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Michael Sandel's The Moral Limits of Markets is an good and very accessible book on this topic of civic virtues being turned into transactions. There's a case
by Barrin92 4y ago
Michael Sandel's The Moral Limits of Markets is an good and very accessible book on this topic of civic virtues being turned into transactions.
There's a case study in the book of economists asking Swiss citizens about their opinion on having a nuclear waste storage facility near their community. When people in the community were asked if they were okay with this, a small majority agreed. A common argument was that there may be risk, but if it has to go somewhere it may as well be here, out of a sense of civic duty.
The Economists then added an incentive and asked others the same question, but added that there may be an annual payment involved for the risk. The support dropped to something like 25%, people starting to give answers like "I'm not going to sell out my kid's health for money".
The naive view is that turning something transactional cannot be worse, after all people can have civity duty and money. But of course it doesn't work like that. The transaction changes the entire nature of a process, turning activities that were about civic virtue into transactions about profit, degrading the entire thing.
Lots of other good examples in the book. Children being paid to read books switching from what they liked to what was shortest, paid volunteers actually being less effective than unpaid ones, and so on.
- AlexandrB 4y ago> The transaction changes the entire nature of a process, turning activities that were about civic virtue into transactions about profit, degrading the entire thing. Even worse, profit attracts bad actors like blood attracts sharks. In real life, you would soon have people "gaming the system" to get those incentives.
- quickthrower2 4y agoIll help someone for free but not for $10/h
- nicbou 4y agoA similar passage in Freakonomics showed how fining parents for picking up their kids late made the problem worse. Paying the fine "excused" the behaviour.
- abigail95 4y agoThat's because they limited the downside. If I continue being late without any consequence eventually there will be some consequence to me, with a lot of uncertainty from a mild talking to, to being banned from the daycare. What's the difference between a sign that says "No Parking" and "No Parking ($200 fine)"?. The second sign isn't excusing bad behavior - it's limiting the likely punishment to an infraction, rather than being towed or misdemeanor trespass.
- alexvoda 4y agoThis looks like a problem of scaling. The punishment should scale with repeat offenses in order to both provide clear consequences and to prevent a cost of business attitude.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago> The Economists then added an incentive and asked others the same question, but added that there may be an annual payment involved for the risk. If you tell me something is harmless I may believe you. But if you try to pay me for it that strongly implies you're actively lying about the harm and you're trying to trick me into "accepting" it so that I lose any recourse. "You can't change your mind, we already paid you!" I suspect that if the offer was "Your canton will get extra transfer payments to be used for medical funding to proactively test and ensure that there are no additional medical problems" that the people would welcome the payment.