While humans are excellent at empathizing with individuals, we are pretty terrible at empathizing with large groups of people who aren’t us; in part this is because we are collectively interacting with systems, which we aren’t very good at understanding and interacting with either. One person’s lack of access to medical care is cause for a fundraiser, but thirty million people without health insurance is a ‘choice’ that needs to be protected. One teenager from a disadvantaged background who gets to go to Harvard is a triumph; the systematic increase of student debt and exclusion of large chunks of the population from public higher education is necessary belt-tightening.