One of the things that I say a lot at work is "well of course that was the outcome, look at the incentive structure we created!"

And as I stare into the abyss of nonsense that is "the news" these days, I feel the same way. We've created a world of incentive structures that have resulted in the exhaustion that we're currently experiencing.

Let me use a few examples… Putin decides that he wants to take over Ukraine. He tries a few times during the Obama era, and sees that while he'll get condemned and get some sanctions… no one is gonna really FIGHT BACK. So he just keeps inching his way in until finally he sees that the western world is feckless and distracted by their own bullshit and full on invades. It doesn't WORK per se… but at the same time… it's not like Putin is rotting in the Hague! He still gets to be in power, he's still trying to push in Ukraine, and it's empowering him to also be a backer of Iran! Because why not! He's still getting rich! His incentives are to keep doing what he's doing to remain rich, show that he's fighting, and seem "strong" (I'm ready for new shirtless Putin on a horse pictures, come on we all know they're coming!). That's what keeps him in power. His incentives are to keep the war going, to keep the strong man routine up, and to cause division across the world, because his country might have great name ID but they're weak. And the only way to make them seem less weak is to go to war and to cause chaos that leads other more powerful nations to weaken themselves for stupid reasons. His incentives to remain powerful and rich require these moves. Otherwise, his power diminishes! If he tries the peaceful solution, he's not going to remain in power. Because who is afraid of a strong man who won't act strong?

Similarly, Netanyahu had a whole campaign of empowering Hamas in order to make them a more formidable foe so that he could use them as a reason to avoid accountability for all his grift as the PM of Israel. He the realized that he had a partner he could manipulate to not only ignore the atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank (notice, that one is so under the radar I bet you haven't thought about it in a MINUTE), but would then aid them in future excursions… so he pushes us into Iran, and then as we're doing that distracting the world, he can then start going into Lebanon. Just wait until the next war starts who knows where he'll go next! Oh wait, it's obvious. He'll start looking south to the Sinai peninsula. Lebanon expands to the north, then they expand to the south, then they'll expand east to Lebanon! Then look at Egypt. And then and then and then. Because he's seeing the only shot he has at retaining power and his own personal freedom (the only metrics he seems to care about) is to keep on doing expansionary wars. Never mind the danger this puts Jews across the world in, never mind the danger it poses to the state of Israel, never mind the consequences for the entire region being embroiled in YET ANOTHER stupid fucking conflict over NOTHING but egos.

And then of course there's Trump, who has never let's an opportunity pass him by to show that his ego is bigger than the sun while his intellect can be easily passed through the head of a needle. His entire incentive structure is to create and retain power, and then somehow show that he's the "real" voice of America. Now my interpretation of this is that he's still upset that his dad thought he was a loser and that he's trying to live the legacy his dad wanted to have… as a nazi loving, racist, piece of shit slum lord, destroying anything that isn't white or gold and replacing it with the most gaudy version imaginable. Maybe that's too much psychoanalysis but still. His incentive structure seems to be "if I do this then maybe daddy will love me and I can fill this well of emptiness inside of me" but while wearing an ill-fitting suit.

Anyway, lol. These are examples of big time leaders of countries who have these wacky incentive structures that would be really easy to dismiss as "things they created for themselves due to the previously mentioned well of emptiness that they all have inside their souls". And honestly, most of the time I just leave it there because it's exhausting thinking about it more than that. But you have to admit… they didn't do this on their own. None of these people inherently have power. They were all GIVEN power by the people that they purport to serve.

This is the same thing we deal with at work, but with a (dear god I hope) less consequential outcome.

There's a part of me that goes "cool, great job laundering your pinko commie liberal mindset into this blog again big guy, you're doing the work of the gods" and pats myself on the back and wants to stop writing. And then there's a part of me that goes, "stop being such a self centered dick and explain why you thought this was important to talk about." And that second part of me has to win because the first part is annoying lol.

So what does any of the way that people in power operating at the international scale have to do with work? Like obviously, they're different and they have weird incentives that are breaking society and our planet, and killing thousands and thousands of people… but that's just sociopathy it's not WORK.

And I hear you. But you have to take a constant refrain from the first trump term and think about it a little bit… he's gonna run the country like a business. He's not a politician, he's a business man! He's got executive experience from… running a company.

And that's the thing that's really disturbing when you start thinking about it more… but we're truly running the country the way we run our businesses. We slash and burn entire departments because the people doing the slashing have no idea what impact those departments have (just look at the videos of the DOGE bros talking about why they cut programs… "it must be DEI there's a WOMAN involved" … fucking idiots). Then six months later as everything is falling apart and we start realizing the impact of those slashes and cuts, we have to go back to the people we fired to beg them to salvage what we've broken. Sound familiar all my tech bros and sisses?

But this is the general problem that I have which is that we still don't actually know how to set up incentive structures to create not just businesses that are successful AT MAKING MONEY which I guess is a purpose even if I think it's a "low value" purpose, but rather we should be working to build businesses that BENEFIT HUMANS. But our incentive structures are only built to "build value" through 1) making more money (in the form of higher revenue) 2) increasing margins (in the form of reducing headcount) 3) decreasing competition (by buying out smaller companies to ensure that your adoption and usage are so high that you can't be disrupted).

None of those "value" pillars actually provide value to PEOPLE though. They provide value to the individual leaders who will benefit greatly financially or through building and consolidating power or through getting invites to the cool kids table.

But none of those values care about the PEOPLE. Whether that's the people who make your business run (contrary to popular CEO belief, companies would still operate without a CEO while they wouldn't if the entire workforce was decimated) or that's the people buying your product, your incentives are not centered on people.

This is a lot of pessimism Scott, and we've talked about incentives before, what makes you think that it's important to have this discussion right now?

Good question devils advocate, I wish I could have answered it without needing the obvious prop to get me in the right direction, but I appreciate your help!

Well, first, I've been thinking about it a lot because we were rewatching all the Yellowstone affiliated shows lol. BEAR WITH ME HERE lol (pun unintended).

Throughout the shows there is a constant push and pull between governmental organizations and the "family" which is operating as a business. As a part of it, the "family" becomes more and more intertwined with the government in order to facilitate their goals.

And you can see the incentives that the players are all working with. John Dutton wants to fulfill a promise to his dad to never sell the ranch. His father makes that request because of the effort that HIS father (Spencer) went through to keep the ranch, literally having to travel home from Africa after WWI, meeting the love of his life, losing her just as they're reunited and she's giving birth due to frostbite. Your mom died to save the ranch. Your dad sacrificed everything for you to have this ranch, of course you're going to ask your kid to just do the minimum and not let it get taken or sold.

This all is done without the understanding that Spencer's father, who originally claimed the land and built the ranch… did so with an explicit agreement with the native tribes of the area that the land was going to be shared.

And so people created incentive structures that were based on "saving the ranch" without thinking more about what that actually meant. Instead of focusing on KEEPING IT THEIR land, they could have focused on any number of other things – preserving the land (hello, they're right next to the first national park… they're NAMED AFTER THAT PARK even), or preserving a way of life (ensuring that it wasn't just an onslaught of modernity wasn't exactly their priority as they fly helicopters around lol), or even just ensuring that your entire family doesn't die in service of the ranch without having any heirs to keep the legacy alive (literally if it wasn't for Casey having a kiddo that John wanted him to not have, there'd be NO generation of Dutton's after John's kids).

JFC Scott you're just repeating plot points from a tv show now? lol. What're you doing here.

Oh right, my point! My point is, that if you look to the origins of the ranch, it's about family, sharing, working through hardships to create a life, and essentially about humanity. But as the ranch transitions from a means of survival to a thing to own and run like a business, they start to lose the humanity of what they are doing. You start branding your hands. You brand your own damn kid. You throw people into a ravine where you know that they're not going to cause trouble for you later, because killing people to save the business isn't an issue.

I'm probably being too hard on businesses and the perspective of business owners. We know that there are businesses that can operate with the goal of being more positive toward society. We know that they can do good. I'm not trying to say that businesses are inherently evil, because I don't believe that's true.

I do believe that the second we start treating businesses as important though, as things that are valuable in and of themselves, as entities that we need to ensure survive beyond us, as entities that OWN things, it creates incentives that inherently are anti-humanistic. Because, contrary to popular belief in the United States Supreme Court (see I got us back to my pinko commie roots lol), businesses aren't people. Though people and businesses share one characteristic – neither is meant to live forever.

And the problem with businesses, is that there are people who think they can keep them afloat forever.

They give the illusion of immortality. And they create an incentive structure that leads these executives to think that THEY can live forever THROUGH these companies, creating this absolute mess of incentives…

So what do we do? How do we change this?

Well, I think long term here and not short term. Short term… I have no idea. I don't have an easy quick fix, or a first thing to do. I don't think we can resolve this in a year, or even 5 or 10 years. It's not a fast fix.

There are three things that I think are critical to move us toward a better place though:

1. Teaching Civics instead of History
   1. I'm making assumptions here because I haven't taken history in… a while lol
   2. I'm sure that there are history teachers (like my kiddo's seventh grade history teacher who rocks) that are laundering in the civics pieces with the normal history curriculum
   3. The problem I am trying to solve here, is to move from "these are events that happened in this order" to "this is why this is important to you TODAY". I think we often miss the "why does this matter" part, and you see it in society today where people just don't even understand how government works, or why different events in our recent history are important, or the change they created in society, etc. I'm not sure if this is the RIGHT solution to my proposed problem, but I think a focus on the why not the when and where would move us toward a more coherent moral framework we all share
2. Teaching Business instead of Economics
   1. Econ is treated like a science, where you can predict things based on formulae and… it's just not true?
   2. Econ is total bullshit, whereas business is the "how do all these things interact with one another"
   3. A common theme… I think I just want more nuance in how we teach things lol. It feels like because we're so focused on standardized testing and grades and making ourselves marketable we lose nuance that creates actual understanding
3. A complete upending of how we invest in businesses
   1. This is my most pinko commie bullshit take of the year – the stock market is evil and we should abolish it. It's legalized gambling. If we want to keep it, then it needs to be an empirical value rather than a bullshit one? But then how do you do that. I know that I'm now going the opposite direction of what I'd talked about where I want more nuance in all places except for here where I just want to fucking burn it down because I know it's evil and my response to "what comes next" is… GREAT QUESTION I HAVE NO IDEA YET!
   2. But I can tell you that the VC culture, the investment culture, and everything else that's going on with society and how we build wealth… it's all fucking gross and I hate it lol

I don't know ya'll. I hope this is something somewhat revealing and helpful. If not, at least it was cathartic for me lol.

My over-riding hope here, is that we can get more humanity into everything we do. I rant and rail against business throughout this post, but it ignores an important truth… 90% of the people I work with are thoughtful humans, and they are really thinking a lot about how we operate as people within the hellscape we're navigating. This isn't a problem with people, this is a problem with how we've structured society. Societal incentive structures don't allow for humanistic pursuits the same way they incentivize monetary pursuits.

But the people can overcome that – it's gonna take work for sure, but it's doable.

Maybe next time, I'll take a more prescriptive approach instead. But sometimes you just need to get your feels out.

Thanks for being along for the journey ya'll!

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