Quotes About Incentives

Rather, in our distorted fee-for-service world, the work to coordinate and oversee care just isn't as profitable as other activities.

As long as a man is still motivated either by the fear of punishment or by the hope of reward—or, for that matter, by the wish to appease the superego—conscience has not had its say as yet.

The foundation of changing behavior is linking rewards to performance and making the linkages transparent.

Thomas Sowell eloquently counters this assumption when he writes, "To the economically illiterate, if some company makes a million dollars in profit, this means that their products cost a million dollars more than they would have without profits. It never occurs to such people that these products might cost several million dollars more…without the incentives to be efficient created by the prospect of profits."3

Time and again a close election leads to hand-wringing about the need for Electoral College reform; time and again, politicians and parties respond to the college's incentives, and more capacious and unifying majorities are born.

I think the problem with schools is not too many incentives but too few. Because of tenure, teachers' unions, and the fact that teachers generally aren't observed in their classrooms, they can do whatever they want in class.

I was creating commitment devices of my own long before I knew what they were. So when I was a starving post-doc at Columbia University, I was deep in a publish-or-perish phase of my career. I had to write five pages a day towards papers, or I would have to give up five dollars.

God made man to go by motives, and he will not go without them, any more than a boat without steam or a balloon without gas.

This arrangement should be the envy of every ruling class in the world. Not only can it be pushed much, much further, but it is fairly certain that it will be so pushed. All the incentives point that way, as do the never-examined cultural requirements of modern capitalism. Why shouldn't our culture just get worse and worse, if making it worse will only cause the people who worsen it to grow wealthier and wealthier?

Such are some of the non-praiseworthy incentives of those who would fertilize the future. And they are all pressures of one kind or another. These pressures build up in people throughout their lifetimes and cry to be released, just as our bowels cry to be released to avoid the discomfort of a fecal build-up. And who, if they could help it, wants the discomfort of a fecal build-up? So we make bowel movements to relieve this pressure.

People work for money but go the extra mile for praise, recognition, and rewards.

The Korean economic miracle was the result of a clever and pragmatic mixture of market incentives and state direction. The Korean government did not vanquish the market as the communist states did. However, it did not have blind faith in the free market either. While it took markets seriously, the Korean strategy recognized that they often need to be corrected through policy intervention.

The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it.

Premio Nobel de Economía de 2005, «por haber ampliado nuestros conocimientos sobre el conflicto y la cooperación a través de la gamificación analítica».

So, ignorant we are. But we're not stupid. Indeed...remaining ignorant about politics and our government is a perfectly rational response to the government we have. The question isn't what we know. The question is what we're capable of knowing, and doing, if we have the right incentives, and the right opportunity.

We accept human nature as it is, then we base our system on it. Your system must accept that human nature is like that. You get the best out of people for society by incentives and disincentives. If you remove too much of their rewards from the top tier, they will migrate.

Unlike China's growth story, which has been built on the strategy of creating excess supply, the Indian growth story has been built on the strategy of responding to incentives generated by excess demand. Which is why a certain degree of inflation is built into the Indian growth process.

Medical costs are soaring because our health-care system is totally screwed up. Doctors and hospitals have every incentive to spend on unnecessary tests, drugs, and procedures.

Arthur Laffer has taught us, 'If you tax something, you get less of it.' That's why firms are moving offshore in droves. It's not about being unpatriotic. It's that it doesn't pay, after-tax, to invest in the United States.

In the modern university, no act of good teaching goes unpunished.

We would like a stable policy framework, and whatever incentives and tax structures are there should be made known to investors upfront. There should be credibility, clarity and continuity in both policy formulation and its implementation.

Our strategic dialogue with China can both protect American interests and uphold our principles, provided we are honest about our differences on human rights and other issues and provided we use a mix of targeted incentives and sanctions to narrow these differences.

Urban America has been redlined. Government has not offered tax incentives for investment, as it has in a dozen foreign markets. Banks have redlined it. Industries have moved out, they've redlined it. Clearly, to break up the redlining process, there must be incentives to green-line with hedges against risk.

If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don't be surprised if you get unemployment.