James Buchanan's essay on "The Samaritan's Dilemma" presents a particular challenge to those who want to provide assistance to those in need. The existence of assistance may in fact induce a demand for assistance --- generating an increase in numbers of those in need. This is a particular manifestation of the "learned helplessness" that I talked about in an earlier post on Buchanan's paper on the demand for dependency. Edward Stringham sent me a link to this discussion of the situation in New Orleans and how the particularly perverse situation we saw unfold was a consequence of policies that induced dependency.
As I read this article and thought about Buchanan's argument about the endogenous supply increase of the very behavior the policies were originally introduced to eliminate I started to realize how applicable this phenomena is in the world. The structure of incentives often reinforces bad conduct rather than inducing just conduct. One example is academic behavior. Of course, our work environment in the university often insulates individuals from the penalties for certain behavior that would be severely punished in other environments because academics tend to associate creativity with different personality quirks. This has two effects. First, a selection process tends to weed in those who exhibit the personality traits we associate with high intelligence and creativity. Unfortunately, there is a thin line between the signal of high intelligence and creativity and the behavior exhibited by a form of high functioning autism --- Asperger's Syndrom. The Chronicle of High Education just ran a nice article on the selection issue for this personality type in academics and the noise in the signal created by Asperger's Syndrom. Second, because individuals are often "rewarded" for exhibiting behaviors we associated with the highly intelligent and creative, there is an induced supply of that behavior. In other words, academic behavior is an affectation rather than a "true" representation of the personality traits of individuals. In other worlds, individuals adopt the quirky behavior of the "nutty professor" even though they don't necessary possess the high intelligence and creativity which associate with the professor. To the extent that the behaviors we associate with high intelligence and creativity are anti-social, the academic community will get more of the bad behavior supplied compared to the intelligence and creativity expected.
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