Blaming Bad Incentives Lets People Off the Hook
Every reward gets gamed eventually, Adam Mastroianni argues, so the only durable fix is developing your own sense of right and wrong.
Experimental History · Incentives are for losersAdam Mastroianni, a writer who studies human behavior, says he kept hearing the same diagnosis for every modern failure, whether the subject was a warming planet, divided politics, or cheating in laboratories.
His answer, in his own words, is blunt: "incentives are for losers."
Mastroianni argues that the usual line, as he puts it, "People do bad things because they are encouraged and rewarded for doing bad things," is basically circular. It leads to talk like, in his phrase, "sorry pal, you've got a bad case of the incentives."
Doing things just for a payout, he contends, demeans the doer. As he writes, "that's for pigeons, not people." And, he adds, "If you build your life around satisfying incentives, then you're a dummy and a schmuck."
He illustrates the point from Little League baseball. Mastroianni recalls dreading his turn at bat because the league helmets were shared, ill fitting, and sour with old sweat and possible lice. A few serious kids brought helmets of their own, and the outfielders perked up when one of those kids stepped to the plate, thinking, as Mastroianni puts it, "this kid might actually hit the ball."
The helmet stands for something larger, the choice of what you stand for instead of accepting whatever motives are handed to you. The moral, in his words, is this: "incentives are like batting helmets: if you don't bring your own, you'll have to use the crappy ones that are provided for you." By that he means building a personal code, deciding what is right and how to add more good to the world.
He grants that bad payoffs should be fixed when possible, and that cheating should not be rewarded. But he argues that revisions rarely stick, because any payoff that can be measured will eventually be gamed, a problem social scientists describe as Goodhart's Law and Campbell's Law. He compares fixing incentives to wishing on a Monkey's Paw, where one wish backfires and is followed by another wish that also backfires.
Mastroianni writes, "But for some reason, the second we start talking in terms of incentives, we also start acting like courage doesn't exist and can't exist." He writes that "Bad incentives have become our generation's version of "I was just following orders", an excuse that should be an indictment." His counter model is Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator who was beaten nearly to death on the Senate floor in 1856 and kept pressing for emancipation. Sumner said to seek three things in a leader: "The first is backbone, the second is backbone and the third is backbone."
Questions people ask
What are Goodhart's Law and Campbell's Law?
Goodhart's Law says that when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure, because people start gaming it. Campbell's Law makes a similar point about social programs, warning that test scores, arrest rates, and other metrics get corrupted once rewards or punishments are attached to them.
Who was Charles Sumner?
Sumner was a U.S. senator from Massachusetts and one of the leading white abolitionists of the 1800s. In 1856, Congressman Preston Brooks beat him with a cane on the Senate floor after an antislavery speech, nearly killing him. Sumner recovered, pushed President Abraham Lincoln toward emancipation, and wrote legal arguments that later resurfaced in Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Does that mean incentives never work and we should not try to fix them?
No, and Mastroianni does not claim that. He says we should check whether reward systems are having their intended effects and revise them when we can. His argument is that tinkering alone will never be enough, because determined people will game the new rules too, so personal conviction has to do the heavy lifting.