Ideas transferable to Nicaragua
Submitted by Daddy-YO on Sat, 2012/02/18 - 14:59.
"GOVERNMENTS typically use two tools to encourage citizens to engage in civic behavior like paying their taxes, driving safely or recycling their garbage: exhortation and fines. These efforts are often ineffective. . . Rewarding good behavior can work.
". . . many people love lotteries. . . in mainland China, lotteries are used for tax compliance. China has a thriving cash economy, and it is common for small businesses like restaurants to evade paying sales tax. To combat this behavior, the government printed up special receipts that are supposed to be given to restaurant customers when they pay. Cleverly, each receipt includes a scratch-off lottery ticket, giving customers an incentive to ask for a receipt.
"In using lotteries to motivate it is important to get the details right. . . One of the Dutch government lotteries is based on postal codes. If your postal code is announced as the winner, you know that you would have won had you only bought a ticket. The idea is to play on people’s feelings of regret.
"Lotteries are just one way to provide positive reinforcement. Their power comes from the fact that the chance of winning the prize is overvalued.
"The moral here is simple. If governments want to encourage good citizenship, they should try making the desired behavior more fun."
sliced from NY Times, Feb 13, 2012, 'Making Good Citizenship Fun', by Richard H.Thaler, a professor of economics and behavioral science at the University of Chicago, is co-author of “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.”
Thank you. This is choice.
So there is intelligence somewhere in the world.
Not to sound hissy, but I'd say the issue is not how governments should manipulate people to engage in civic behavior, but how people should force governments to do so.
But then you're talking about Nicaragua, and know infinitely more about it than I do.
During a radio program I heard recently, someone commented that the old model is "vote for someone to go away and run the government" and the new one is "us inventing government".
I mentioned this elsewhere, but can't hurt to do it again: ReCivilization, a five-part series on the CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/recivilization/ This has a bunch of good ideas in it.
I keep wondering why I didn't have the sense to be born Canadian.
No Sniveling!
Agree on that..
Agree on that.
It all seem like a good idea to encourage people to do the right thing but the dog training method will work better (I think): The carrot and the whip.
Some people needs to be whipped around while others are best teased by the carrot.
It seems like governments that haven't adequately control over the population tends to use the carrot to get people to do what they're supposed to do. Other governments that have a good control over their population tends to use the whip more often.
Norway, for example, only uses a bullwhip on everything that they want to be done. You'll never see a carrot offered from the government in that country.