Ben Dachis: It may come as a shock, but economics isn’t always about money. Before you tell me to hand in my economists’ guild card, I should tell you that the way economists look at the world is rooted in a simple idea: people respond to incentives. That incentive often is money. Sometimes it is not: in scientific research, for example, the incentive that drives people to do world-class research is often scientific prestige for its own sake, not whether an invention will make money.

Economists, and sometimes governments, tend to be on the lookout for cases where the incentives that some people confront are going to lead to harm for others.

If we put a cost on polluting, companies will do less of it. That is how the United States and Canada dealt with acid rain — through a market for sulphur dioxide emissions permits. If we had not, and acted as if the quality of the environment had no financial value, we would have been in more trouble than we are now.

And of course the environment has value in its own right, and putting a cost on polluting it has been one way of dealing with the fact that it is common, shared, property. None of us bears the full cost of the things that we do that harm it: changing financial incentives so that we do confront actual costs can help.

Incentives can also play a role in our currently government-provided services such as health care, public transit or postal services. The lack of markets is a root cause of many problems of high cost, poor service or both. Rather, there’s little bottom-line incentive for anyone to do a better job.

But adding markets does not mean governments ceding control of crucial government services to free-market privateers. Instead, governments can create a market in which companies and existing employees compete for the right to provide services on the government’s behalf.

Profit is an incentive for corporations to find ways to keep costs down so they can outbid their competitors. As long as governments penalize poor service from those who win the bids, the public can get the same, or better, service at a lower cost.

Contracting need not mean privatizing. Government workers often are the best option. They can go head-to-head with private sector bidders. A market can create the incentives that unleash the good ideas they’ve had for doing their jobs better. Markets drive that saving.

Governments around the world are increasingly relying on private companies to operate waste services, water and wastewater, postal services, and public transit.

In the case of some health-care services, governments can instead put money in the hands of people in need and let companies compete to serve them. This is what Nordic countries do for patients in long-term care.

In all these areas, there are often good reasons for governments to have some role in setting service standards or providing subsidies, but adding market forces can result in incentives for better and lower cost services.

Rather than decrying the role of money and markets, let’s give incentives a chance.