pjmedia.com By Charlie Martin
It’s tempting, especially for a libertarian-verging-on-anarchist like me, to just assume government functionaries are inherently bad people who like doing bad things to good people.
It’s not really true — in general, people in government are doing what they think is good. So why does it seem like it’s true? Why does it so often seem that what government does is at best useless, often counterproductive, and sometimes actively harmful?
Elon Musk posted something on X a few days ago that struck me: incentives drive outcomes.
The “save the homeless” NGOs are often paid according to how many homeless people are on the streets, thus creating a strong financial incentive for them to maximize the number of homeless people and never actually solve the problem!
Incentives explain outcomes. https://t.co/ujxryf8z6d
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 10, 2024
In psychology, this is called “operant conditioning.” Put simply, it’s that a behavior that gets rewarded, gets repeated.
It’s useful, though, to analyze an existing situation going the other direction: ask what the incentives are that drive a particular behavior.
This is actually a callback to my previous memo to Musk and Ramaswamy. The short version is that government suffers from having vague, unstated, or even contradictory objectives, and no measures of success that can be verified…
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