Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

“We try harder” proved a famously effective advertising slogan. Effort is important. Good incentives can elicit greater effort.

Today's Economist Perspectives from expert contributors.

But incentives sometimes backfire. And too much emphasis on them can lead to the presumption that all our failures result primarily from lack of willpower.

One commenter on my last blog post asserted that the economy would recover if middle-class people “would work harder, spend less, kill their televisions, stop drinking alcohol, stop eating sugary fat foods, exercise an hour a day and stop letting their rotten little brats run wild.” Good suggestions, in my opinion, but not substitutes for better economic policies.

In “The World Is Flat,” Thomas Friedman often sounds like a football coach, exhorting Americans to be more competitive. He tells his daughters, “Girls, finish your homework – people in China and India are starving for your jobs.” Again, good advice, but I doubt it will end the offshoring of American manufacturing employment.

Do people work harder if their pay is linked to specific measures of performance? Sometimes. But the psychologist Paul Marciano summarizes a number of reasons that carrots and sticks often fail, including the resentment workers feel when their performance has been mismeasured.



The debate over performance pay for teachers raises fears that it will overemphasize standardized test scores or undermine collaboration among teachers, hurting students more than helping them.

As the compelling “Freakonomics” documentary shows, experimental efforts to improve student performance by paying them for high grades have shown only small positive effects so far. Some of the most poignant moments in the film capture a student who says he will try harder but fails.

Many experimental studies have offered people financial incentives to stay on a diet and lose weight. Incentives tend to work in the short run, but most people regain the weight they have lost. In a recent New York Times article, Tara Parker-Pope persuasively asserts that willpower is not their primary problem: physiological changes make significant permanent weight loss extremely difficult to achieve.

Why not stigmatize fat people anyway, if that might help them lose weight? Likewise, why not blame poor people for their own poverty and the unemployed for their own joblessness? Even if they don’t deserve the blame, it could help them try harder.

The economists Roland Bénebou and Jean Tirole come close to making this argument when they assert that a delusional belief that people always get what they deserve can be economically advantageous because it will motivate greater effort.

But as Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb pointed out long ago in “The Hidden Injuries of Class,” blaming people for every aspect of their own failure can demoralize and demotivate them. That kind of blame also discourages efforts to collaborate with others to make changes that no individual can achieve alone.

If we simply assume that the world is just, then there’s no need to change it.

Good incentives should encourage people not just to try harder but also to try smarter; to improve their social environment rather than their just their own psyche.

Some fascinating research shows how “commitment contracts” enable people to specify rewards or punishments for meeting (or not meeting) their goals, and to recruit friends or others as enforcers.

Ian Ayres, a law professor who developed this concept in his recent book “Carrots and Sticks,” takes it well beyond mere self-improvement. A commentary he recently wrote with the economist Aaron Edlin, on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, makes a strong case for a public commitment to tax – and thereby discourage – further increases in income inequality, on the grounds that it undermines democracy.

I believe that inequality also undermines effort, by making it more difficult for those at the bottom to move up. Americans now enjoy less economic mobility than their counterparts in other affluent countries.

Improving economic fairness — now there’s a problem economists should try harder to solve.