Hey there quizzers and voyeurs! Hopefully you’ve finished leering at me from outside my office! Freaks. Anywho…I heard a great lecture (I hate that word due to its negative connotation) about how we as a society often look to two tools to “manage” our world: rules and incentives. Read on to find out how you are ruining everyone's life.

Rules and laws about what you should do, how you should act, why you can’t throw a bag of kittens into the Rocky River (more than twice), and a whole slew of others. Then there are incentives. If you do this, you WON’T go to jail. If you DON’T do that, we’ll give you a $500/child tax rebate. So yeah, I’m pretty much regurgitating the lecture, but I found it interesting nonetheless.

The curious aspect of this observation, is that inherently, rules and incentives degrade and diminish individual creativity and wisdom. Not book-smarts, and all-knowing-even-though-they-came-in-second-place-Team-11 smarts, but actual human-interaction, empathetic experiential wisdom. Learning through experience how to be compassionate, considerate, and wise in your decisions and judgments.

A group of well-informed, middle-class residents in Arizona were asked if they would permit a nuclear waste disposal site in their city. 50% said they would. They knew, inherently, that it has to go in someone’s city, versus the traditional Not-In-My-Back-Yard syndrome. They developed that rationale on their own, without any rules or incentives. Then, they asked another group of citizens, or equal demographics, if they received a $1,000 check from the government, would they allow a nuclear waste dump in their city. Less that 25% said they would. Here we see incentive actually having the inverse reaction than intended.

The speaker goes on to say, essentially, that we need to get back to a place that allows experimentation and mistakes. Learning from our experiments, deciphering for ourselves what works, and what doesn’t work. Obviously we do need rules and laws for the safety and welfare of our communities.

But mandating teachers in the Chicago Public School District follow a day-by-day script they are contractually obligated to read, verbatim, every day, doesn’t allow for experimentation or learning. The teachers are told what to read, how to read it to the class, and exactly what to do. Every day. Every year. This is the insurance policy the school district has against poor teachers. The insurance policy the superintendent has against any complaining parents. The insurance policy that guarantees identical results.

Which, consequently, guarantees mediocrity.