Who’s Hungry for a Carrot Anyway?
Scott MyersWhat is the reward system in this country? From schools to businesses to private homes, are rewards making people feel appreciated and stimulating them toward further success or are they woefully incongruous with the achievement that is being recognized?
In school a student wins the class math contest and is rewarded with a basket of candy. So, she figures out that the candy wasn’t worth all the effort. Or, she doesn’t mind the candy and keeps working away at math just for sweets. What if she was rewarded with a chance to run the math contest next time? She learns that success leads to further opportunities and new experiences.
At work a businessman succeeds at setting a new record for sales and is rewarded with a promotion to a position that pays better but requires more time and travel. So he learns that success means he’ll have to work harder and longer while getting less time for family and leisure… but he got more money, right?!
We’re looking at the broad spectrum of rewards here. From the school and work examples outlined above to more general rewards like government incentives, reward systems need to be updated and utilized more effectively. The government expects citizens to abide by certain rules or appropriate disciplinary actions will be implemented (e.g.: prison time, financial penalties, etc…). The reward system, which could provide more of a counterbalance to the penalty system, is nearly non-existent, therefore leaving the population trying to avoid punishment rather than seeking to be rewarded. Some cities have implemented trial reward systems (for example, police officers stopping people who are obeying all the rules and giving them gift certificates), but these attempts have been few and unsustained in comparison to all the penalties enacted regularly for bad behavior.
This sort of system stirs several responses from people. “Big Brother is watching, so be good or face the consequences” is the unspoken sentiment of the fearful majority. These folks realize rewards aren’t even conceivable, so they just want to avoid pain. “It’s not cheating unless you get caught” is the motto of the boldly disobedient. These people recognize the system for what it is, refuse to live in fear, and decide to find their own rewards while being willing to face the consequences if they are caught in the act.
Please do not think that I don’t recognize the value of freedom, safety, protection, and other positive benefits of living in a society that has to have negative consequences for behaviors that put them in jeapordy. I am only arguing that reward programs that are implemented effectively can play just as crucial a role in the prevention of negative behavior as penalties can.
The note of caution to be acknowledged and stressed here is that not all reward systems are inherently good. A recent article took a look at the ‘safety net’ of merit status within companies, focusing specifically on the new strategies employed by Utah. In Best of Both Worlds they discuss how the archaic practice of rewarding employees who have simply shown up to work for a certain number of years with merit status (meaning they are more difficult or even impossible to fire) is counter-productive. Employees should rather be encouraged to perform well through performance-based rewards rather than rewarded for time served at the job. There is something to be said for loyalty, but folks that simply survive their job without exceeding or even meeting certain expectations should not be retained simply because they have ‘been around a while’ and are impossible to terminate. Regardless, this specific group of state employees in Utah was given the opportunity to choose whether they wanted to retain their merit status or forfeit it for a chance at more performance based rewards (raises, promotions, etc…), and 90% chose to give it up and take the performance-based challenge. “It has been a healthy thing because you’re motivated to do a good job… You’re motivated to keep your skills current. Plus you get paid more, so it has been a win-win,” is the comment that followed this move in Utah. A broken reward system got fixed, and now they will reap the benefits.
This solution seemed to come about after the rewards system stopped being mechanical and traditional and started being people-focused. On a workplace rewards website, there are multiple possibilities of what type of reward stimulates what kind of employee. Money, time, travel, promotion, memberships to health clubs, and other incentives motivate people at different levels. Is it not the same in schools? Prisons? A parent’s interaction with his child?
Credit card companies understand this system. They make their rewards very personal, and they are reaping serious benefits. What they haven’t figured out is an effective negative consequence, leaving a large majority of their patrons free to abuse the credit while suffering only the little sting of bankruptcy.
Can we not find a middle ground where rewards and consequences dovetail together in a balanced manner that helps to motivate positive, productive people while restraining negative, destructive people?
For a starting place to your own investigation on a rewards program for your workplace, school, or city look at www.iloverewards.com or www.maritzrewards.com. These were the first internet sites I visited on my search for better reward concepts to implement across the general spectrum. Let me know if you have found other better resources to achieve this end.
September 23rd, 2007 at 10:38 am
Scott,
I have trouble imagining a proposal more dangerous to liberty than asking the government to start rewarding “good” behavior. To do that, the government would first have to define good behavior on behalf of all of its citizens.
The essence of liberty is for individuals to pursue ends that they consider good. A lot of individuals will be mistaken and pursue ends that probably aren’t good by any standard–like setting the Guiness World Record for lifetime tobacco consumption, or running a strip club. But without the liberty to make bad choices, there is no liberty at all.
Law, as you point you, is a system of negative consequences. All law can do in a free society is impose negative consequences on a certain range of behaviors that threaten everyone’s liberty, like murdrer and theft. Our law punishes a lot more conduct than that, and to the extent it does, we aren’t really as free we like to concieve ourselves as.
What you propose would destroy liberty at a whole new level. It would change the purpose of the law from telling us what we must not do to telling us what we ought to do. Liberty won’t exist in a meaningful sense once the government starts telling us what the ends and purposes of our lives should be rather than forbidding certain means to their attainment.
September 23rd, 2007 at 7:48 pm
Well, Jeremy, I knew in writing this essay that the governmental application of its contents would be the most risky of all. But, that does not take away from the argument’s application to other institutions such as the educational system, the workplace, or the homefront, does it? Or are negative consequences all we have to safely fall back on in those circumstances as well?
September 23rd, 2007 at 8:14 pm
I almost forgot. As a merely hypothetical mental exercise, consider your comment in the reverse. We have made it permissible for our government to tell us what is NOT right, and yet you say it would be an unimaginable mistake to allow laws to reward what IS right. By outlining what is wrong, hasn’t the government already made a certain claim on what is right, however deep and wide that claim might span? What if a government existed that only rewarded those doing what was right, that is those doing good (and did nothing concerning those that did what was wrong)? People would be shocked and scared, right? Murderers would be on the loose, child molesters on the prowl, and so on. But, the public would probably start finding some solutions to these folks on their own, right? And, should we not be equally shocked at the current reality where uncountable dollars are spent finding, incarcerating, feeding, insuring, counseling, and even executing people who are doing wrong while people who are doing what is right go untouched and unrewarded?
September 24th, 2007 at 8:43 am
Prohibiting certain behavior definitely implies something about what people ought to do, but it does so in a fashion much more consistent with liberty than telling people what to do. It’s the difference between “Do X” and “Do anything in the world you want to, except X.”
I do not share you concern about “people who are doing what is right” going “untouched and unrewarded.” I’m a fan of freedom. A big part of what freedom is about is the freedom to define and attain the rewards you want out of life. Once we start accepting rewards from the government instead of taking them from the real world, that freedom, and most freedom, is gone.
What troubles me most about your premise is that you appear to see very little difference between a student in class and a citizen. You presume that both should be totally prostrated to the authorities set above them, relying on them to be told what to do, how to do it, and what kinds of candy they can get for doing it well. That kind of servitude may be appropriate in the classroom, but it is anathema to a free society.
September 24th, 2007 at 9:02 am
In some circumstances, governments can accomplish useful things by offering incentives for desired behavior (like tax breaks for home owners). But it’s a delicate balance. Look at the way welfare, designed to keep people on the brink from dying of starvation, has turned into “free money for the lazy.” The more we expect, desire, or rely on the government to reward us for acting in a certain way, the closer we get to turning over responsibility for deciding the course of our lives.
September 24th, 2007 at 10:55 am
Your use of welfare is unintentionally instructive, Jeremy. Your statement about welfare being meant simply to stave off starvation, for instance, isn’t quite accurate.
Welfare, at least as it was practiced by states and local charities in America from the mid-19th century and intended under the original ADC program (Aid to Dependent Children, which became AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, in the early ’60s), was meant for more than just to keep people from dying of starvation. It flowed out of the “widows pensions” programs, which aimed to give “deserving” single mothers (those who were single because their husbands had died, or had otherwise unaccountably left them) enough support to allow them to stay at home, not have to work, and focus on raising their children. It only supported single mothers “in good standing”, however, and was usually denied to non-whites and single mothers deemed morally unfit. In its origin, welfare exhibited some of the traits Scott calls for and some of the traits Jeremy extols.
Its path from limited, conditionally-awarded government program to guaranteed government entitlement tracks pretty closely with America’s development from a society that tended to view freedom more along the lines of what Jeremy seems to describe (freedom from state interference) to a society that tends to view freedom more along the lines of what Scott seems to envision (freedom based on state intervention).
Jason DeParle’s excellent book, “American Dream: three women, ten kids, and a nation’s drive to end welfare”, about the 1996 welfare reform act and its consequences as of 2003 or so, is an excellent primer for more on this discussion.