the incentives which shape who we are as people

“Institutions form the incentive structure of a society and the political and economic institutions, in consequence, are the underlying determinant of economic performance.”

Douglas C North

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Incentives, institutions and thinking are intertwined. What I mean by that is what the world incentivizes affects what we perceive as important, therefore, it effects what we think and about, how we think about things, and, inevitably, why we end up doing some of the things we do. That said. Incentives are everywhere – visible and invisible, overt and subtle. Its almost like, well, everyone wants to game us and how we think and what we do. Okay. They do. And, for the most part, we go along with it.

Now. There are gobs of great books on how business uses gamification to manipulate workers. Yes. I said “manipulate.” Business is infamous for suggesting everything they do is to motivate workers. Its bullshit. Motivation is intrinsic and incentives are extrinsic. Yeah. There can be some blurring on what I just said, but generally speaking, business, and we as a society, would be a shitload better off if we just looked around at all the incentives and thought about whether we really believe those incentives, and prizes/rewards, are actually good. To be clear. If we did businesses would shit, politicians would panic and society would be seriously discombobulated.

Anyway. Today I am focused on society. Everyday people and everyday life.

Incentives actually create parameters of behavior. Aiming for good grades or passing a grade or, well, our system offers us a shitload of ‘incentives’ to do things. There is even an entire industry to optimize our time (society has a weird incentive that if you optimize you are a better person). All of these incentives to ‘do things’ and ‘do things a certain way’ and ‘look certain ways’ are all ways to divide society into ‘those who do’ and ‘those who don’t.’ In addition many of those things are actually used to judge people and are used to assess ‘moving up the ladder’ in life.

And, well, yeah, we go along with it.

But I am gonna make this a bit worse.

If we are honest, one of the characteristics of incentives is actually the phenomenon of power as in ‘power applied’. The exercise of power, the submission of some to the will of others, is inevitable in modern society. Some argue that nothing would be accomplished without it (I do not agree). In fact John Kenneth Galbraith said that (but he said a lot of other things I agree with). But there is a core of truth to the idea. It is true of gamification, is true of incentives, it is true of the standard operating procedure of most businesses and, while often never discussed, it is true as a feature of society. Power and incentives are inextricably linked. So while we speak of free will and freedom of choice, we ignore the fact that incentives often appear in conflict with all of those things, if not our even our best interests. Yeah. Incentives manipulate; even against some of our best interests. This is a semi-important thought because in a natural state, a society will typically morph in the direction of not only the individual interests, but the collective interests because we intrinsically understand that good progress touches everybody. As a note what I just described is actually a characteristic of a living system and not a machine. But then incentives enter the picture. Incentives intervene in the cultural characteristics of communities of practice. Incentives push, pull, sometimes even bully, to guide social systems in different directions. Power uses incentives like society is a machine. And, just to be clear, social media does exactly the same thing. More often than not this all creates false narratives which everyone knows is not true or healthy, yet, the incentives to follow along are enormous. Possibly the worst consequence is it translates into a lost vision for common good and the capacity to see all humankind as larger than the sum of its parts.

Then we get to the present.

All these incentives floating around out there, the ones the systems offer up as ‘good for us’, are actually becoming more and more visible. And more and more people are becoming a bit more stridently vocal about them. Why? Well. even thought it is 2023 let me introduce you to Alvin Toffler and 1970:

For the foreseeable future, we must anticipate still more rapid value change. Within this context, however, a second powerful trend is unfolding. For the fragmentation of societies brings with it a diversification of values. We are witnessing the crack-up of consensus. Most previous societies have operated with a broad central core of commonly shared values. This core is now contracting, and there is little reason to anticipate the formation of a new broad consensus within the decades ahead. The pressures are outward toward diversity, not inward toward unity.

This accounts for the fantastically discordant propaganda that assails the mind in the technosocieties. Home, school, corporation, church, peer group, mass media—and myriad subcults—all advertise varying sets of values. The result for many is an “anything goes” attitude—which is, itself, still another value position. We are, declares Newsweek magazine, “a society that has lost its consensus … a society that cannot agree on standards of conduct, language and manners, on what can be seen and heard.”

Toffler, Future Shock, 1970

I offer up Toffler to suggest that as things break down a lot of people, and the system (and those in power), want it to stop breaking down. Well. They want it only to ever break the way they want it to break. So, construct, i.e., incentives, get ratcheted up. And it’s not like the prizes get any better its just that the penalties seem to be harsher if you don’t go along with the system incentives – you think wrong, you do wrong, you act wrong and the system, and society, relentlessly suggests that is bad – for you. Look. The system creators needed to stuff to get done so they crafted a system to ‘motivate’ people to do what they needed to do so that the institutions could get the stuff done they wanted to get done. And today is no different. They are worried their stuff will not get done so they scurry about telling people what is important and why the system incentives shouldn’t be abandoned. Sometimes they point out the visible obvious ones and sometimes the slyly nudge the subtle incentives around. Doesn’t matter. All incentives are used by people in power.

Keep your eyes open and your minds working.