http://www.williamboot.net/2007/03/19/a-load-of-pony/ A weblog on economics and psychology Tue, 06 Jan 2009 23:23:28 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.4 http://www.williamboot.net/2007/03/19/a-load-of-pony/#comment-70693 Tue, 14 Oct 2008 06:30:39 +0000 http://www.williamboot.net/2007/03/19/a-load-of-pony/#comment-70693 girl man site man red you man girl man site man red you man

]]> http://www.williamboot.net/2007/03/19/a-load-of-pony/#comment-4779 Mon, 19 Mar 2007 22:17:25 +0000 http://www.williamboot.net/2007/03/19/a-load-of-pony/#comment-4779 [...] Turning to the economics and politics of the programme, I find much of what I want to say has already been said by William Boot, of whose Fixed Point I was hitherto unaware, but it’s well worth a read. I particularly liked his point that Curtis’ discussion of the way targets in the public services have been so spectacular a failure in many cases, and of how they’ve led to corruption in private business, suggests, if anything, that people actually do behave as ’selfish rational maximisers.’ Give people targets to achieve, and make these important enough — people were saying on the programme their annual increment, or even their job from one month to the next, depended on meeting them — and obviously they’ll find creative ways of meeting the targets, even at the expense of what the enterprise is supposed to be about. If your job depends on not having patients waiting on trolleys in hallways, and there’s no obvious way of getting them into beds on wards because you haven’t got enough, then it’s entirely sensible you’ll take the castors off the trolleys, call them beds, declare the corridors are, in fact, wards and thus solve the problem. Similarly, provide directors with sufficient incentives in the form of stock options and obviously at some point the temptation artificially to ramp up the share price will become irresistible. [...] […] Turning to the economics and politics of the programme, I find much of what I want to say has already been said by William Boot, of whose Fixed Point I was hitherto unaware, but it’s well worth a read. I particularly liked his point that Curtis’ discussion of the way targets in the public services have been so spectacular a failure in many cases, and of how they’ve led to corruption in private business, suggests, if anything, that people actually do behave as ’selfish rational maximisers.’ Give people targets to achieve, and make these important enough — people were saying on the programme their annual increment, or even their job from one month to the next, depended on meeting them — and obviously they’ll find creative ways of meeting the targets, even at the expense of what the enterprise is supposed to be about. If your job depends on not having patients waiting on trolleys in hallways, and there’s no obvious way of getting them into beds on wards because you haven’t got enough, then it’s entirely sensible you’ll take the castors off the trolleys, call them beds, declare the corridors are, in fact, wards and thus solve the problem. Similarly, provide directors with sufficient incentives in the form of stock options and obviously at some point the temptation artificially to ramp up the share price will become irresistible. […]

]]>