How do you best incentivize people in order to optimize societal outcomes? I often struggle with this; the argument presented by David Brooks in the article in the url below warns against a pure economic answer to the problem:
"We turned off the moral lens. You probably know the example of the Israeli day care centers. Parents kept showing up late to pick up their kids. To address the problem, the centers experimented with fining the late parents. But the number of late pickups doubled. Before, coming to pick up your kid on time was a moral obligation — to be fair to the day care workers. After, it was seen as an economic transaction. Parents were happy to pay to be late. We more or less did this as an entire society — we switched to a purely economic lens."
In essence, Brooks suggests that we somehow chose to emphasize the economic and remove the moral—as he puts it:
"… economic priorities took the top spot and obliterated everything else. … We ripped the market out of its moral and social context and let it operate purely by its own rules. We made the market its own priest and confessor."
I think this is the wrong conclusion. There are two problems, in particular, with Brooks' logic: First, I do not think it is possible to separate the moral from the economic. When we buy something (whether it is a product, or service, or stock, or whatever), we are expressing our values. Disposable income, for most of us, is a scarce resource. As such, we reveal our priorities when we use it. Second, the accusation that we removed the moral assumes that our morals remained the same and that we just took them out of the equation. Apart from being an overly-agentic description of human decision-making (a completely separate issue), my take is that the morals and values are there, just as they have always been (it is impossible to remove them from any decision we make), it is more likely to me that they changed. Why they changed is difficult to answer – whenever I think through issues at the societal level, the explanation often seems to come back to education. What does a High School education mean today? For that matter, what does an undergraduate degree mean, or a master's degree? If those things mean the same that they used to, then it is possible that not much has changed (unlikely, but possible). But, if they mean something different, then something has definitely changed. The outcomes that Brooks is highlighting, to me, suggest they have changed in a way that has made our society more individualistic and less collective (among many other changes). This shift makes it more acceptable to replace moral responsibilities with economic payment—as in the above quote and subsequent examples Brooks includes:
"Anything you could legally do to make money was deemed O.K. A billion-dollar salary for a hedge fund manager? Perfectly acceptable. The Apple corporation exists because of American institutions. But, as Pearlstein notes, Apple parked its intellectual property in an Irish subsidiary so it could avoid paying taxes in America and support those institutions. It saved $9 billion in 2012 alone. This is clearly sleazy behavior. Apple employees should be humiliated and ashamed."
It is not that the morals have been removed, therefore, but that we have changed our morals to allow certain kinds of behavior that would have been frowned upon in earlier times:
"Human beings are moral animals, and suddenly American moral animals found themselves in an amoral economic system, which felt increasingly alienating and gross."
No, it is not that our economic system is "amoral," but that the morals today are different than they used to be. This distinction matters, I think, because suggesting morals have been removed gives us all a pass on some level. Reiterating that morals and values are still very much there, but have changed, keeps the burden on us to do something about it, … if we want to.
Take care
David
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Remoralizing the market
Remoralizing the market
By David Brooks
January 11, 2019
The New York Times
Late Edition – Final
A23
