Of Scripts and Rolling Suitcases
According to psychologists Roger C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson, narratives
may be seen as nothing more than scripts.18 These scripts are also called social
norms, and they partially govern our activities, including our economic actions.
For example, the “prudent person rule” in finance is one social norm with
economic impact. Fiduciaries and experts do not have the right to act on their
own judgment. Instead, they must instead mimic a “prudent person,” which in
effect means following a script.19
When in doubt about how to behave in an ambiguous situation, people may
think back to narratives and adopt a role they have heard of, as if they are acting
in a play they have seen before. We can debate whether such behavior is rational.
In one sense it is rational to copy the behavior of apparently successful people,
even if one does not see any logic in the behavior. Those being copied might
have mysterious or unobserved reasons for such behavior, and their success
suggests they have at least stumbled onto an advantageous behavior. But
traditional economic theory does not model this kind of rationality. It sees the
following of others’ behavior as more reflexive, not as a thoughtful application
of the principle “When in doubt, imitate.” This reflexivity does not generally
follow the typical economic assumption that people attempt to maximize their
utility based on all available information. On the contrary, following scripts set
by others often looks like quite stupid behavior.
People often fail to notice ideas if those ideas are not part of a script or are not
packaged well enough. In my 2003 book The New Financial Order, I argued that
some obvious financial inventions have not been adopted anywhere, and I asked:
Why? As an analogy, I gave the example of wheeled suitcases. These did not
become popular until the 1990s, when a Northwest Airlines pilot, Robert Plath,
invented his Rollaboard with both wheels and a rigid handle that can collapse
into the suitcase. An earlier version of the wheeled suitcase by Bernard Sadow in
1972 had achieved only limited acceptance. The traveler pulled it along by a
leather strap, and it worked moderately well, though not perfectly because it
tended to flop over sideways. Still, it was a big improvement over nonwheeled
suitcases. Sadow had great difficulty getting his wheeled suitcase accepted in the
market. Nobody was interested, but why? The idea was good, and today almost
every traveler owns Rollaboards or their descendants. Most people wouldn’t

even think about buying a suitcase without wheels.
Years after The New Financial Order was published, I received an email from
a former patent examiner who told me of a wheeled trunk patent in 1887, and it
looks like much the same idea.20 But I could not find it advertised in newspapers
of that era. I later found a 1951 article by John Allan May, who recounted his
efforts to manufacture and sell a wheeled suitcase starting in 1932. May wrote:
And they laughed. I was very serious about it. But they laughed, the whole lot
of them.
When I spoke to any group about the further application of the theory of
wheels they would express themselves as vastly entertained in a kind of
soporific way.
(Why not make full use of the wheel? Why haven’t we fitted people with
wheels?) …
I calculate I have outlined the wheeled suitcase idea to 125 groups of
people and possibly 1,500 individuals. My wife tired of hearing about it back
in 1937. The only man who ever took me seriously was an inventor who lived
for a time a couple of houses away. The trouble was, nobody took him
seriously.21
I have never understood why the wheeled-suitcase idea wasn’t absolutely
contagious. My best guess is that, with Plath’s invention, glamour overcame the
sense that wheels on a suitcase looked ridiculous. Its 1991 newspaper ads
attached the Rollaboard narrative to airlines, which seemed much more
glamorous in the 1990s than they do today:
It’s pilot-designed and approved for carry-on aboard most airlines. With its
built-in wheels and retractable handle you can roll it through the airport,
aboard the plane and down the aisle.22
The epidemic was fueled when flight crews adopted the Rollaboards, and
passengers saw these glamorous-looking people walking through airports,
pulling their Rollaboards effortlessly behind them. By 1993, the ads for
Rollaboards took advantage of this publicity, citing them as the “first choice of
aircrews worldwide.” Maybe that is all it took to make a good idea, over a
hundred years old, suddenly contagious.