Incentives: The Core Of Economics

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Incentives: The Roots and Core of Economics Economics is a social science that analyzes how society produces, distributes, and consumes its resources such as goods and services. The tools of economics can be easily applied to subjects of everyday life. According to Steven D. Levitt in his Freakonomics, economics at its root is essentially the study of incentives: something that induces people to act. Levitt illustrates that economic, and even social and moral decisions, are made by comparing the costs and benefits of incentives. Incentives are offered to people in order to induce them to make certain choices or behave in a certain way. They can be either positive or negative. For example, positive incentives like discounts and rewards are beneficial; whereas negative incentives such as fines and penalties are not. Understanding how people respond to both positive and negative incentives is important in analyzing how society operates as a whole. Ultimately, it can be argued that “incentives are the cornerstone of modern life” (Levitt, 12), and having a grasp of this concept is a key to solving social and economic riddles. The rise of modern capitalism in the 18th century sparked economic forces that vastly changed the way people thought and behaved in a given situation. For instance, what might lead one person to cheat or steal while another remained honest? In Freakonomics, Levitt suggests that just about anyone would cheat and quotes W.C. Fields that “a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for”. Levitt proposes that the roots for cheating lie in the incentives for cheating. He suggests that cheating may or may not be human nature; however, “it is definitely a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor” (Levitt, 21). In fact, cheating is a fundamental economic act where one tries to obtain more for less per se, so long as the incentives
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