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Take a staircase in an underground station in New York with one step slightly higher than the others, point a camera at it, then watch as one after another people stumble over it. Et voila: a ready made metaphor for the uselessness of discussing social problems in terms of individual merit. For any given person walking up those stairs it is true that, if they knew about that step in advance, or paid attention to the people stumbling in front of them, or just looked a little bit closer at the steps, they wouldn’t have stumbled, as you can see many people didn’t in that video. But it is not true that everybody can do that: people don’t pay attention, misjudge why the people in front of them stumbled, are new to staircase and so on.

So it goes too for e.g. the recession. If there are three million people chasing two million jobs it is arguably true that any of those three million could get a job if they just made the right decisions, put more effort in it, knew the right people, did everything right, but you’re still left with one million people unemployed who did do everything right but still couldn’t get a break. Therefore, any unemployment policy that doesn’t take into account this simple fact, but is based on trying to spur individual people back into work, is doomed to fail.

It’s left to the reader to extend this analogy to other societal problems like the obesity epidemic, ballooning student and mortgage debts, and so on, as well as to explain why consumer action is not enough to end child labour, exploitative business practises or make companies green.