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Nancy F. Koehn
Strings Attached is a thoughtful…look at the encroaching power of the market and its mechanisms in a range of human activity.—The New York Times
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Incentives can be found everywhere--in schools, businesses, factories, and government--influencing people's choices about almost everything, from financial decisions and tobacco use to exercise and child rearing. So long as people have a choice, incentives seem innocuous. But Strings Attached demonstrates that when incentives are viewed as a kind of power rather than as a form of exchange, many ethical questions arise: How do incentives affect character and institutional culture? Can incentives be manipulative or exploitative, even if people are free to refuse them? What are the responsibilities of the powerful in using incentives? Ruth Grant shows that, like all other forms of power, incentives can be subject to abuse, and she identifies their legitimate and illegitimate uses.
Grant offers a history of the growth of incentives in early twentieth-century America, identifies standards for judging incentives, and examines incentives in four areas--plea bargaining, recruiting medical research subjects, International Monetary Fund loan conditions, and motivating students. In every case, the analysis of incentives in terms of power yields strikingly different and more complex judgments than an analysis that views incentives as trades, in which the desired behavior is freely exchanged for the incentives offered.
Challenging the role and function of incentives in a democracy, Strings Attached questions whether the penchant for constant incentivizing undermines active, autonomous citizenship. Readers of this book are sure to view the ethics of incentives in a new light.
Dr_Wilson_Trivino
Posted March 6, 2012
The idea of the book Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives by Ruth W. Grant came about from a class she taught in Greek political philosophy. The discussion centered on under what circumstances you should use coercion or force when attempting to persuade a certain action.
Grant goes back to the philosophical root of these and the even defines the changing meaning of incentive. The current accepted intent of the word is a relatively new concept.
The author explores the concept of inceptive by the lens of ethical and unethical ones, the standard and how they are judged.
What makes this book valuable is that it goes beyond academic ease and uses the cases to explore how they are implicated. The most interesting one is when she explores the history of plea bargaining in our court systems. I find this fascinating and gives insight to a relatively new tool used.
Political Scientist Ruth Grant opens the discussion on what works when crafting public policy that develops to foster a desired outcome. This is a gray area and can be tricky when implemented.
Strings Attached is a good read to hook you into a larger discussion of what works and what doesn’t in public policy or how what are better tactics we can use in persuading others in our daily lives.
Overview
Incentives can be found everywhere--in schools, businesses, factories, and government--influencing people's choices about almost everything, from financial decisions and tobacco use to exercise and child rearing. So long as people have a choice, incentives seem innocuous. But Strings Attached demonstrates that when incentives are viewed as a kind of power rather than as a form of exchange, many ethical questions arise: How do incentives affect character and institutional culture? Can incentives be manipulative or...