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The problem with having a genuinely brilliant partner is that he’ll say something, and you’ll think “ah yes, that sounds smart”; but it takes years before you realize how smart. So two years ago when John said the most valuable thing we have to offer is a point of view, I thought, “okay, sure” and moved on thinking about skillsets and attention and mental nimbleness.

Lakoff’s work in framing was the first time I started to see exactly how important point of view was. If you could encapsulate your point of view in a frame, and then change others’ point of view with that frame, you could essentially control their behavior.

Now Malcolm Gladwell, of Blink and Tipping Point fame, has written an article in last week’s New Yorker that illuminates finally why the American health care system has taken such a weird, illogical and unfortunate turn. And guess what: it comes down to point of view.

Policy is driven by more than politics, however. It is equally driven by ideas, and in the past few decades a particular idea has taken hold among prominent American economists which has also been a powerful impediment to the expansion of health insurance. The idea is known as “moral hazard.”
…
“Moral hazard” is the term economists use to describe the fact that insurance can change the behavior of the person being insured. If your office gives you and your co-workers all the free Pepsi you want– if your employer, in effect, offers universal Pepsi insurance — you’ll drink more Pepsi than you would have otherwise. If you have a no-deductible fire-insurance policy, you may be a little less diligent in clearing the brush away from your house. The savings-and-loan crisis of the nineteen-eighties was created, in large part, by the fact that the federal government insured savings deposits of up to a hundred thousand dollars, and so the newly deregulated S. & L.s made far riskier investments than they would have otherwise. Insurance can have the paradoxical effect of producing risky and wasteful behavior. Economists spend a great deal of time thinking about such moral hazard for good reason. Insurance is an attempt to make human life safer and more secure. But, if those efforts can backfire and produce riskier behavior, providing insurance becomes a much more complicated and problematic endeavor.”

So rather than picturing a whitehouse full of rich folks not caring about poor folks getting sick, which is a common view from the left, we can now see the white house full of rich folks afraid poor folks will suddenly start running with scissors. Or perhaps acting like Logan on Gilmore Girls, enjoying rich man’s privileges like jumping off buildings with umbrellas and stealing yachts.

Okay, I may be exaggerating here, but the power of point of view and frames is more clearly demonstrated here than in almost anything I have read. If your interest is more than academic, the frame of Moral Hazard is also nicely refuted in the article as well.

I’ve naughtily cut and pasted this article below (click “more”) which I’ll remove once Gladwell posts it to his site (he seems to run a month or two behind the New Yorker). For now, I recommend reading it; and if it affects you as it affected me, forwarding with vigor usually reserved for jokes and juggling videos.

FYI: I had a sudden affect/effect freakout while writing this, and stopped to search for the difference, finding this useful article.

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