#incentive

When I applied to graduate school many years ago, I wrote an essay expressing my puzzlement at how a country that could put a man on the moon could still have people sleeping on the streets. Part of that problem is political will; we could take a lot of people off the streets tomorrow if we made it a national priority. But I have also come to realize that NASA had it easy. Rockets conform to the unchanging laws of physics. We know where the moon will be at a given time; we know precisely how fast a spacecraft will enter or exist the earth's orbit. If we get the equations right, the rocket will land where it is supposed to--always. Human beings are more complex than that. A recovering drug addict does not behave as predictably as a rocket in orbit. We don't have a formula for persuading a sixteen-year-old not to drop out of school. But we do have a powerful tool: We know that people seek to make themselves better off, however they may define that. Our best hope for improving the human condition is to understand why we act the way we do and then plan accordingly. Programs, organizations, and systems work better when they get the incentives right. It is like rowing downstream. ↗

— Charles Wheelan

#goverment #humanity #incentives #politics #social-policy

The system that enables the most people to earn the most success is free enterprise, by matching up people's skills, interests, and abilities. In contrast, redistribution simply spreads money around. Even worse, it attenuates the ability to earn success by perverting economic incentives. ↗

— Arthur C. Brooks

#around #contrast #earn #economic #enables

Pay-for-procedure or fee-for-service reimbursement rewards doctors and hospitals for volume - not keeping patients healthy or being efficiency. Pay-for-Performance is clearly one tool that can change the incentives to reward quality. ↗

— Ron Wyden

#change #clearly #doctors #efficiency #healthy

When you're failing, there's a very powerful incentive to put ideology aside and just do what seems to work. ↗

— Fareed Zakaria

#failing #ideology #incentive #just #powerful

I would give relief from the first $10,000 of the payroll tax. I would allow small businesses to accelerate depreciation so they would have an incentive to buy now rather than defer. I would also give to the states $40 billion of relief. ↗

— Bob Graham

#allow #also #billion #businesses #buy

Natural resources are so vast that no single individual or business is going to protect them; they don't have an incentive to. ↗

— William Weld

#going #incentive #individual #natural #natural resources

New technology is useful, but it's inefficient and ugly; it knows it'll be obsolete by lunchtime tomorrow, so it has no incentive to be anything else. ↗

— Tom Holt

#else #incentive #inefficient #knows #lunchtime

Only free people have an incentive to be virtuous. Only people who bear the consequences of their own acts will care about those consequences and try to learn from their mistakes. ↗

— Harry Browne

#acts #bear #care #consequences #free

When people who are songwriters say 'That's my property and if you give it away for free then I'll lose my incentive,' then, well, good riddance. ↗

— Ian MacKaye

#free #give #good #i #incentive

There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something tomorrow. ↗

— Orison Swett Marden

#great #hope #incentive #like #medicine