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The Best Way To Stop Bad Conduct Is To Take Away The Rewards For It

By David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)

Why Do People Do “Bad” Things?

Except for psychopaths who do evil because it stimulates them, people do bad things in the pursuit of:

Money is the most common motive for bad conduct, not the least because, to some extent, people believe that enough money can also get them sex, power, respect and fame.

So, how do you deter people from doing bad things? You can

OR

You can take away the reward for the bad conduct so that people have no incentive to do the “bad thing” in the first place.

Reduce Or Increase Incentives To Get The Conduct You Want

People’s actions follow their motivations.

Change the motivations, change the rewards, and you will change people’s actions.

It’s far more efficient to establish a system where people don’t want to engage in disliked conduct than to try to catch and punish violators after they have done the crime.

Drug Cartel Crimes

Why do drug cartels do so many bad things? Because there is a great deal of money to be made by selling recreational drugs.

If people couldn’t make huge profits by selling illegal drugs, the cartels, and the bad things they do, would disappear like water in the desert.

How could you take the profit out of selling recreational drugs?

I asked my friend, a world-famous gene-editing scientist, to get some of his pals to figure out how to tweak the human genome to “turn off” or “edit out” the genes that predispose certain people to drug and alcohol addiction.

In an email to him I said:

If we could reduce alcohol and drug addiction we could save about half a trillion dollars a year from the public budgets of cities, counties and states.

I suspect that there are probably fifteen or twenty different genes that play some part in addictive behavior. And I also suspect that certain ones interact with others in greater and lesser ways so that it’s not like flipping one or two digital switches.

What are the chances of selectively editing certain genes out of the human race to reduce susceptibility to substance addiction?

He replied, jokingly, “Problem Solved” and forwarded the following paragraph from a post in the February 4, 2018 edition of New Scientist under the heading “No More Cravings”:

“Human clinical trials of an addiction pill based on the ‘love hormone’ or ‘cuddle chemical’ oxytocin are due to begin next year [2019]. Oxytocin is naturally released during sex, social interactions and when women give birth. Giving an oxytocin-mimicking drug to rats, monkeys and gibbons hooked on various substances seemingly cured them of their addiction.”

I don’t pretend to know whether gene editing, anti-addiction pills, or drug legalization would, on balance, be the best way to reduce the amount of money people are willing to spend to buy recreational drugs.

I doubt that on a net cost/benefit basis any of those three alternatives would be worse than the current policy of criminalizing drugs which fills our prisons and creates and funds multi-billion dollar wholesale murder organizations.

As an aside, in 2017 there were over 31,000 murders in Mexico and over 70,000 drug-overdose deaths in the U.S.

Corporate Bad Behavior

I’ve written several columns on various techniques that might be employed to restrain bad behavior by business organizations:

Right now we are still following the slow, expensive and ineffective policy of

This is little more than an institutionalized version of Whack-A-Mole.

Wouldn’t it make more sense, be cheaper, faster, and more effective to instead reduce the incentive for executives to have their companies engage in corporate bad behavior?

High-level executives in publicly-traded corporations are given stock options as rewards for reaching higher revenue/lower costs targets. These stock options increase in value in direct proportion to increases in the short-term stock price.

This mechanism pays executives millions of dollars to achieve short-term increases in net profits, which additional profits translate into increases in the price of the company’s stock.

Is it any wonder that corporate bad behavior occurs again and again?

Suppose publicly-traded corporations were not allowed to give executives stock options or bonuses? Suppose executives could only be paid a set salary, period. Suppose you took away the executives’ personal financial incentive to increase their company’s short-term profits.

When you don’t incentivize short-term profits you remove much of the motivation to produce shoddy products, fail to honor warranties, increase fees, lower wages, skimp on safety, etc.

Capping Profits

In my columns:

I proposed reducing the incentive for bad corporate behavior by heavily taxing profits above the level earned by companies like Apple and Google in their best years.

If we want employers to pay workers more and executives less, why not give employers a financial incentive to do just that? Give companies an extra tax deduction for wages paid to the lowest-paid workers and take away the tax deductions for salaries paid above a certain level.

Summary

It’s far more efficient to create an environment where people are not rewarded for engaging “bad” conduct than it is to maintain a system that rewards them for doing bad things and then try to catch and punish them after they’ve crossed the line.

Let’s deal with conduct we want to deter or encourage by eliminating the incentives for disliked conduct and increasing the incentives for desired conduct rather then relying on criminalization of the objected-to activities.

— David Grace (DavidGraceAuthor.com)

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