I love the fact that Dan Ariely designed the chart testing people's knowledge of their own society. He is a psychologist who looks at how you can use your understanding of your own irrational inner nature to help you be more rational. His books Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality are well worth reading.
The problem is that almost everybody has drunk the Kool-Aid of the right wing ideologues:
- government is the problem, not the solution
- work hard and you get ahead
- the problem with America is the welfare moms driving around in Cadillacs not the Wall Street Banks that got a $700 billion gift (bailout) from the taxpayers
- deregulate, deregulate, deregulate (which is exactly while the Wall Street banks blew up, why there was corruption in the dot.com era (Enron, Worldcom, Global Crossing), why the Savings & Loans blew up in the late 1980s, etc.
- the rich are "job creators" and you don't want to tax them
- trickle down economics is how you grow wealth (just wait for those rich to let the crumbs off their table shower down on your head)
- America is great because it is free, the land of opportunity (in fact it has less social mobility than almost any other country except the undeveloped dregs of the world)
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