Incentives are for losers

photo cred: my dadWe can all agree: the incentives are bad. Everywhere you look, people are being rewarded for doing the wrong thing. This has become the go-to diagnosis for every problem, from climate change to political polarization to scientific malfeasance—“sorry pal, you’ve got a bad case of the incentives.”I don’t disagree with this analysis, exactly. Who could? It’s basically tautological. “People do bad things because they are encouraged and rewarded for doing bad things.” Well, why else would you do them?My real gripe with this line of thinking is it implies that incentives should be obeyed, that it is normal or even noble to do so, and that is perhaps impossible to do otherwise. How could you be expected to break a rule, forego a promotion, or give up decimal of your grade point average, for the sake of—what? Doing the right thing?There’s a point here that should go without saying, but instead it has simply gone unsaid. Which is: incentives are for losers. Doing something…