Incentives Quotes

Capitalism drives the employers to do their worst to the employed, and the employed to do the least for them. And it boasts all the time of the incentive it provides to both to do their best! . . . The reason the Capitalist system has worked so far without jamming for more than a few months at a time, and then only in places, is that it has not yet succeeded in making a conquest of human nature so complete that everybody acts on strictly business principles.

There is no reason to believe that bureaucrats and politicians, no matter how well meaning, are better at solving problems than the people on the spot, who have the strongest incentive to get the solution right.

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.

Despair is a great incentive to honorable death.

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.

Live the present intensely and fully, do not let the past be a burden, and let the future be an incentive. Each person forges his or her own destiny.

Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money.

Some people die twice: once when they retire, and again when they actually pass away. Fear of the first one is a big incentive for me to keep working.

Some are trapped in boxes of pea-sized Christianity, full of myths about missions that rob them of incentive to care about the unreached

Capitalism has given people both the liberty and the incentive to create, produce, and trade, thereby generating prosperity.

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

When we face our problems, they disappear. So learn from failure and let success be the silent incentive.

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.

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

Curiosity is one of the strongest human incentives

Politicians and bureaucrats are no different from the rest of us. They will maximize their incentives just like everybody else.

The most difficult thing is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. Because we don’t see how our conflicts of interest work on us.

An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation

Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome

Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.

Congress is headed in the wrong direction with this bill which removes any and all incentives from the food industry to improve their products for children.

New technology is useful, but it's inefficient and ugly; it knows it'll be obsolete by lunchtime tomorrow, so it has no incentive to be anything else

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

Every company, every boardroom in which I sit, has a plan, and they have objectives, goals, and a process. And to make it work, the pressure and incentive have to come from the top.

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