run the military because that is the only efficient way to run the military. We spend a lot of money on military operations that are run by the government. We have bought into a pretty broad-based mental model regarding government particularly over the past thirty years. I would flag it to around the Reagan era.  I think he was the spokesperson to this model, and I think we are still living with it.

I think there was a whole lot more pure academic research in health care before businesses were let loose and government was criticized, There was abundant freedom, and faculty were kind of untouchable in academic settings.  Conditions are no like that anymore.  Even tenure is a question mark now.  This was a sacred feature of academic life. Faculty were protected from outside influences.  These safeguards are being stripped away.  That’s part of the changing dynamics in our contemporary society. I question this diminution of government’s benefits. For instance, The University of California is a government run university. I spent time there and learned a lot.  I’m not sure that government can’t do anything.  I think that is part of where we get trapped.  Government is supposed to help us. There was a time when we actually admired our government.  I remember feeling that way.

Bill B

I want to return to the notion of substitute industry that Bill G. brought up. That is a strong mental model. We never want to deal with the absence of things. That is the matter of negative research results.  We don’t want to acknowledge negative results. We substitute the positive results for the negative ones. We want “no bad news!”

Jeremy

It is a mater again of processing. It can be seen in the history of tobacco. Tobacco was a natural product smoked by Native Americans.  Smoking didn’t appear to cause health conditions for these Native Americans.  We have ultra-processed the tobacco and turned it into cigarettes which have killed a lot of people. I think there are times when a part of our Amereicna culture is that we can do better than nature. Baby formula famously has created an international crisis regarding starvation.  Kids could have drunk their mother’s milk rather than tainted water.  We have arrogantly created something that ends up almost every time being unhealthier than the more natural way.  High fructose corn syrup is one of the latest versions of this phenomenon. We have created an alternative sugar that has got to be better.  It’s got corn in it!