Seattle leaders have the carrot and stick approach all backwards
May 17, 2018, 3:32 PM
Seattle City Council members Kshama Sawant, center, Mike O'Brien, left, and Teresa Mosqueda, right, listen to public comments on a proposal to tax large businesses to fund efforts to combat homelessness. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
(AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
The carrot and stick. It’s an age-old adage about how to get a stubborn horse moving. Should you lure with a treat or prod with some force?
It’s all about incentives. Even though someone’s behavior might seem like a mystery to you, they are responding to some kind of incentive that makes sense to them. It dawned on me today that the City of Seattle has these incentives exactly opposite.
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They should be using the carrot with the business community, and the stick with the homeless population. But for a complex mixture of political correctness and misguided intention, they decided to take the stick to big business and passively offer the services carrot to the homeless. A big, expensive, and voluntary carrot.
On the lower end of the motivation scale are instincts like survival. Most people wouldn’t punish someone for stealing bread if they were starving. The instinct to survive trumps following the rule about theft.
On the upper end of the motivation scale are concepts like altruism – selfless concern for the well-being of others at one’s own expense.
Most social scientists agree that it until your basic needs are met, a person is consumed with the base instincts of survival. Add drug addiction to the mix, and that drive becomes animalistic and one dimensional. Common sense evaporates and things become a modern day “Lord of the Flies.”
On the other hand, we live in an area that is quite aware of the sheer luck of how modern technology created the most concentrated wealth the world has ever known. Altruism is celebrated here by the people who have benefited most by the technology revolution. Where else have the most powerful among a population vowed to give away their wealth for the greater good of humanity? You don’t see Russian Oligarchs doing that.
So why would it seem like a good idea to use the stick with the folks prone to altruism and use the carrot with the people who are just trying to survive?
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It makes no sense. Especially when we’re talking about a relatively small amount of money to the people at the very top.
That brings us to the motivation of the people wielding the sticks and carrots. What’s driving them. The most likely answer is power, control, pride, and jealousy.
So where does this leave us? Unfortunately, back to where we started. Punishing the people we should be partnering with and coddling the people that are crying out for boundaries. Until we all get a chance to vote again, I guess all we can do is to think about our own motivations and find someone who can be the object of our own altruism.
That’s what makes is so powerful. Even when faced with selfishness and stupidity, doing good for another human being without any expectation of something in return is one of the most powerful things you can do.
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