Head on over to TED to see a talk on Wisdom delivered by Barry Schwartz this year at the TED conference in Long Beach, CA (sorry, can't find en embed URL on the page). In it Schwartz, famous for studying the link between actual human psychology and economics, extols the virtue of, well, virtues but especially wisdom. He provides interesting anecdotes including hospital janitors who break the rules as outlined in their job descriptions, a father who makes an honest mistake and falls into a bureaucratic nightmare, and a poll conducted in Sweden that showed that offering incentives can be devastatingly counterproductive to their stated aim. You can boil down his points down to the following: overly restrictive rules with a legalistic adherence to them is stifling to human beings in every sense of the word, and over-reliance on incentives/disincentives encourages habitual selfishness, making any such system self-defeating; the selfish bastards it creates will always eventually succeed in subverting it.
Follow me over the jump for a more in depth discussion.
Professor Schwartz, I think, isn't able to do the broad applicability of what he discusses justice in the 20 minutes TED allocates for talks. I can certainly see that it is applicable to the realm of politics where so many Republican politicians, both at the national level and here in CA (where they can do more damage due to various 2/3 rules floating around), seem to have decided that if their personal interests run counter to the best interests of the people they govern then screw the people.
The tricky question is this: how, then, do you structure your society? Morality certainly has an edge in that it is an evolved trait inborn to all of us (to a greater and lesser extent - I would certainly argue that many in the Bush administration were, shall we say, morally handicapped), thus it provides a structure which we are naturally happy to obey. The downside is that it comes with a lot of arbitrary historical baggage that can be at least as stifling as the worst bureaucracy. What's more, a lot of that baggage differs from culture to culture, so that poses a particular challenge for a nation made of the coming together of many cultures, as the U.S. is. The other downside is that morality works best in small communities. In modern society where malefactors can travel from group to group, like an influenza infection, it is far more difficult for morality to effectively constrain bad actors.
Rules certainly have the theoretical advantage of clarity; they demarcate sharply what is allowed from what is not, even if it's not really possible to write a set of rules with sufficient detail to cover all situations. What's more, since they are written out explicitly, rules also have the advantage that anyone (theoretically) can learn what they are without having to learn through trial and error. Incentives, then, are just rules enforced with both the carrot and the stick, and who doesn't want more carrots?
Looking back over what I've written, I see that I've only expanded some of the positives and negatives of morals, rules and incentives. At this vague level it is difficult to do much better, so perhaps constraining the problem a bit more will stimulate our thought processes. Let us be more concrete about what we want:
- Happy/fulfilled citizens - we want the people in our society to be happy that they're there,
- Stability - we want the society to be able to cope with the inevitable Murphy's law, like bad actors,
- Realism - we want the society to be achievable for real human beings with finite resources.
Believe it or not but that is sufficient. There are, of course, lots of other things we want in a society but these three things are enough to constrain the form that any society can take.
Given Schwartz's talk, a strictly rules based society fails on requirement one. It is not sufficient that people obey the rules, they have to like obeying them, on the whole, to be happy. Some totalitarian regimes think they can achieve this through keeping their citizens ignorant or fearful of the alternatives, but that never lasts. You might think that the addition of incentives would make just about any strictly rules based system tolerable, but as we've seen above it will fail requirement 2.
The only alternative that seems to leave is a society with, at least, a strong element of morality to it's basis. The question then becomes how do you achieve that? How do you get (back) to there from where we are? Schwartz's suggestion that we lionize moral heros is certainly a start, but is it enough?