To browse Academia. Ruth Grant explores a question that is becoming increasingly pertinent in this age of governing through contracts and neoliberal policy designs: why worry about incentives? Writing at about the same time as Michael Sandel's What Money Can't Buy, Grant tries to help the reader understand incentives by exposing them as instruments of power and as relationship-defining.
The paradigmatic problem this book tackles is how to persuade citizens to contribute to a public good when it is costly to them.
Such collective action problems are omnipresent in our society: voluntary payment of taxes, voting, limiting car use, restraining antibiotics use, etc. Bowles' book presents an encompassing overview of current empirical research, especially in behavioural economics, on the question of the effect of incentives.
While it discusses a lot of empirical research, the book is at the same time closely related to the field of political and applied philosophy. To begin with, Bowles explicitly connects this research with larger debates in the history of political thought. Secondly, his overview and conclusions seem to be very relevant for anyone thinking about the interactions between motivations, values and policies. One key complexity that non-ideal theory recognises are stronger feasibility constraints than an ideal-theoretical approach would acknowledge Farrelly, ; Rawls, Devising institutional arrangements that are not compatible with the Homo oeconomicus image of people to whatever degree this image is evident in reality โ and that are not incentive-compatible in this way โ could be seen as unworkable no matter how desirable such a scheme would otherwise be Brennan and Pettit, However, insofar as feasibility constraints are taken as limitations on what is realistic in terms of social justice, these limitations themselves must be subjected to critical scrutiny, particularly connected to the concern of inadvertently crowding out virtue.
What is feasible depends greatly on the balance between self-interested and other-interested motivations and, as will be explored, such feasibility constraints not only form the parameters of what can be done, they are also the consequences of what is done.
