[raducu]

There's overwhelming evidence against such a broad statement.

There are good mechanics, cars are getting safer, cops do fight crime, soldiers do fight wars and so on, social workers so do their jobs, teachers usually teach and so on.

You can say the same for every kind of work -- that you are incentivized to do a poor work so that there's more demand for the work, but the counter incentive is the free market.

If others can do a better job than you and eat your lunch, they will.

[mdpopescu]

> ... but the counter incentive is the free market.

Yes. Which is why the free market is ILLEGAL in the medical system, in the police system, in the educational system, in the judiciary system...

[dennis_jeeves]

Lol, how do you manage to keep your sanity on HN? Everyone else thinks that medicine/police/education/judiciary is so special that the free market cannot deal with it.

[mdpopescu]

It's difficult :)

[jjk166]

> There are good mechanics, cars are getting safer, cops do fight crime, soldiers do fight wars and so on, social workers so do their jobs, teachers usually teach and so on.

But there also exist many mechanics who try to get you to pay for unnecessary services, which mechanics are incentivized for.

Cars are getting safer for their human passengers by increasing the energy absorbed by the car body, which coincidentally increases the odds of a car being totaled in an accident, which increases demand for cars, which is what car manufacturers are incentivized for.

Cops are incentivized to make lots of arrests - which means they mostly fight crime which doesn't require extensive investigation nor poses high risk, ie lots of low level non-violent crimes.

Soldiers are not incentivized to prolong wars (they get paid in peace time, which also has much lower risks of death and disability). Major defense contractors and some politicians though do have an incentive to prolong wars, and coincidentally the US has been continuously at war for nearly 20 years.

How many major cities have had a serious social problem eliminated by the efforts of social workers? That's not their job, which is why it doesn't get done.

Teachers have no perverse incentive not to teach, they don't get paid more if their students don't pass. In fact it's a real problem where schools that have poor performance for unrelated reasons get punished with reduced funding, leading to a downward spiral that has destroyed lots of inner city schools. Even if the government doesn't formally have such punitive measures in place, the fact is wealthy families move away from mediocre school districts, which reduces the funding available for them, which quickly leads to the school district becoming even worse.

Perverse incentives don't mean you're incentivized to do your job poorly, it means the job you're incentivized to do well isn't necessarily the one people would want you to do.