I will be teaching a course at UC Berkeley in the fall. This story (via JWT) may come in handy:
An economics professor at Texas Tech said he had never failed a single student before but had, once, failed an entire class. The class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said ok, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism.Bottom Line: Incentives matter!
All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A. After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. But, as the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too; so they studied little... The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around the average was an F.
The scores never increased as bickering, blame, name calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great; but when government takes all the reward away; no one will try or want to succeed
3 comments:
What is socialism?
Other possible conclusions: 1) Certain people want to prove socialism doesn't work and made up this anecdote. 2) the professor believed socialism didn't work and arranged things (consciously or unconsciously)so that the class would fail (test making and grading can be fairly arbitrary, even in a hard discipline- thus the grading on a curve). 3) socialism doesn't work in a top down situation where someone on high is doling out the rewards for the perceived right amount of work. etc.
I'm not convinced socialism works, I'm not convinced capitalism works (I'm reminded of the Ferris Beuller quote on isms). One thing I do know, I've taken classes pass fail so that I could slack off a bit, and I'm not able to - I always go all out - so I have a hard time believing this example as given.
Fairly powerful lesson in behavioral psychology. It's amazing what happens when you remove the incentive of rewards.
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