Quotes About Incentives

A fellow does not know how far he can run until he has the hope of life in flight and the knowledge of death in being overtaken. That acts as a goad to urge him on when all other incentives fail.

I think we need a very, very serious effort, primarily through tax policy to provide incentives and encouragement for people to save and invest and expand their businesses and to create more jobs. The kind of thing we did in the early Reagan years, 30 years ago. I think that's essential.

Economics is everywhere, and understanding economics can help you make better decisions and lead a happier life.

Means-tested benefits have one incredible feature in that they impose huge poverty traps.

Tax credits do not help people get better jobs; in fact, they can create poverty traps that actually disincentivise people from working more hours or finding a better paid job.

If history judges society for how it treats those in need, so markets judge economies by the incentives they provide for private investment, the infrastructure that supports growth, and the burdens placed on job creation.

Experts are human, and humans respond to incentives. How any given expert treats you, therefore, will depend on how that expert's incentives are set up.

In the United States especially, politics and economics don't mix well. 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.

The financial crisis and the Great Recession left firms with excess capacity, reducing incentives to invest. If businesses expect slower growth to continue, that will also hold down investment.

Who Protects the Consumer? It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens. —Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, vol. I, [>]

The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.

Hunger, love, vanity, and fear. There are four great motives of human action.

In the U.S., hospitals are rewarded for keeping hospital beds full. That's the market at work. The question is: should we work for the market, or should the market work for us?

Nudge policies, in essence, can be used to encourage us to mimic the way that we would behave if we were as rational as economic man.

Our financial, tax, and legal systems are set up to reward property owners

in Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson emphasize the importance of legal institutions (and other state institutions) that are "inclusive" through rights and incentives equally available to all people rather than "extractive" (that is, designed to extract resources from the many for the few) if countries are to experience sustained economic growth.15

Summing up: Correctly interpreted, the simple economic model specifically predicts that people will be less selfish as voters than as consumers. Indeed, like diners at an all-you-can-eat buffet, we should expect voters to "stuff themselves" with moral rectitude. Once again, analogies between voting and shopping are deeply misleading.

Government heavily subsidizes education. In 2011, U.S. federal, state, and local governments spent almost a trillion dollars on it.5 The simplest way to get less education, then, is to cut the subsidies.

But these days there are a lot of younger people who would like to go into teaching but don't because the economic opportunities are sometimes elsewhere.

Kids who are poor often have families that have not really been kept informed about... how important it is to read to your child, to reduce stresses in their life, to use positive incentives and words.

If you tell people, 'that old banger of yours, we're going to tax the hell out of it,' they'll rightly tell you to get lost. But if you tell people that when they next buy a car, the tax will be adjusted so that the cleanest ones will cost less and the polluting ones will cost more, most people would say 'fair enough.'

I put bounties on guys. And the guys tried to take me out, a guy tried to take a cheap shot on me, I put a bounty on him, right now.

In organizations, once you articulate how success will be measured, everybody tries to game the system so that they are measured in the best possible way.

Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?