More A-town and B-ville

I read the A-town B-ville parable a few times, and have several thoughts on it. Some of them overlap with Chloe, Emily, and Bryce's posts. One of Emily's points was that it was ironic that A-town didn't want to destroy the moral character of their town, but they ended up doing this anyway. Elaborating on this, I thought that it was ironic that while A-town's plan made people look down on the welfare recipients, B-ville's plan made people jokingly envy the policyholders that received insurance "for having been 'up there with the big shots'".

The way the insurance was presented in B-ville (the ceremony) made a big difference in the way it was accepted. As Hayakawa emphasizes in another section of the book, people like socializing. It is inevitable that they would like something presented at a social ceremony better than something mailed to them discreetly.

After reading the parable, I concluded, as Chloe touched upon in her second point, that it wasn't what was done about the unemployment that mattered, but how it was done. It doesn't matter what word the leaders used to describe the $500 the families were receiving, but the connotations the word had, as Bryce mentioned in his post. They could have used either the word "insurance" or the word "welfare", or any other word describing $500. The people didn't know what either of the words meant beforehand (as shown by "...the idea [of insurance] was entirely new to his fellow commissioners." on page 79 and the fact that the A-town leaders had to choose whether to use the term "dole" or the term "welfare".) It was the feelings that the leaders chose to associate with the words "welfare" and "insurance" that made the people act as they did. When the term "insurance" was given a positive connotation, the recipients and their neighbors accepted it happily. When the term "welfare" was given a negative connotation, the recipients were ostracized from the community. It could have been the other way around, and the word with the positive feeling associated with it would have still had a good response, just as the word with the negative feelings associated with it would have had a detrimental response.

Essentially, it didn't matter what the leaders did for the unemployed families, but how it was done, and it didn't matter which words they used to describe what they did, but what feelings were attached to those words.

-Audrey