The reflection this week is over a talk by Dr. Antony Davies for the Free Enterprise Society at Oklahoma State University. The talk is titled "Cooperation & Coercion".
This presentation by Dr. Davies is a lesson about unintended consequences and wasted efforts by the government. Davies explains the brutality of governments not looking thoroughly at the effects of their actions before passing laws. The example I liked the best was the war on poverty example. The U.S. government continues to add programs and funding toward the cause of ending poverty, at least within the United States. However, no matter what policies are enacted, poverty sticks around.
Something I am seeing as a common occurrence with government spending is that the government often chooses to spend money to benefit the people, but would be better off avoiding doing so or doing in a more effective way. As was the case last week with the government subsidizing industry, this spending is often wasteful and does not seem to ever reach its intended purpose. The government does not reward those who are innovative, nor does it create positive incentives for actions it wishes would happen more often. The speeding ticket example given by Dr. Davies comes to mind. This is the proper way of setting up rules to give people options while incentivizing cooperation.
My reaction to this is talk is to look at the bigger picture. The issue discussed by Dr. Davies is one of creating better rules to incentivize cooperation rather than force people to do things one way. The point he makes about politicians chasing election and reelection is actually a much bigger issue to me. If there was a way to change politicians' reward structure to incentives effectiveness rather than vote chasing, this would be beneficial to all of America. But alas, those who have the power to change those laws are those who benefit from them.
A lot of Dr. Davies' presentation reminded me of desire paths- the more effective routes that humans will follow when a poor one is put in place. At Ohio State University, rather than putting sidewalks in right when buildings were built, the university installed sidewalks where they would be most effective. More policies should take note of desire paths and plan with them in mind.
