It was a classic case of a perverse incentive. The Corps of Engineers had incentivised not the clean-up, but the mere fact of having a heavier truck, inadvertently creating new problems. It isn’t hard to think of similar examples from other fields: incentives for journalists that reward revenue rather than original reporting, leading to flimsy clickbait articles; incentives for teachers that reward school rankings rather than learning, leading to questionable marking; incentives for politicians that reward short-term vote gains rather than long-term solutions, leading to the subsidy of
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