Quotes About Incentives

But so long as somewhere somebody is incentivised to invent ways of serving others' needs better, then the rational optimist must conclude that the betterment of human lives will eventually resume.

A free economy cannot exist without competition. Therefore, men must be forced to compete. Therefore, we must control men in order to force them to be free.

Over time, though, the team was able to arrive at a coherent set of principles to guide a shift in strategy. Under the emerging plan, U.S. officials across agencies would be expected to deliver a consistent and coordinated message on the need for reform; they would develop specific recommendations for liberalizing political and civic life in various countries and offer a range of new incentives to encourage their adoption. By

Mires a donde mires, te encuentras con la jerga empresarial: "incentivos", "valor añadido", "pasos adelante"; las mismas cadenas de mando, las mismas oficinas con iguales mesas y cubículos, la misma funcionalidad neutral, sin concesión alguna a la estética; la misma fe en la motivación y en el espíritu de equipo prefabricado.

Thinking like a Freak may sometimes sound like an exercise in using clever means to get exactly what you want, and there's nothing wrong with that. But if there is one thing we've learned from a lifetime of designing and analyzing incentives, the best way to get what you want is to treat other people with decency. Decency can push almost any interaction into the cooperative frame.

With any problem, it's important to figure out which incentives will actually work, not just what your moral compass tells you should work.

People aren't "good" or "bad." People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated—for good or ill—if only you find the right levers.

What most of these doomsday scenarios have gotten wrong is the fundamental idea of economics: people respond to incentives. If the price of a good goes up, people demand less of it, the companies that make it figure out how to make more of it, and everyone tries to figure out how to produce substitutes for it. Add to that the march of technological innovation (like the green revolution, birth control, etc.). The end result: markets figure out how to deal with problems of supply and demand.

Never, ever think that people will do something just because it is the "right" thing to do.

People are complicated creatures, with a nuanced set of private and public incentives, and that our behavior is enormously influenced by circumstances.

Los incentivos constituyen la piedra angular de la vida moderna.

Steven D. Levitt

Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them—or, often, deciphering them—is the key to understanding a problem, and how it might be solved.

The impulse to investigate can only be set free if you stop pretending to know answers that you don't. Because the incentives to pretend are so strong, this may require some bravery on your part.

It also means that the pain of negative feedback will for most people trump the pleasure from positive feedback.

The economic approach is both broader and simpler than that. It relies on data, rather than hunch or ideology, to understand how the world works, to learn how incentives succeed (or fail), how resources get allocated, and what sort of obstacles prevent people from getting those resources, whether they are concrete (like food and transportation) or more aspirational (like education and love).

Steven D. Levitt

La gente no es «buena» ni «mala». Las personas son personas y responden a incentivos. Casi siempre pueden ser manipuladas —para bien o para mal— si se encuentran las palancas adecuadas.

Steven D. Levitt

ofrecer a los donantes de órganos incentivos como «amnistía fiscal, seguro de enfermedad garantizado, becas universitarias para sus hijos, depósitos en sus cuentas de jubilación, etcétera.»

Steven D. Levitt

Politicians have all sorts of reasons to pass all sorts of laws that, as well-meaning as they may be, fail to account for the way real people respond to real-world incentives.

For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying to beat it. Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor. Cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more for less.

Steven D. Levitt