Ok Not to Care?
I saw this caption to an article on the Net about the floods in Thailand: “Thailand is 20% underwater, and is second-biggest hard drive producer after China. Now do you care about the floods?” Provocative caption indeed. Do we always need to be told how something affects us before we care? The answer’s not that simple. Sometimes, there are too many other tragedies and accidents closer home for us to care about something far away. At other times, the news we see is too vague: we don’t know how many died. Or how many are stranded without food or medicines. And sometimes, it’s just too tiring and draining to feel or care about everybody’s problems. Dan Ariely wrote about a county in the US where firefighters are not available on-call to everyone . Instead, the right to firefighters is only for those who an annual “premium”. So when a house (whose owner hadn’t paid the fee) caught fire, the firefighters refused to come douse the fire. They finally came only when the neighbour’s ...