From Randy Olson: Is Money the ONLY Way to Talk?

So much of environmentalism these days has come down to people asking, "How can we change the public's behavior?" When this topic crops up, there is always a group of hard core cynics who say, "The ONLY way you'll ever get anyone to change their behavior is if there's a profit incentive." Ugh. I hate listening to that.

Here's an op-ed today in the NY Times that plays like music to my ears. In literal terms it's about baseball, but more generally, it's about everything, as indicated by the last paragraph of the piece.

The more society embraces the idea that nobody will do anything right unless it pays, the more true it will become that nobody does anything right unless it pays. And this is no way to run a ballclub, a school system, or a country.

It is a sad, boring state for anyone to have so totally abandoned the idea of "persuasion" to the point of thinking the only way to accomplish anything is to pay people. They're the kind of parents who pay their kids for every good grade they get.