Discussion about this post

User's avatar
E.W.R's avatar

In conversations with friends in even the liberal mainstream (where I belonged fairly comfortably, too, as late as the beginning of Obama’s second term), I find such a stubborn and sometimes even angry resistance to seriously considering the impact of incentives in influencing human behavior. I’m hardly an economist or even proponent of a traditional, reductive rational actor model of human behavior. We’re animals and individual psychology and group dynamics count for a lot, too. But the best I come up with is these friends, who are all financially comfortable people with advanced degrees living in large cities, is that they consider a concern re: incentivizing bad behavior to be a species of victim-blaming. They seem to consider all people in victim categories (by identity or poverty) as lacking agency. They don’t seem to appreciate that the structures and incentives and personal examples they create and model for their own kids, almost without thinking, might actually be important to other kids, other adults, even when they lack some of their and their own kids’ advantages. I keep seeing an inability or unwillingness to consider incentives as one element in so many disastrous policies being promulgated from the left. Certainly, this isn’t a new story, but the variety and reach of such programs keeps expanding unchecked. To check such irresponsible excesses seems to require such bad outcomes a coalition of unwoke but implicitly approved of minorities and disaffected liberals revolts. Anyone else already has been or will be labeled “alt-right” or “far-right”, smeared and silenced.

Expand full comment
Lorenzo Warby's avatar

Is there a ‘no’ missing from this sentence?

“A substantial number of men who had [no] history of dysphoria or gender-nonconformity, but who did have a history of serious sexual violence, were suddenly deciding that they were women and should be cohabiting with female prisoners.”

Expand full comment
19 more comments...

No posts