We’re Going to Get the Society We Incentivize

What kind of society do you want to live in?

BF Skinner, who some people believe to be the father of behaviorism, essentially believed that all learning is a result of a conditioning process.

If your dog poops inside in front of you, you loudly say, “NO! Bad dog!” If your dog poops outside in front of you, you pleasantly say, “Good dog!” and give her a small treat. Next thing you know, even when you’re not around, your dog poops outside.

Granted, that’s an oversimplification of conditioning, and conditioning itself is an oversimplification of the way that human behavior works and is modified, but as any economist can tell you, incentives work.

What we incentivize as a society, we get more of. What we disincentivize as a society, we get less of.

For example, you may have seen this chart floating around:

Why do so many kids in the West want to be influencers? Because we heavily reward successful influencers in our society and kids see that. However, is it GOOD for our society to have so many kids wanting to be influencers? Not at all, because many of the traits that tend to make someone a successful influencer don’t make them particularly good citizens or people. Think about it – what makes someone a good influencer? Things like being extremely emotional, being unstable, willing to do anything for attention, being willing to offend others, enjoying controversy, and lacking a sense of conscience or shame. Will our society be better or worse if it’s full of people like that?

Now, how about this?

I still stand rather than leave a woman standing, but I get why other men don't. If you're just as likely to be mocked as a chump by guys or a sexist by women as thanked for giving up your seat, it's not a surprise most men won't bother.

A behavior that is consistently rewarded, continues. A behavior that is consistently punished, is extinguished.

So, what happens when shoplifting isn’t seriously punished? You get waves of shoplifting that leads to stores putting all their merchandise under lock and key. Furthermore, do you think that someone who concludes it’s fine to steal from a store would have a moral problem with stealing from YOUR yard, shed, or house? No, of course not.

What happens when you don’t seriously punish protesters who block the road? You get more protesters who block the road. Why would anyone want the road blocked if a loved one is in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, they may miss a flight or they’re just on their way home from work? It doesn’t convince anybody or accomplish anything. It’s just a bunch of extremely selfish people who think an opportunity to get a selfie protesting is worth any amount of inconvenience for their neighbors.

This is another reason why it’s so dumb to cheerlead protesters going to people’s private residences or confronting politicians in public. One day, you’re AOC cheerleading on the dirtbags harassing Brett Kavanaugh in public:

Next thing you know, you’re the one being harassed in public:

The video starts with her saying, “I need you to understand that this is not okay.”

This is why it’s valuable to have rules of conduct that apply universally, as opposed to, “Anything my tribe does is okay and anything those other guys do is bad.” It never ends up working that way long-term. Instead, people follow incentives. If activists conclude they’re going to be rewarded for bad behavior, they’re going to engage in bad behavior. If they feel as if even their “own side” won’t like it, they won’t do it.

Even though this seems like a very basic, obvious principle, it feels like many Americans have either forgotten it or have gotten so wrapped up in their own self-interest, that they’ve stopped caring about the impact of their actions on our wider society.

On some level, this is understandable. People put themselves first and different groups want to recognize and promote different types of behavior. That being said, when these attitudes are taken to an extreme, it has society-wide consequences. Let’s take an example from a foreign country:

If you asked most people if they’d like to live somewhere that had that kind of lack of crime, they’d say, “Yes.” However, it’s well worth considering WHY China is that way. It certainly doesn’t “just happen” or occur because somebody says, “It sure would be nice if it was that way.” There are reasons people behave the way that they do:

China also has an all-powerful, totalitarian government that extensively spies on the public and hands out draconian punishments for crimes. The population is ethnically very similar, which decreases crime and increases the trust of the population. Compared to Americans, Chinese people are also much less independent and much more collectivist in their thinking. All those things can help create a low crime rate.

Could we do something similar in America WITHOUT creating a totalitarian spy state? It seems likely that you could. For example, if you had a big city full of let’s say, devout Christians in America, you could probably create a very similar effect. Instead of doing the right thing because the government is watching them, they’d do the right thing because they quite correctly believe God is watching them. Of course, the sort of moral upbringing that goes along with being raised Christian would help as well and so would cultural similarity. A large group of culturally similar devout Christians from low-crime ethnicities would be likely to have an even lower crime than just a group of ethnically mixed devout Christians.

In other words, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, but yet and still, the attitudes, behaviors, principles, and choices that get rewarded and punished will change what your society looks like.

So, what kind of society do you want to live in?

If you want a society with free speech, you have to reward free speech and punish censorship. If you want a truthful society, you have to reward telling the truth and punish lying. If you want a society full of good people, you have to make a point of rewarding good people and looking down on immoral people. If you want a lawful society, you have to treat people who obey the law with respect and look down on and punish criminals.

If you don’t do that because you don’t want to “judge” anyone, a society automatically ends up sinking to the lowest common denominator because the worst people do what they want with few consequences and end up setting the tone for everyone else.

Worse yet, if a society REWARDS people who do the wrong things, everything goes downhill in a hurry. Every time a politician gets away with a crime or a lie, the rest of them think, “Maybe I’m a sucker for not doing it, too.” Whenever some dirtbag influencer gains traffic and attention for doing or saying something horrible, other influencers wonder if they should follow in their footsteps. Whenever a woman decides to divorce her husband and gets half the money he earned in a divorce, it makes other women who saw how she was rewarded more likely to divorce their husbands. Whenever some mentally ill kid gets endlessly celebrated in school and online for becoming trans, other damaged kids learn from their example.

Granted, there are people who consider practically EVERYTHING to be political, but to the vast majority of people, we’re not even talking about political issues here. We’re talking about some of the most basic things that make a place nice to live in.

Nobody wants to get carjacked on the way to work, be lied to all day long, or have people scream abuse at them when they walk down the street. If you want an orderly, kind, law-abiding, competent, moral country, then those things have to be rewarded in your society, and, at least to a degree, their opposites need to be punished.

For good or ill, we get what we incentivize. Given how things are playing out in America these days, maybe it’s time for all of us to put a lot more thought into the ramifications of what’s being rewarded and punished in this country.

---