Incentivisms

If anyone saw the final of The Apprentice the other night you will have seen a prime example of incentives at their best and their worst. My favourite moment was when one of the finalists tried to unite his hopelessly fragmented team by offering to take them all to Barcelona. What the unfortunatel would-be high flyer failed to realise was that his team couldn't stand each other. The prospect of a team holiday in the sun was actually more like a punishment than a reward.

Rule one: know your audience!

Alan Sugar on the other hand, knew what he was doing. He managed to get the two finalists to surrender their entire lives, location, family, leisure time, career, all for the promise of a huge salary and the prospect of 'success'.

Rule two: know your audience!

I've been thinking a bit about incentives recently prompted by a book I've been reading called Freakonomics in which an economist and a journalist attempt to reveal the statistical underbelly of (post)modern life. This fascinating and at times mathematically challenging book is based entirely on the assumption that human beings are fundementally motivated by incentives.

As a Christian the idea that we are essentially weighers of advantage versus disadvantage seems to me not only to fail to do justice to the many acts of selflessness present in our communities but also somehow to reduce us. This perspective discounts the inner creativity and passion which compells us occasionally to do the ridiculous, and occasionally the sublime.