Where bad acts are punished and good acts are not rewarded, the rational strategy is to do as little as possible, and systems drift toward inaction.
Mowshowitz's point is about the shape of the incentive rather than its severity. If the downside of acting is unbounded and the upside is nil, every additional action lowers expected standing, so the optimising response is to minimise surface area. The organisations this produces are not cowardly by disposition; they are correctly reading their own scoring system.
In practice
- A regulator blamed for every approval that goes wrong and never credited for one that works approves less.
- An employee whose initiatives bring scrutiny and whose inaction brings none stops having initiatives.
- Standing
- A generalisation of the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics; the two are usually cited together.
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change