Quotes About Incentives

NATIONS FAIL TODAY because their extractive economic institutions do not create the incentives needed for people to save, invest, and innovate. Extractive political institutions support these economic institutions by cementing the power of those who benefit from the extraction. Extractive economic and political institutions, though their details vary under different circumstances, are always at the root of this failure.

It took the Virginia Company twelve years to learn its first lesson that what had worked for the Spanish in Mexico and in Central and South America would not work in the north. The rest of the seventeenth century saw a long series of struggles over the second lesson: that the only option for an economically viable colony was to create institutions that gave the colonists incentives to invest and to work hard.

The reason that Nogales, Arizona, is much richer than Nogales, Sonora, is simple; it is because of the very different institutions on the two sides of the border, which create very different incentives for the inhabitants of Nogales, Arizona, versus Nogales, Sonora.

El éxito económico de los países difiere debido a las diferencias entre sus instituciones, a las reglas que influyen en cómo funciona la economía y a los incentivos que motivan a las personas.

Allowing people to make their own decisions via markets is the best way for a society to efficiently use its resources. When the state or a narrow elite controls all these resources instead, neither the right incentives will be created nor will there be an efficient allocation of the skills and talents of people.

Congo, vividly illustrates how political institutions determine economic institutions and, through these, the economic incentives and the scope for economic growth.

the prime determinant of why agricultural productivity—agricultural output per acre—is so low in many poor countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, has little to do with soil quality. Rather, it is a consequence of the ownership structure of the land and the incentives that are created for farmers by the governments and institutions under which they live.

The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites.

La lección más importante que se puede aprender es que las instituciones extractivas no pueden generar un cambio tecnológico sostenido por dos razones: la falta de incentivos económicos y la resistencia por parte de las élites.

Countries differ in their economic success because of their different institutions, the rules influencing how the economy works, and the incentives that motivate people.

Only when government begins to hand out rewards on the basis of political pressure do we find ourselves involved in group conflict, pushed to organize and contend with other groups for a piece of political power.

The marketplace is not a battlefield where the person with the most money wins the battle and takes the whole prize;

When kids made a decision for themselves they have a vested interest in showing they were right. Lee wanted to prove to me that he had made the right choice so he worked hard and did well. If we'd forced him to go to college somewhere else all the incentives would've been different. Then he would have had a motive to prove that we were wrong.

The '60s were a disaster in terms of social policy. The elites put in place a whole set of reforms which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing.

Along with Senator Lieberman and others, I introduced the Energy Security Bill to use existing technologies with a variety of tax incentives to reduce our dependence on oil.

The current administration has made the decision to cut dollars going for community development block grants, for various incentives to bring cities back.

As a general rule, Las Vegas sports books take boxing bets only on major fights.The same is true of most Internet gaming sites. Within that framework, not only does boxing allow participants to bet on their own bouts, it sometimes encourages them to do so.

If you take all the money we've spent at NASA since we landed on the moon and you had applied that money for incentives to the private sector, we would today probably have a permanent station on the moon, three or four permanent stations in space, a new generation of lift vehicles.

Let's give people more incentives to get fuel efficient vehicles.

Affordability is critical so that patients have access to medicines. At the same time, it's also important that we have the kind of incentives that allow us to do the kinds of studies that we need to do to go after these diseases like Alzheimer's.

Subsidies are hugely important; they represent America's de facto energy policy.

Eventually, the economy will work well when you reduce subsidies. People have got used to getting some handouts from governments.

We've seen the government give out subsidies to companies, those companies turn around and use it for executive bonuses.

Subsidies should never be a permanent feature of any market. They should be introduced only to address market failure and they should be withdrawn gradually as those distortions in the market are addressed.