80 percent of Americans don't trust big banks and almost two-thirds think that corporate corruption is widespread.
This loss of trust is costly. Though it is said that market competition is an efficient substitute for trustworthiness and integrity, economists have claimed for years that it is expensive and wasteful to monitor and regulate a system when trust is lost.
Barry Schwartz, Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College, argues that to get people to work well, we assume you have to make it worth their while. You have to create the right set of financial incentives. The one thing you virtually never see as an “incentive” is the opportunity to say to oneself, at the end of a day, “that was a job well done.” The organizations that surround us seem not to trust that virtue can ever be its own reward.
Schwartz argues that incentives don’t get us what we want in business, they don’t get us what we want in schools, and they don’t get us what we want in the legal system.
The Real Price of Incentives: Loss of Trust by Barry Schwartz, Linked In
