A Better Way To Deter People From Doing Things We Don’t Like
The most efficient way to deter bad conduct is to make it unprofitable
By David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
Governments try to control people’s behavior by imposing rules, by making this illegal or that required. That leads to police, trials, appeals, prisons, delays, expense and waste.
Of course, anarchists want to let everybody do whatever they can get away with, and if you don’t like what someone does to you then your recourse is to do battle with them and try to impose your set of rules on them instead of their imposing their rules on you. Survival of the fittest. Law of the jungle. Not how most people want to live.
Those two approaches — rules, investigators, courts, and lawyers trying to control conduct versus a law-of-the-jungle struggle for dominance — are both based on a fundamental error.
Both strategies (a system of laws and prosecutions or a society living by the law-of-the-jungle) arise from their proponents’ political religions (socialism or anarchism) rather than from intelligent design.
What Motivates Humans
At the most basic level, human behavior is motivated by four forces:
- The desire to acquire a benefit (money, sex, celebrity, power, physical pleasure, etc.)
- The fear of loss (freedom, money, health, physical pain)
- The desire for approval
- The fear of disapproval
Economic Systems Dispense Rewards & Punishments
Every society has economic systems, business systems, social systems and political systems that automatically reward some activities and punish others. These systemic rewards and punishments motivate people to pursue some types of conduct and avoid others.
The most effective and efficient way to encourage or discourage human behavior is to build systems that automatically reward or punish the conduct you want to control without the need for civil or criminal trials.
If the system is producing results you don’t like, change the system to remove the incentives it gives people for engaging in that conduct.
For example, executive stock options give management an incentive to push the envelope to increase short term profits that will drive up the stock price. Instead of long and expensive litigation against the companies for their misdeeds (opioid sellers, Wells Fargo, VW, etc.) prohibit public corporations from issuing executive stock options and paying executive bonuses tied to short term goals.
You can prosecute drug companies for price fixing, but if you enact an excess-profits tax that takes away the excess profits that the price fixing generates, they probably won’t bother to fix prices in the first place.
For details on how this would work, see my column:
Seven Ways To Fix Capitalism
Take away the incentive to engage in the bad conduct in the first place instead of after-the-fact prosecution of it.
Cultural Systems Dispense Rewards & Punishments
Every society has cultural rules that promote some types of conduct and discourage others. Most people want to gain others’ approval and to avoid others’ disapproval.
If you want to encourage some types of conduct and discourage others then change the cultural values attached to those sorts of conduct.
Smoking, drinking and driving, racial discrimination and sexual harassment are all types of conduct that have been greatly reduced by an increase in cultural disapproval of them.
If the media publicized the names and cities of residence of the executives and members of the boards of directors of companies caught acting badly they might be less willing to do bad things.
If the Carrier workers’ union had made a TV commercial asking Americans to stop buying Carrier products in response to the company’s decision to fire thousands of American workers and send production to a factory in Mexico, the bad publicity and drop in sales might have forced Carrier to keep those jobs in the U.S.
Expressing Human Motivations In A Formula
We can express people’s motivation to do or not do things in a series of formulas.
The Potential Reward
For any type of conduct, the product of the (Amount of Hoped For Gain) times the (Perceived Chance of Success) is what the individual views as the Perceived Potential Reward for that conduct.
“If I rob the bank, I think I have a 90% chance of immediately getting at least $10,000.” $10,000 X 90% = $9,000 Perceived Potential Reward.
The Attractiveness Of The Reward Declines The Longer You Have To Wait To Get It
The perception of the size of this Potential Reward declines depending on the delay between when you do the act and when you get the reward.
“If I have to hide the money I steal from the bank for a year before I can spend it, then, in my mind, the Perceived Potential Reward is about the same as my getting $4,500 from some other robbery that I can spend immediately.”
In other words, the subjective value to the individual of a Potential Reward that he knows he won’t receive until twelve months in the future might be half what it would be worth to him if he knows that he’s going to get the reward immediately after doing the act.
Similarly, the more distant the possible punishment, the less the perpetrator fears getting it.
Quicker smaller rewards and quicker smaller punishments are far more effective motivators than slower bigger rewards and delayed bigger punishments.
The Potential Loss
The product of the (Amount Of The Feared Loss) times the (Perceived Chance of Failure) is the Perceived Potential Loss for that conduct.
Social Approval
The percentage of the society that approves of a certain conduct (the Percentage of Society That Approves) times how strongly they approve of that conduct (the Strength of Social Approval) is the Level of Social Approval.
What percentage of the population approves of being an organ donor? How strongly do they approve of being an organ donor?
Social Disapproval
The percentage of the society that disapproves of a certain conduct (the Percentage of Society That Disapproves) times how strongly they disapprove of that conduct (The Strength of Social Disapproval) equals the Level of Social Disapproval.
What percentage of the population disapproves of smoking? How strongly do they disapprove of smoking?
Strength Of The Incentive To Do Something
The product of the (Perceived Potential Reward) times the (Level of Social Approval) is the strength of the individual’s incentive to engage in that conduct (Incentive Strength).
Strength Of The Incentive Not To Do Something
The product of the (Perceived Potential Punishment) times the (Level of Social Disapproval) is the strength of the incentive not to engage in that conduct (Disincentive Strength).
Motivation Level = Incentive To Do It/Incentive Not To Do It
The result of dividing the Incentive Strength by the Disincentive Strength for any particular type of conduct yields the Motivation Level for that conduct. The Motivation Level is a measure of the strength of the motivation to engage in that conduct.
A Motivation Level > 1 means that people are motivated to engage in that conduct. A Motivation Level < 1 means that people are motivated to avoid that conduct.
The Motivation Level for crimes like murder, rape, burglary, etc. is certainly far less than one, that is, most people are strongly motivated not to do those things. In the U.S. the Motivation Level for tax fraud is probably less than one.
In many places in the U.S. the Motivation Level to smoke marijuana has gone from less than 1 to greater than 1.
In some other countries where “everyone” cheats on their taxes, the Motivation Level for tax fraud may be equal to or greater than 1.
The Higher The Motivation Level, The Larger The Percentage Of The Population Who Will Do It
As the Motivation Level for particular conduct climbs above 1, the larger the percentage of the population that will be willing to engage in that conduct.
No participation, however, ever goes up to 100% or down to 0%.
Some People Will Never Engage In The Desired Conduct
No matter how high the cash reward for helping the police catch an escaped mass murderer of a school bus full of innocent children and no matter how strong the Social Approval for helping the police catch an escaped mass murderer of a school bus full of innocent children, there will always be a few people who will, instead, chose to help the killer escape the police.
No matter how high the Potential Punishment for murder in the pursuit of cannibalism and no matter how strong the Social Disapproval of murder and cannibalism, there will always be a few Jeffrey Dahmers who will kill and eat people.
If you create a graph with the Motivation Level for some particular conduct on the vertical axis and the percentage of the population who will engage in that particular conduct on the horizontal axis you will get a chart that looks roughly like this:
Strategy To Reduce Disliked Conduct
To reduce disliked conduct, we want to
- Eliminate rewards that our economic or political systems provide for that conduct
- Revise our economic and political systems to non-judicially impose costs for that conduct, and
- Get a material percentage of the population to socially disapprove of that conduct.
Alternatives To Investigation, Arrest, Prosecution & Punishment
People dumping garbage on public streets is a problem.
You could make it a crime to dump garbage on public property, then track down the criminals, arrest them, have a trial, then try to collect a fine OR you could monitor popular dumping grounds, seize the vehicles that are dumping the garbage, tow them away, and keep them for thirty days.
After losing his truck for a month and paying $500 to $1,000 in towing and storage fees to get it back, that guy isn’t likely to do it again, especially if you keep the vehicle for 90 days for a second offense.
No arrests, no hearings, no trials, no jail. Just tow the vehicle away for a month and make the owner pay to get it back.
Do that a few hundred times and illegal dumping will decrease by over 90% in that community.
You want to stop so-called auto “side shows”? When one happens, block the streets and seize the cars for a month or two. The side-shows will be drastically reduced without the need for arrests, trials, or jails.
You want to cut drug prices? Tie the term of drug patents to the gross revenue the company earns from that drug instead of to a fixed number of years. Once the drug’s gross sales equal $10 billion or whatever, the patent expires.
Because the seller wants the patent to last as long as possible, it will have an incentive to sell 1,000,000 courses of treatment per year at $1,000 each for ten years rather than 100,000 treatments per year at $100,000 each for one year and then lose the patent.
Whatever conduct you want to stop, find a way to take the profit out of it, and/or find a way to make not doing it more profitable than doing it.
See these columns that apply this tactic to fixing abuses with for-profit schools:
How To Train Americans For Good-Paying Jobs Without Rip-off Schools, Without Student Loans & Without Spending Taxpayer Money
and stopping scalpers from draining the artists’ money by scalping concert tickets:
How To Stop Event-Ticket Rip Offs
It’s always more efficient to get the conduct you want by rewarding good conduct than by taking people to court in an attempt to punish them months or years later for bad conduct.
— David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
