Quotes About Incentives

What makes capitalism succeed is not chiefly its structure of incentives but its use of knowledge and experience.

Incentives and infrastructure should encourage development and that development needs to contain the right types of housing in the right places.

Even the wisdom of God hath not suggested more pressing motives, more powerful incentives to charity, than these, that we shall be judged by it at the last dreadful day.

The generality of mankind is lazy. What distinguishes men of genuine achievement from the rest of us is not so much their intellectual powers and aptitudes as their curiosity, their energy, their fullest use of their potentialities. Nobody really knows how smart or talented he is until he finds the incentives to use himself to the fullest. God has given us more than we know what to do with.

Profits. Joe, if you want to use just one word"—and Mr. Healey wagged a huge finger at Joseph—"to describe wars and the making of wars, it's profits. Nothing else. Profits.

Ohne Vergütungen, die weit über das eigentlich Angemessene hinausgehen, wäre der Beruf des Politikers viel zu unerfreulich.

The British welfare state, it seemed, had removed the incentives without which a capitalist economy simply could not function: the carrot of serious money for those who strove, the stick of hardship for those who slacked.

Suddenly the people running Savings and Loans had nothing to lose - a clear case of what economists call moral hazard.

We want people to stay on MySpace. We'll give them whatever they might want to do.

I feel, at the national level, shooters should get monetary rewards also, along with medals and a handshake.

On vaikeaa saada ihminen ymmärtämään jotain, kun hänen palkkana riippuu siitä, ettei hän ymmärrä.

What shall we say to the wicked man to make him be good, if we cannot reward him with a heaven and frighten him with a hell? Well, my first answer is that we have been trying this process for a couple of thousand years, and the results seem to indicate that we might better seek out some other method of inducing men to behave themselves.

Union leaders essentially want the public to believe that all teachers are equal and deserve to be paid and treated that way—but that's clearly not the case. Some teachers are much more effective than others in helping kids learn, yet school policies and pay scales do little to recognize or reward their efforts.

Yes, compensation and incentives are important, but for very different reasons in good-to-great companies. The purpose of a compensation system should not be to get the right behaviors from the wrong people, but to get the right people on the bus in the first place, and to keep them there.

In our research, we found no systematic pattern linking executive compensation to the process of companies going from good to great. Financial incentives don't—indeed cannot—cause companies to achieve greatness, for the simple reason that you cannot turn the wrong people into the right people with money. After all, if someone needs financial incentives to perform at a high level, he or she lacks the intense inner drive, the productive neurosis, required to do great things.

If you thought car maintenance was covered by Uncle Sam and you never saw a bill, what would keep your from getting new brakes every few months?

To say that people would cease to come to California if they would have to pay more taxes is to underestimate the advantages of being in California - mightily.

Sometimes, tax rate increases create the very problems that the spending is intended to cure. In other words, the tax rate increases reduce economic growth; they shrink the pie; they cause more poverty, more despair, more unemployment, which are all things government is trying to alleviate with spending.

Unfortunately, the elimination of incentives such as parole, good time credits and funding for college courses, means that fewer inmates participate in and excel in literacy, education, treatment and other development programs.

Making wise decisions requires more than incentives. It requires wisdom.

I'd rather live in a world where firms don't have these enormous incentives to spy on individuals.

Subsidising inefficient businesses does not encourage them to become more competitive and means that extra money has to be taken from tax payers for the same result. Inevitably, this reduces the total size of the economy and lowers living standards.

Competitive programs such as Race to the Top provide incentives for communities to develop new solutions for old problems. Because of Race to the Top, states have raised their standards and committed to fixing schools that have persistently failed students.

Net neutrality rules have been premised on the incentives and ability of ISPs to engage in harmful conduct, not actual harms. I don't believe we should be regulating based on hypothetical problems.