skyfont
1yr ago
Some day care centers had a problem with parents picking up their children late (i.e., they were supposed to be all picked up by 6pm or whatever so that the center could close at that time). In order to try to fix the problem, they implemented a late pickup fee. People follow incentives and will then do a better job of picking up their children, right? Whelp, the result was that the number of late pickups went up.
I've heard that story before and I always feel like it's being subtly misinterpreted. The original source for that anecdote is this paper and the fee was 10 NIS in 1998. Converting from Israeli shekels to USD and then adjusting for inflation, that's a $5 fee.
I would argue that this isn't so much "inserting money changes the culture", it's that putting a fee on something is a signal of how much you want to discourage it, and a fee of $5 is sending a very clear signal that you don't really mind all that much. You would get the same effect if you signalled "I only care about this as much as a cup of coffee" by any other non-monetary means.
skyfont
1yr ago
I unironically believe that conspiracy theory. Not that I think my belief or nonbelief really matters in any real sense, but in my opinion there's a decent amount of evidence for it, the official denials would look identical regardless of the truth and thus offer zero evidence for or against the proposition, and so I choose to believe that it's true because it makes me laugh.
skyfont
1yr ago
I have a reflexive "I'm being lied to with misleading statistics" response these days whenever somebody claims some social pathology, such as obesity in this case, is correlated with Republican voting patterns. Generally these correlations go away the instant you start looking at the racial demographics of the cities involved -- it just so happens that many Republican voting cities happen to be located in areas with lots of minorities, and both hispanic and black people tend to have higher obesity rates.
From a quick glance at the statistics (1) (2) this seems to be generally the case with your list, with only Huntington and Charleston WV breaking 70% non-hispanic white. (And let's not even get into the whole age-obesity-convervativism confounder)
The fee was absolutely not high enough. From the original source the fine was 10 NIS in 1998 (which works out to about $5 if you convert to 1998 USD and then adjust for inflation). They provide some comparable values in the paper for various fines in 1998 Israel: this was 0.13x the fine for illegal parking, 3% of the fine for not collecting your dog poop, or 1% of the fine for running a red light.
This study is almost always misreported. What it really shows is that if you blatantly signal "this isn't a big deal" by putting an absurdly low price on something, people will do that thing. This doesn't mean that using money caused that, the money was just a way to communicate to everybody that "hey, I care about this about as much as a cup of coffee".
In the absence of any such signal people used their own best judgement and figured that late pickups were probably a pretty big deal. When the parents saw a price of $5 they thought "Oh, I guess it's not that big of a deal to them after all!" and acted accordingly.
More options
Context Copy link