Obeying Incentives Is Loser Behavior: You Should Decide Right and Wrong for Yourself
Economists say fix the incentives and you fix the world. Mastroianni says that misses half of it: even if you have a reason to do something bad, you still shouldn't do it. Outsourcing your value judgments to an incentive structure is abandoning the core task of being a person.
The video won't play here. Listen to the audio instead:
The argument · timestamps estimated from transcript position
Having a reason to do wrong doesn't mean you should
Mastroianni first concedes that incentive analysis beats ‘people are bad, so they do bad things’: at least it admits people have reasons, and change the reasons and you may change the behavior. But he adds a premise economists often miss — if you do it because an external reward structure tells you it's good, because it will pat you on the head or give you a little treat, that is loser behavior. His words: even if you have a reason to do something bad, you still shouldn't do it. He jokes that this is an obvious point, but some points are so obvious that no one thinks to say them.
— Adam MastroianniThe real Omelas is a Rube Goldberg machine
In Le Guin's Omelas, the whole city's happiness rests on a tortured child in the basement, and some people choose to walk away. Mastroianni says that story was in his head when he wrote the piece, but he cut a section: in the story you have some metaphysical connection to the child, whereas in reality the connection is more like a Rube Goldberg machine — you aren't the one torturing the child, you're three warehouses away, you're just the hammer that swings down, hits the ball, the ball rolls down the slope, lights the match. The bad thing is far from you, you didn't do it with your own hands, but you're in the causal chain. That makes ‘walking away’ much harder and far less heroic: it doesn't look like brushing the dust of Omelas off your feet, it looks like ‘I'm not going to be VP of brand partnerships at Philip Morris.’
— Adam MastroianniOutsourcing value judgment means being conscripted by bad actors
Russ asks: are you saying we should encourage people to be more moral? Mastroianni says he doesn't think that can be centrally organized, mandated, compelled or cultivated by government — when government tries, it tends to go bad fast. His goal is to produce the kind of person who does the right thing even when it's inconvenient, even when it's costly. He offers a chain: if you only do what's rewarded, you can start out amoral and end up deputized for the immoral. His judgment: bad people are rare; what's plentiful is people without a strong sense of right and wrong, and those people can be turned into an army by bad people.
— Adam MastroianniThe big fish finds you; you decide whether to look
The ‘big fish’ comes from Lovecraft's Dagon: a man sees a fish god, is never right again for the rest of his life, and finally jumps out a window. Mastroianni uses it as a metaphor — everyone has a fish inside them, and if you really take it seriously you have to overturn your entire life. His own fish was the 2020 Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference in San Francisco: the venue was in the Tenderloin, and inside people ate canapés and talked about reducing implicit bias by a tiny amount, possibly just noise, while outside people were curled up with fentanyl in their veins. He specifically mentions the 1970s seminary student experiment: randomly assigned to speak on the Good Samaritan or on career opportunities, then randomly told they were late or on time, and only ‘whether they were in a hurry’ determined whether they stopped for the man lying by the road. He says one of the most famous findings in the field, known to everyone in that room, and no one felt any conflict about it — that was the fish he saw.
— Adam MastroianniSumner went back to provoking after being caned
Charles Sumner is the man whose statue Mastroianni walked past every day in grad school. He came from a poor Boston family, his father was illegitimate; the place where he grew up was home to large numbers of formerly enslaved people. He went to France, and at the Sorbonne saw Black and white students studying together as equals, and wrote in his diary: the difference between people is obviously not caused by nature, it can only be caused by education. He became a radical abolitionist, arguing not just for abolition but for racially integrated schools and Black suffrage — things that only became common sense more than a century later. As a senator he gave a fierce anti-slavery speech, and days later a Southern congressman walked up to his desk and beat him with a cane until he was nearly dead, trapped in his desk, soaking in his own blood, and it took him more than a year to recover. After recovering he kept being a provocateur, and pushed Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation two years early. His new biographer says Sumner is cited 40 times in the brief for Brown v. Board.
— Adam MastroianniDesperate to join the club of people you don't respect
Russ cites Adam Smith: we want to be loved and to be lovely, so we should surround ourselves with good people whose approval we want. Mastroianni goes harder: he and the people close to him have spent their whole lives desperately seeking opportunities from people they don't respect, landing them in an absurd position — ‘I think they're bad people, I think they're completely wrong about what's good and bad, but I really want them to let me into their club.’ Into it for what? You will inevitably become more like them, and you can't control it. He says the moment you can say ‘I distrust this person's judgment so much that even though he could give me success, I'll go do something else’ — that is the moment of freedom he described earlier: that person has no power over you anymore.
— Adam MastroianniHigh pay doesn't buy you better professors
Russ says he made about $18,600 a year when he graduated, and is glad he didn't go into finance or a corporate chief economist's office. He asks: economics professors can make $500,000 or even $750,000 a year — with more money, aren't the norms that founded the discipline, honesty and truth-seeking, harder to maintain? Mastroianni says this is more a selection effect than a corruption effect: the people attracted by $750,000 are often not the people who can be good professors; the consequence of high pay isn't corrupting people who might have been good, it's attracting people who shouldn't be there and making them compete with each other. Russ presses: doesn't paying $750,000 get you the best professors? Mastroianni answers: the professor you want is someone who puts truth above everything, and the more money there is, the people who come are the ones who don't put truth first — and our selection procedures can't tell who's in it for truth and who's in it for the salary, especially since many of the people doing the selecting came for the wrong reasons themselves.
— Adam MastroianniStatus is harder to separate from knowledge than money is
Mastroianni says what attracts the wrong people in most places isn't money, it's status: being called professor feels good, so many people want it, so few get it. And status markers are harder to distinguish from knowledge markers than money markers are, because they claim to be knowledge markers — ‘you published in a good journal, so it must be good work.’ He says we've reached the point where people talk about writing a specific paper for a specific journal, calling papers pubs or A-pubs, and he finds it vile and disgusting, like defacing a cross. He says this is why he isn't in academia: he's willing to earn less to study what he thinks matters, to tolerate job insecurity, to move all over the world, but if after all that it's still ‘why don't you publish a pile of junk papers’ and ‘why don't you massage the statistics a little’, then it isn't worth it.
— Adam MastroianniIn their own words · checked verbatim
even if you have a reason to do a bad thing, you shouldn't do it. I realize it's an obvious point, but some points are so obvious that no one ever thinks to say them.
Adam Mastroianni8:07
I am not the person torturing the child. I'm actually three warehouses away. I'm just the hammer that swings and hits the ball that rolls down the ramp so that it lights the match.
Adam Mastroianni12:21
if you do what gets rewarded, you can start as amoral, and you can end up being deputized for the immoral. Which I think is where a lot of people end up. I think there are few villains. There are many people who don't have a strong sense of right and wrong, and that can be turned into an army by the villains.
Adam Mastroianni17:27
I felt like I've decided to tell the truth, and I'm already dead. They can't kill me more.
Adam Mastroianni22:56
I think they're bad people. I think they're totally wrong about what's good and bad in the world. I really hope they let me into their club
Adam Mastroianni40:20
what you want out of a professor is the kind of person who is willing to prioritize the truth above all else. And, if you make it very financially attractive to be a professor, you're going to attract a bunch of people who do not prize the truth above all else.
Adam Mastroianni54:05
I'm willing to sacrifice a lot if it means I can study what I think is important, describe it using words that I think are accurate, and for that I'm willing to make less money. I'm willing to have job insecurity. I'm willing to have to move around all over the world. But, if you do all those things and then it's, like, 'And, why not put out a bunch of junk papers,' or 'Why not fudge the stats a little bit?' That's, like, 'No, no, then it's not worth it.'
Adam Mastroianni57:37
Figures
| Russ Roberts' salary when he graduated | about $18,600 | 50:15 |
| Times Sumner is cited in the Brown v. Board brief | 40 | 31:28 |
| Time Sumner took to recover after being caned | more than a year | 31:28 |
| Years early Sumner pushed the Emancipation Proclamation | two | 31:28 |
| Share of the population that were farmers 150 years ago | 80% to 90% | 59:01 |
Glossary
- Rube Goldberg machine
- A contraption that performs a simple action through a long chain of complicated, indirect steps; a metaphor for a causal chain that pushes responsibility far away.
- big fish
- Mastroianni's metaphor: an unexamined belief that, once you face it squarely, forces you to overturn your entire life.
- obedience to the unenforceable
- Lord Moulton's phrase for the territory between law and freedom, governed by people's own willingness to comply.
- blackpilled
- Internet slang for having completely given up hope on something and concluding it is doomed to fail.
How to listen
Suited to founders, investors and managers who depend professionally on incentive mechanisms, especially anyone designing team behavior with bonuses and titles.
The literary discussion of Omelas from 3 to 12 minutes can be fast-forwarded; jump straight to the big fish at 20:33.