NEW YORK CITY has decided to offer cashrewards to some students based on their attendance records and examperformance. Diligent, high-achieving seventh graders will be able toearn up to $500 in a year. The plan is the brainchild of Roland G.Fryer, an economist who has been appointed as x93chief equality officerx94of the cityx92s Department of education usa .
The assumption that underlies the project is simple: people respondto incentives. If you want people to do something, you have to make itworth their while. This assumption drives virtually all of economictheory.
Sure, there are already many rewards in learning: gainingunderstanding (of yourself and others), having mysterious or unfamiliaraspects of the world opened up to you, demonstrating mastery,satisfying curiosity, inhabiting imaginary worlds created by others,and so on. Learning is also the route to more prosaic rewards, likegetting into good colleges and getting good jobs. But these rewards arenot doing the job. If they were, children would be doing better inschool.
The logic of the plan reveals a second assumption that economistsmake: the more motives the better. Give people two reasons to dosomething, the thinking goes, and they will be more likely to do it,and theyx92ll do it better, than if they have only one. Providing somecash wonx92t disturb the other rewards of learning, rewards that areintrinsic to the process itself. They will only provide a little boost.Mr. Fryerx92s reward scheme is intended to add incentives to the onesthat already exist.
Unfortunately, these assumptions that economists make about humanmotivation, though intuitive and straightforward, are false. Inparticular, the idea that adding motives always helps is false. Thereare circumstances in which adding an incentive competes with othermotives and diminishes their impact. Psychologists have known this formore than 30 years.
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