Quotes About Incentives

#1. The poor need the motivation, the incentives, the skills, the education so they can help themselves.

John M. Perkins

#2. If intellectual curiosity, professional pride, and ambition are the dominant incentives to research, then assuredly no one has a fairer chance of gratifying them than a mathematician.

G.H. Hardy

#3. Historically speaking, religious and conservative groups always wanted the control over the private sphere that impacts women most, as reflected by family law and women's access to resources and mobility. And often secular groups traded this for economic incentives and trade.

Zainab Salbi

#4. I think the problem with schools is not too many incentives but too few. Because of tenure, teachers' unions, and the fact that teachers generally aren't observed in their classrooms, they can do whatever they want in class.

Steven Levitt

#5. The current regulations -- for companies, doctors and researchers -- create perverse incentives; and we'll have better luck fixing those broken systems than we will ever have trying to rid the world of avarice

Ben Goldacre

#6. Our government is ready to guarantee their investments for them, and then we will create tax incentives. We are interested in having all these things and with the privatization we also want to create more jobs and better conditions for the workers.

Ibrahim Rugova

#7. A goal without real consequences is wishful thinking. Good follow-through doesn't depend on the right intentions. It depends on the right incentives.

Timothy Ferriss

#8. Clearly, we need more incentives to quickly increase the use of wind and solar power; they will cut costs, increase our energy independence and our national security and reduce the consequences of global warming.

Hillary Clinton

#9. The British welfare state, it seemed, had removed the incentives without which a capitalist economy simply could not function: the carrot of serious money for those who strove, the stick of hardship for those who slacked.

Niall Ferguson

#10. I love when problems have simple solutions. Cold medicine. Umbrellas. Condoms. Tax incentives & subsidies attracting favored industries.

Greg Fitzsimmons

#11. Practically all government attempts to redistribute wealth and income tend to smother productive incentives and lead toward general impoverishment.

Henry Hazlitt

#12. When a thoughtful human being has overcome incentives to vice and is aware of having done his bitter duty, he finds himself in a state that could be called happiness, a state of contentment and peace of mind in which virtue is its own reward.

Immanuel Kant

#13. We need to fashion policies with proper incentives to reduce the amount of carbon we are putting in the atmosphere.

William Ruckelshaus

#14. When emulation leads us to strive for self-elevation by merit alone, and not by belittling another, then it is one of the grandest possible incentives to action.

Samuel Johnson

#15. In the United States especially, politics and economics don't mix well. Politicians have all sorts of reasons to pass all sorts of laws that, as well-meaning as they may be, fail to account for the way real people respond to real-world incentives.

Steven D. Levitt

#16. I think we need a very, very serious effort, primarily through tax policy to provide incentives and encouragement for people to save and invest and expand their businesses and to create more jobs. The kind of thing we did in the early Reagan years, 30 years ago. I think that's essential.

Dick Cheney

#17. We need to find a way to safeguard humanity whilst still offering short-term financial incentives. For sure, we need innovators in finance more than we need innovation in technology.

David W. Wood

#18. The mingled incentives which lead to action are often too subtle and lie too deep for us to analyze.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

#19. One of the unfortunate things about creative writing courses is that they make people impatient. People feel that they have prepared themselves and that they must now do it. In fact there are positive incentives for doing so - universities are offering degrees for writing novels.

Robert Dessaix

#20. Encourage your own curiosity; pursue the problems based on that. Don't get diverted by trying to do things for your own advancement. In other words, don't be lured into responding to incentives.

James Mirrlees

#21. Economists love to talk about incentives, but the bottom line is that people hate being controlled or manipulated, even when done through voluntary institutions. This is one of the most important tensions in capitalism.

Tyler Cowen

#22. We only gain merit and psychological development by accepting ourselves as we are and by being serious enough to live the lives we are entrusted with. Our sins and errors and mistakes are necessary to us, otherwise we are deprived of the most precious incentives to development.

C. G. Jung

#23. The American economy is driven by small business. And there's nothing basically to create incentives for small businesses. We've done no tax reform. They're the highest-taxed group in the country. And corporations can go anywhere they want and do whatever they want. Small businesses have to stay ...

Ed Rollins

#24. In the bureaucracy, incentives will forever be inverted. Failure results in success: in more funds, more training, more time off.

Ilana Mercer

#25. I think that players play, and they compete, and it's not about incentives.

David Stern

#26. Too little attention is paid to the dark side of incentives. They are anything but a magic bullet. Psychologists have known this for years, but it seems largely hidden from the world of commerce.

Barry Schwartz

#27. History is so full of high-level intelligence officials who actually worked for the other side that one is forced to conclude that whether or not top intelligence jobs attract the disloyal, they surely offer incentives to disloyalty.

Angelo Codevilla

#28. The impulse to investigate can only be set free if you stop pretending to know answers that you don't. Because the incentives to pretend are so strong, this may require some bravery on your part.

Steven D. Levitt

#29. If you want better behavior from bankers, then make their financial incentives more like those in the hedge-fund world - where managers have 'skin in the game,' and their net worth is tied to their long-term performance.

David Ignatius

#30. Conflicting legislation and regulations, overlapping mandates, unwillingness to enforce land use, elite capture, entrenched attitudes, and lack of incentives to influence behavior are rife in many resource-rich countries.

Sri Mulyani Indrawati

#31. The system that enables the most people to earn the most success is free enterprise, by matching up people's skills, interests, and abilities. In contrast, redistribution simply spreads money around. Even worse, it attenuates the ability to earn success by perverting economic incentives.

Arthur C. Brooks

#32. Incentives are not strategy, they are tactics. Defensive measures.

Carlos Ghosn

#33. Giving tax incentives for more labor ownership of company stock will do more to create jobs and increase productivity than all the "emergency full employment" bills proposed.

Jack Kemp

#34. When you're managing a large number of people, you learn that incentives matter tremendously. You really want people to be rewarded for doing the right thing for the customers and the organization.

Ramez Naam

#35. Scholars today are under increasing pressure to publish. Consequences of this pressure are incentives to deviate from the truth

Bruno Frey

#36. Bitcoin actually has the balance and incentives right, and that is why it is starting to take off.

Julian Assange

#37. So overall, though my life is far from perfect, I'm contented with it. And in a peculiar way, I'm grateful for the troubling emotions I experienced. The obstacles we face in life can provide powerful incentives for change.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

#38. The tax incentives in place for 'House of Cards' in Maryland have resulted in hundreds and hundreds of jobs and not just for actors, but for carpenters and waitresses and hotel workers. The amount of hotel nights and meals that the production of a television series brings to a state is staggering.

Ted Sarandos

#39. I do believe in tax incentives in order to move the economy forward.

Steve Southerland

#40. The tax code is very inefficient. Both the personal tax code and the corporate tax code. By closing loopholes and lowering rates, you could increase the efficiency of the tax code and create more incentives for people to invest.

Ben Bernanke

#41. I think we have to take a look at corporate law. We have to take a look at the incentives that we can perhaps use to encourage more longer term.

Hillary Clinton

#42. People from both political parties have long recognized that welfare without work creates negative incentives that lead to permanent poverty. It robs people of self-esteem.

Mitt Romney

#43. Increasing inequality in income distribution in this country has broader policy implications, and there is also the growing problem of perverse incentives that result from executives receiving grossly disproportionate compensation based on decisions they themselves take.

Barney Frank

#44. I think I've been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it.

Charlie Munger

#45. The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.

Thomas Sowell

#46. The current administration has made the decision to cut dollars going for community development block grants, for various incentives to bring cities back.

Stephanie Tubbs Jones

#47. But there were certain incentives for slaves who showed loyalty to their masters, even if it meant betraying another slave.

Tracey Bateman

#48. It is human nature to be shortsighted and to lose momentum to make changes once the story is out of the headlines and there aren't financial incentives or political rewards. We owe to ourselves to learn from the past so we can try to do better.

Sheri Fink

#49. Economic policies need to be analyzed in terms of the incentives they create, rather than the hopes that inspired them.

Thomas Sowell

#50. What makes capitalism succeed is not chiefly its structure of incentives but its use of knowledge and experience.

George Gilder

#51. Commerce has changed the ethics of citizenship and the incentives for national service. America now buys private contractors - we used to call them mercenaries - to do the country's fighting.

Michael Ignatieff

#52. The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports the same inherent malignancies and perverse incentives of government, down to the racial-spoils system.

Ilana Mercer

#53. Unfortunately, the elimination of incentives such as parole, good time credits and funding for college courses, means that fewer inmates participate in and excel in literacy, education, treatment and other development programs.

Bobby Scott

#54. Of the major incentives to improve safety, by far the most compelling is that of economics. The moral incentive, which is most evident following an accident, is more intense but is relatively short lived.

Jerome F. Lederer

#55. Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.

Clay Shirky

#56. When I was a child and teenager I read whenever I had the opportunity, but since then I've found it hard to read as much as I'd like, children, work, and pets all providing powerful incentives to escape into a book and a practical reason why I rarely do so.

Louise Brown

#57. Pay-for-procedure or fee-for-service reimbursement rewards doctors and hospitals for volume - not keeping patients healthy or being efficiency. Pay-for-Performance is clearly one tool that can change the incentives to reward quality.

Ron Wyden

#58. In a paper called 'The Economics of Matching: Stability and Incentives,' I showed that there were not any mechanisms that would always both produce a stable matching and make it completely safe for all firms and workers to reveal their true preferences.

Alvin E. Roth

#59. The Korean economic miracle was the result of a clever and pragmatic mixture of market incentives and state direction.

Ha-Joon Chang

#60. If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.

Steven Johnson

#61. Even the wisdom of God hath not suggested more pressing motives, more powerful incentives to charity, than these, that we shall be judged by it at the last dreadful day.

Francis Atterbury

#62. An across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes ... to expand the incentives and opportunities of private expenditures.

John F. Kennedy

#63. The desire of reward is one of the strongest incentives of human conduct; ... the best security for the fidelity of mankind is to make their interest coincide with their duty.

Alexander Hamilton

#64. I know the problem of obesity. I got to tell you, I think that's tepid. I just don't think the bully pulpit is going to be enough to sufficiently fight obesity. We're going to have to have incentives in here.

Max Baucus

#65. Banks have come to realize in the recent crisis that they are paying the price for having designed compensation packages which provide incentives that are not, in the long run, in the interests of the banks themselves, and I would like to think that would change.

Mervyn King

#66. There is a huge body of business evidence now showing that energy savings give better service at lower cost with higher profit. We have to tear down barriers to successful markets and we have to create incentives to enter them.

William J. Clinton

#67. The solution to our problems is not more paternalism, laws, decrees, and controls, but the restoration of liberty and free enterprise, the restoration of incentives, to let loose the tremendous constructive energies of 300 million Americans.

Henry Hazlitt

#68. Libraries can offer important alternatives to the services provided by the corporate sector, which will always have incentives to offer biased, limited, and costly access to knowledge.

John Palfrey

#69. What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions
if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they're still all wrong.

Michael Lewis

#70. Reforming the way the state works with businesses and providing incentives for employers will help preserve and create new jobs in Massachusetts.

Mitt Romney

#71. Intelligent policies will be largely self-regulating in the sense that the system of incentives and standards makes it absolutely ludicrous to not move towards clean, internalized systems of cost and production.

Paul Hawken

#72. I have a very simple rule when it comes to management: hire the best people from your competitors, pay them more than they were earning, and give them bonuses and incentives based on their performance. That's how you build a first-class operation.

Donald J. Trump

#73. Gun control does not decrease gun ownership by criminals but instead reduces their incentives to refrain from violence because it decreases the supply of armed law-abiding citizens who might resist them.

John McGinnis

#74. Masonry superadds to our other obligations the strongest ties of connection between it and the cultivation of virtue, and furnishes the most powerful incentives to goodness.

Joseph Fort Newton

#75. I get a bit of a kick out of exporting private enterprise and incentives.

Fred L. Turner

#76. Instead of worrying about who's American and who's not, here's a better idea: Create incentives for any global company to do what we'd like it to do in the United States.

Robert Reich

#77. The basic idea that incentives can be used to motivate behavior is a powerful one. It works for employees, and it has a clear place in parenting, as anyone who has tried to potty-train a recalcitrant toddler with sticker rewards knows.

Emily Oster

#78. We simply prefer to deny death or tragedy at all costs and, with it, a fundamental aspect of life. We do this instead of acknowledging that suffering represents one of the strongest incentives of life, which is the base of human solidarity and what brings intensity to happiness.

Claudia Llosa

#79. Not that incentives are always so easy to figure out. Different types of incentives - financial, social, moral, legal, and others - push people's buttons in different directions, in different magnitudes. An incentive that works beautifully in one setting may backfire in another.

Anonymous

#80. There is an increasing gap between academic research and business application. Sometimes the incentives for success in the academic world are not consistent with what it takes to run a company.

Dave Ulrich

#81. Rules do not determine outcomes - the players still have to make choices - but they make some outcomes more likely than others, by defining what it means to "win", and by creating incentives for and imposing constraints on the players.

Frances McCall Rosenbluth

#82. The answer for healthcare is market incentives, not healthcare by a Godzilla-sized government bureaucracy.

Mitt Romney

#83. Incentives aren't the only thing that matter for economic growth. Opportunity is also crucial, and extreme inequality deprives many people of the opportunity to fulfill their potential, and government programs that reduce inequality can make the nation as a whole richer by reducing that waste.

Paul Krugman

#84. Both humanity's capacity to innovate and the incentives to innovate are greater today than at any other time in history.

Ben Bernanke

#85. Today, our incentives aren't set up well - you can make a lot of money burning fossil fuels, digging up wetlands, pumping fossil water out of aquifers that will take 10,000 years to recharge, overfishing species in international waters that are close to collapse, and so on.

Ramez Naam

#86. A combination of unrealistic goals, unnecessarily pessimistic expectations, and the wrong incentives for teachers contributes to ensure that education systems in developing countries fail their two main tasks: giving everyone a sound basic set of skills, and identifying talent.

Abhijit V. Banerjee

#87. Go Daddy is not just a job; it's a way of life. Our employees work hard, and offering great incentives is fun and productive for the company.

Bob Parsons

#88. One overly simplistic idea is that we can improve student performance by just by giving financial incentives to parents, teachers, or kids. Unfortunately, there is little evidence that such incentives are effective, but nuances matter.

Richard H. Thaler

#89. It is an unquestioned assumption that managers should have and set targets and then create control systems - incentives, performance appraisals, budget reporting and computers to keep track of them all - to ensure the targets are met. In Toyota, these practices simply do not exist. To

John Seddon

#90. With such incentives to brave deeds, and with the trust that God is with us, your generals will lead you confidently to the combat - assured of success. General commanding

Shelby Foote

#91. Call it what you will, incentives are what get people to work harder.

Nikita Khrushchev

#92. We need to align the incentives so that colleges have an incentive to keep down their costs ... to graduate students on time with degrees in areas where they're going to be able to get jobs and going to be able to pay back those loans.

Elizabeth Warren

#93. What you do by having an income tax rate reduction across the board, you really provide great incentives for people to work, produce, and increase output. So I would support a carbon tax in replacement for a progressive income tax.

Arthur Laffer

#94. Some people are in positions of power, and when incentives go haywire, we are all human and it's easy to make mistakes. I am not saying everybody is Bernie Madoff.

Nicholas Jarecki

#95. If the incentives are aligned right - towards better preservation and restoration of nature and natural resources - then you'll see a tremendous amount of activity in that direction.

Ramez Naam

#96. Living in New York City gives people real incentives to want things that nobody else wants.

Andy Warhol

#97. As coercive monopolies that spend other people's money taken by force, governments are uniquely unqualified to solve problems. They are riddled by ignorance, perverse incentives, incompetence and self-serving.

John Stossel

#98. People respond to incentives. If unemployment becomes more attractive because of the unemployment benefit, some unemployed workers may no longer try to find a job or may not try to find one as quickly as they would without the benefit.

Paul Krugman

#99. Politicians like to talk about incentives - for businesses to relocate, for example, or to get folks to buy local.

Tom Golisano

#100. If there is a real desire, if the thing desired is really light, the desire for light produces it. There is a real desire when there is an effort of attention. It is really light that is desired if all other incentives are absent.

Simone Weil