Positive market incentives operating in the public interest are too few and far between, and are also up against a seemingly never-ending expansion of perverse incentives and lobbying.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Too little attention is paid to the dark side of incentives. They are anything but a magic bullet. Psychologists have known this for years, but it seems largely hidden from the world of commerce.
Far too many businesses have been all too eager to lobby for maintaining and increasing subsidies and mandates paid by taxpayers and consumers.
I think we have to look at the whole way campaigns are financed. The No. 1 problem is PAC and special-interest money.
The good news is that economists are intelligent, engaging and often charming folks. The bad news is their work is often of little use to investors.
Economists love to talk about incentives, but the bottom line is that people hate being controlled or manipulated, even when done through voluntary institutions. This is one of the most important tensions in capitalism.
In the long run, the public interest depends on private virtue.
We don't think much about the up and down of the public market.
The reality is that asking the public to fund political campaigns accomplishes nothing. Candidates continue to seek interest-group support through other channels, both financial and in-kind, and corruption problems abound.
Philanthropy should be taking much bigger risks that business. If these are easy problems, business and government can come in and solve them.
Having an investor on your board of directors who is naive about public markets or finds them complex or scary is non-optimal.
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