Photo: wired_grA worthwhile Bloomberg profile of John List, the University of Chicago economist, frequent Levitt collaborator, and SuperFreakonomics hero who has championed the use of field experiments. List recently received $10 million from hedge funder Kenneth Griffin to track the performance of 600 students, including 150 at the Griffin Early Childhood Center. Along with Levitt and Roland Fryer, List will “monitor the students through annual tests, attendance records and graduation rates. As the students move into adulthood, their employment, pay and criminal records, if any, will also be tracked. While early results from the experiment may be published as soon as this year, the project has money to follow the students ‘until they die,’ List says.” List plans to experiment with using incentives to motivate both students and parents; he successfully used incentives (a trip to Disney World) to potty-train his daughter. “Incentives are the pillar of economics and represent everything I’m about,” says List. “If you understand the incentives people are operating under, you have a good first guess about what they’re going to be doing in certain circumstances and how changes in the environment and/or in their institutions will influence their behavior.”
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This concept and behavior is directly connected to psychology. The reward and punishment system is very effective if people want to train children at a young age. However, the incentive motivation only includes the rewards, which gives a very positive vibe, as only rewards come with good deeds, but punishments are not even in the picture, taking misbehavior out of the question as well. Different people are raised differently, and this is one way that children can be trained; this will help them mature faster and learn more adult related ideals. I can’t wait to find out what happened to the children who were put under this study.
If you are measuring the incentives of students, why does it matter that you have to follow through with them their whole life. By the way, do the 600 students agree to this? Is this even legal?
Well if a student knows that every move will be evaluated/tracked/ recorded by a person wouldn’t their obligation to do better in school be different than just solely having a monetary incentive? If every student had their own personal life evaluator hovering over every step they take, of course the results would be different. The money would not be the factor that pushes students to work harder, it’d be that creepy person.
Economics has always been based of assumptions. It’s good to see someone actually testing these theories with real people and observing the outcome.
Yeah, so much for education getting kids somewhere. Not all people are motivated by any type of incentive to do better or succeed. People such as myself would like incentives, but my own brother finds no point in improving himself for even the greatest of rewards. I feel so bad for any student under these circumstances.