I really like the article but I feel like ignoring incentives always costs something. Only people who can afford the cost get to look principled, which turns having money into looking like having character. Everyone he praises in the article has/had a safety net: Sumner was a Harvard-educated senator with inherited standing, the writer himself still had a career after dropping his uni title.

The fish metaphor has the same issue. The people dying on the sidewalk outside his conference have seen worse than he has, they don't lack moral clarity but rather the freedom and capital to rebuild their lives around it. His essay treats seeing the fish and acting on it as a single moment when the acting part requires you to have capital/social safety net.

I remember this book: Punished by Rewards, Alfie Kohn

"The basic strategy we use for raising children, teaching students, and managing workers can be summarized in six words: do this and you'll get that. We dangle goodies (from candy bars to sales commissions) in front of people in much the same way that we train a family pet. The quick fix of rewards may seem to be effective, but manipulating people with external incentives actually kills their interest in what they are doing and lowers the quality of their work."

Incentives are important for allocative efficiency, whether that be the price of a banana or the incentive to do a job that pays more. Of course, they're imperfect and there are some cases where incentives lead to rent-seeking rather than genuinely economic efficiency. And there is often a divergence between private value and social value. But these are exceptions to the rule. If everyone ignored price signals, society would be less well off.

This doesn't mean we should all attempt to do the highest possible paying job available to us, but it does mean there's a genuine loss to society if (say) a high paid software engineer decides to quit and start a bike repair shop i.e. the economic pie will be smaller an so will the tax base. So when making the decision we should at least be conscious of this.

As an economist, I do kind of agree with the premise of the article, but in a different way. As consumers in particular, we can do much better than following incentives.

For instance, we can use the car less, even if it's a bit inconvenient. It's much nicer to see more people out walking, on their bikes or on the bus, leads to less noise and congestion. So there's a positive externality. Or I could buy a smaller car, even though bigger one is more convenient.

Similarly, if you're lucky enough to have a high paying job, you can buy all sorts of status symbols. Or, you could choose to consume less than you earn, and give the difference to charity.

Whether you agree with this or not, economic theory provides a clear framework to think about all of this, both the price signal and the difference between private and social incentives. What bothers me (as the article touches on) is that people often have a simplified view of economics which is essentially that 'market incentives and price signals broadly lead to good outcomes (or at least, better outcomes than communism!), and therefore economics always morally endorses buying things at market prices'. There's nothing in economic theory that says that spending £50k more on a car because it's got a fancier brand is a reasonable moral choice.

The game theorists/economists have studied this stuff in depth under the rubric of "mechanism design" or "market design". The relevant concept is "incentive compatibility" where the agents in the system do the right thing (whatever that was intended to be/designed for) because any deviation from that costs them more than playing nice.

The Wikipedia article [0] is not yet great but does give the two classic examples of "second-price auctions and a simple majority vote between two choices". The Gibbard–Satterthwaite shows the difficulty in extending this to more choices (in that Arrow's theorem sort of way).

The best thing I've read on this stuff is Alvin Roth's "Who Gets What and Why" (2015) [1] which is worth a read in any case. Repugnant markets!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_compatibility

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_E._Roth#Market_design

Incentives are about tricking the selfish side of people into doing things that are valuable for others, which can be an incredibly powerful force, but it’s not the only way to get people to do things, and it’s not okay to be absolutely selfish and outsource your responsibility to the system.

> In the eternal game of cat and mouse between the goodhearted people trying to fix the incentives and the Goodhart’d people trying to exploit the incentives, I am rooting for the cats.

What lovely writing.

> We can all agree: the incentives are bad.

No, we don't.

> Everywhere you look, people are being rewarded for doing the wrong thing.

And, people are also being rewarded for doing the right thing. Don't conflate the two.

Just because some incentives are rewarding the wrong behavior doesn't invalidate the concept. We're surrounded by incentives at work in every part of our life.

Fiat money only works because we are incentivized to believe in it.

Democracy works because we're mostly incentivized to support it.

Governments, countries, companies, parks, global trade, science, and shipping only work because of the complex web of positive and negative incentives we've built up to support them. They're not perfect, and never will be. And they also shouldn't be perfect (despite our natural inclination to want the "perfect"). The worst atrocities humankind has seen were driven by the pursuit of perfection and purity.

The cobra effect is what happens when you choose your incentives poorly. That's not a fault of the concept.

Completely agree. Incentives are for the statistical masses.

As thinking individuals we can and should use our awareness and courage to make biggest "good" choices we can bear to. We can't all be zero-waste vegan community organisers lobbying for renewables and free education/healthcare, but I doubt living life with the blinders on leads any kind of moral or spiritual growth or fulfilment either.

The premise of this article only works because the author has taken an overly narrow definition of an 'incentive' - as if an incentive can only be offered by a social media app for a quick dopamine hit.

What's they are missing is that it's all incentives, all the way down. You want to be a good kind person? You feel good when you believe you've demonstrated this - but you're just acting on incentives you've set for yourself to feel good. You want to feel morally superior by quitting social media (thereby avoiding the overt incentives to the contrary) or donating more to charity? Same thing - you're following incentives you've created for yourself to be the person you want to be and be seen as.

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Also, FWIW, I strongly disliked the mid-article moralisation - implying that people are somehow flawed, inferior individuals if they haven't examined every aspect of their world and developed a deep understanding of it that could never be challenged. This is just a self-serving conceit of someone who feels superior because they think they see the matrix (or fish). The world is full of people who live their lives as best they can, trying to be decent people as best they can, without having the time, energy, or incentive to dive deeper into things as the author seems to believe they should. Are they inferior people? No. So f#ck this author and their snide superior moralistic b#llshit.

As someone who has helped drug addicts in an organisation called "Proyecto Hombre" in Spain you probably don't understand how hard is to help someone in this situation and that sometimes you CAN'T.

It is very typical that when someone gets on drugs even the father of the person stops trying to help after several failed trials. Only the mothers stay. And it is so painful to watch. The kind of abuses mothers tolerate from their children.

Substances destroys the typical regulating behaviour of the brain. They literally can't see the harm they do to others. You usually can't help them until they hit rock bottom and open a window for you to intervene.

For helping you need knowledge and training and "trying to help" without it could do more harm than good.

About the moral obligation to help the drug addicts, as "social justice", I would call this "injustice". Here is the typical situation: Someone takes drugs in a social group because is "cool". In the same group there is someone that decides not to take them. He is humiliated by the group and it takes a lot of work. One of the members of the group gets addicted, do terrible things and asks for help.

It is usual that the one that did not take drugs, or the brother in the family ask the question "why are you helping this person that decided to go this way herself?" "Why are you expending like 10x more resources in this person that did everything wrong than in me when did everything well (studied instead of earning easy money selling drugs, that had to withstand the pressure and humiliations by the group).

Drugs are super expensive and addicts will do anything to get their dose, supporting the addicts usually takes all the resources from a family, neglecting the resources to other members of the family. If the State provides the support, the same thing happens. Should the State spend exorbitant resources that the rest of the society has to pay taking the resources from everyone that needs them?