Ruth Grant, author of Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives, sat down with our co-publishers The Russell Sage Foundation for a brief Q&A in which she offers her take on what happens when you dig beneath the surface of incentives and view them as a form of power. Here are a few questions to whet your appetite, but head over to the Russell Sage Foundation site to read the complete interview: http://www.russellsage.org/blog/interview-ruth-grant-ethics-incentives

Q: While incentives are largely viewed now as an alternative to social control, you look at the history of their use at the turn of the 20th century and find a much more controversial and worrying story. How were incentives perceived back then, and in what context were they discussed?

A: The term “incentives” was introduced in America in the early 20th century in several different contexts, including Frederick Taylor’s scientific management in industry and the new field of behaviorism in psychology. (Surprisingly, the term is not found in 18th century writers like Adam Smith). Incentives were introduced in industry as a tool of social engineering, while in psychology, behaviorists believed that they could gain social control by using incentives to induce desired behaviors. Incentives were quite controversial at the time. They were often criticized as dehumanizing, and in the form of piece-rate wages, they were a source of conflict between unionized labor and management.

Q: Someone defending incentives could say they merely offer a choice to the public. So, for example, states didn’t have to compete in the Race to the Top education program if they didn’t want the strings attached to the federal funds. But you suggest this focus on voluntariness relies on a rather narrow definition of freedom and rationality. Could you elaborate?

A: When incentives are viewed as a type of bargain or trade, the ethical focus is exclusively on whether or not the transaction is voluntary. So, for example, people argue over whether offering large sums of money to a poor person to participate in research is “coercive.” But this is not the only question. When incentives are viewed as a form of power – one way I can get you to do something you otherwise wouldn’t – additional ethical questions arise of the sort that always arise about the use and abuse of power. To return to the example — if the research is filling out a questionnaire, nobody would really worry about coercion. If the research involves invasive and painful procedures, then the first question is whether the researcher ought to be conducting this study on human subjects at all. (Of course, often the answer will be “yes”).

Incentives do offer a choice – but that is not sufficient. Mice in a maze also have choices: left or right? Studies have shown that incentives with human beings often backfire in situations where people find the incentives insulting. Incentives imply that you wouldn’t do the thing you are being asked to do for intrinsic reasons. Studies show that people tend to feel insulted by incentives when they take the place of persuasion; when they micromanage; or when they fly in the face of people’s generous impulses – for example, paying for blood “donations” can decrease the number willing to give. In other words, while incentives offer choices, they are based on a psychology that assumes people are reactive and malleable, like the mouse. They do not treat people as fully autonomous rational agents.

You can also read a sample from Ruth’s book here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9546.pdf

Daniel A. Bell, co-author with Avner de-Shalit of The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age, was sent this fantastic iPad drawing of a recent book talk he gave at the Beijing Bookworm store:

Artist Wu Peng was in the audience at the talk–how cool is that!

If that wasn’t enough, Debra Bruno recently wrote a blog article featuring Daniel A. Bell and the book at The Atlantic Cities blog, which Chicago magazine’s staff blog The 312 picked up earlier today, with a Windy City twist.

Foreign Policy has just released a list of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” for 2011, and four PUP authors have made the cut!

#25 Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, authors of This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.

“They told us so. For years before the crash, economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff presciently sketched out just how bad the global credit crunch could become based on their groundbreaking study of eight centuries of financial crises — the work that culminated in the publication of their bestselling 2009 book, This Time Is Different. In their study, the two found that in all the crises, “excessive debt accumulation … often poses greater systemic risks than it seems during a boom.”

#43 Saskia Sassen, author of The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo.

“This year’s political upheavals have been as much about cities as countries. From Cairo’s Tahrir Square to London’s Tottenham, we’ve seen vivid illustrations of how urban spaces can shape social movements. Saskia Sassen, an academic guru who famously coined the term “global city,” has been very much part of the conversation, arguing that the same melting-pot factors that make cities drivers of capitalism can also make them highly unstable. “The poor in Britain, living next to enclaves of wealth and privilege, chose street riots to deliver their message,” she wrote.”

#44 David Scheffer, author of All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals. Foreign Policy applauds Scheffer for demanding that war criminals be held accountable.

Congratulations to these four authors, alongside the other great thinkers and writers on this list!

“Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society” by PUP author Steven A. Barnes is the winner of the 2011 Baker-Burton Award: “The Award is given by the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association for the best first book in European history by a member of the Section or a [...]

Congratulations to Michael C. Horowitz, whose book The Diffusion of Military Power: Causes and Consequences for International Politics has won the 2011 Best Book prize in the International Security Studies Section of the International Studies Association (ISS) competition. The ISSS Annual Best Book Award is awarded annually to a text “on any aspect of security [...]

Congratulations to Professor John M. Owen IV, whose book The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510-2010 has been awarded the 2011 Lepgold Prize from the Mortara Center for International Studies at Georgetown University.

The Lepgold Prize honors “exceptional contributions to the study of international relations” in memory of Professor Joseph S. Lepgold, a Georgetown University Government and School of Foreign Service professor who passed away in 2001. The award announcement praises The Clash of Ideas in World Politics for its wide scope in addressing the ideological struggles related to forcible regime promotion:

John Owen examines more than two hundred cases of forcible regime promotion over the past five centuries, offering the first systematic study of this common state practice. He looks at conflicts between Catholicism and Protestantism between 1520 and the 1680s; republicanism and monarchy between 1770 and 1850; and communism, fascism, and liberal democracy from 1917 until the late 1980s. He shows how regime promotion can follow regime unrest in the eventual target state or a war involving a great power, and how this can provoke elites across states to polarize according to ideology. Owen traces how conflicts arise and ultimately fade as one ideology wins favor with more elites in more countries, and he demonstrates how the struggle between secularism and Islamism in Muslim countries today reflects broader transnational trends in world history.

We invite you to check out new and forthcoming books in our political science & law catalog at:
http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/politics11.pdf

Race and politics, immigration, public opinion, Tea Party, global rulers, ethics and zombies – just a few of the hot topics you will find in the catalog.
Yes, zombies!

If you’re at the APSA meeting in Seattle, stop by our booth no. 508 to say hello and browse new books. We hope to see you there.

Philip Tetlock, author of Expert Political Judgment, is running a massive research project to see if the rank and file can make better predictions than the so-called experts. In the book he identifies two main types of expert — foxes and hedgehogs — each with their own style of gathering information and making predictions. He discovered that many political pundits are actually less accurate at predicting outcomes than a monkey might be (ie than if you randomly chose the outcome). His new project, which he describes in this article at The Frontal Cortex, is an extension of the earlier research. In the article, Jonah Lehrer speaks with Tetlock about the project and what he’s looking for in participants (no crystal balls needed!).

Tetlock: The current project is supported by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US government — and it is the most systematic effort, to date, at testing the effectiveness of competing approaches to improving forecasting accuracy in the domain of politics and national security. Multiple teams are participating — and we are recruiting people who, ideally, have three characteristics: a deep interest in thinking about how they think (and correcting blind spots and errors); a deep interest in world affairs; a willingness to translate those deep interests into hard work (it will take time and energy to master some of the tools that we will be giving various subgroups of forecasters).

Think you have what it takes? Register here: http://www.goodjudgment.info.

Congratulations to David R. Mayhew, author of Partisan Balance: Why Political Parties Don’t Kill the U.S. Constitutional System, which recently won the 2011 Leon D. Epstein Outstanding Book Award presented by the Political Organizations and Parties Section of the American Political Science Association.

According to the APSA website, the award “honors a book published in the last two calendar years that makes an outstanding contribution to research and scholarship on political organizations and parties.”

In Partisan Balance, Mayhew examines the unique electoral foundations of the presidency, Senate, and House of Representatives in order to provide a fresh understanding for the government’s success and longstanding vitality. Arguing that the system has developed a self-correcting impulse that leads each branch to pull back when it deviates too much from other branches, Mayhew contends that majoritarianism largely characterizes the American system. The wishes of the majority tend to nudge institutions back toward the median voter, as in the instances of legislative districting, House procedural reforms, and term limits for presidents and legislators.

David R. Mayhew is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. His books include Congress: The Electoral Connection, Divided We Govern, and Electoral Realignments.

Again, a warm congratulations to David Mayhew!

To read the Introduction to Partisan Balance, click here.

To see other recent award-winning PUP books, please Continued »

David Runciman, in delivering the first annual Princeton University Press in Europe lecture in London on Wednesday night (http://www.goodenough.ac.uk/fileadmin/docs/Alumni/PUP_lecture.pdf), posed an extraordinarily timely question with the title of his lecture “Can Democracy Cope?”. The lecture was an intellectual tour de force, with Runciman distinguishing two prominent schools of thought on democracy, the “confidence trick” view that democracy is essentially a sham, and the “confidence trap” view that democracy is actually too successful and therefore becomes complacent. In Runciman’s memorable paradox, the “trick” is that democracy is too good to be true, while the “trap” is that democracy is too true to be good.

Runciman explored the “trap” view in detail, arguing that this view originates in Tocqueville’s highly prophetic view of democracy, as destiny but also as complacency. In this melancholy view, it will be difficult for democracies to escape the confidence trap.

David will explore this theme in more detail in his forthcoming PUP book, The Confidence Trap (2012).

If you missed the lecture, there is a terrific overview of the arguments in David Runciman’s interview on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week programme, a review on the Enlightenment Economics blog, and an article “In Praise of David Runciman” in the Guardian.

David is Reader in Political Thought at the University of Cambridge and the author of two PUP books, Political Hypocrisy and The Politics of Good Intentions.

The Princeton University Press in Europe lecture series provides an international platform for discussion of ideas that enrich scholarly communities and inform public discussion of important issues. Future speakers include economist Paul Seabright of the University of Toulouse (2012), biologist Sunetra Gupta (2013) and religious historian Diarmaid MacCulloch (2014).

The Princeton University Press in Europe lecture marked the inauguration of the Press’ European Advisory Board, a distinguished group of scholars, journalists and writers who will work with us to publish the most exciting and intellectually ambitious work possible (see the PUP European Advisory Board PDF for a list of our collaborators).

This week’s book giveaway is Uncivil Disobedience: Studies in Violence and Democratic Politics by Jennet Kirkpatrick.

Uncivil Disobedience examines the roles violence and terrorism have played in the exercise of democratic ideals in America. Jennet Kirkpatrick explores how crowds, rallying behind the principle of popular sovereignty and desiring to make law conform to justice, can disdain law and engage in violence. She exposes the hazards of democracy that arise when citizens seek to control government directly, and demonstrates the importance of laws and institutions as limitations on the will of the people.

“Jennet Kirkpatrick has done something quite remarkable in this book. She has taken a set of unsavory characters–vigilantes, members of lynch mobs, and far-right militiamen–studied their arguments, and placed them within the tradition of political theory. She demonstrates that understanding is the necessary prelude to criticism. And she adds militant abolitionists to the mix so that we can’t resist the demonstration. The result is a wonderfully illuminating argument.”–Michael Walzer, professor emeritus, Institute for Advanced Study

Anyone who has LIKED us on Facebook by 3:30 p.m. EST this Friday will be included in the draw. Thanks for taking the time to follow us.

Uncivil Disobedience: Studies in Violence and Democratic Politics by Jennet Kirkpatrick

In addition to Anton Kaes, the Modern Language Association (MLA) has also awarded Christine Poggi a prize for her Princeton book. Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism has been declared one of two winners of the MLA’s 21st Howard R. Marraro Prize, for outstanding books in the field of Italian literature or comparative literature involving Italian.

The selection committee’s citation for Poggi’s book reads:
Published on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the movement, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism offers a cultural studies analysis that thoroughly revises our perception of futurism and of its most widely held tenets. Christine Poggi ably explores traditional modernist tropes associated with futurism-speed, machines, urbanization, war-to reveal that the movement’s most important figures were much more conflicted about modernity than has been thought thus far. By diachronically juxtaposing the artistic production and official pronouncements of futurist artists with coeval theories such as those advanced by social theorists like Gabriel Tarde, Gustave Le Bon, and Cesare Lombroso, as well as with recent developments in the field of chronophotography and war technology, Poggi’s work makes a case for a radical reappraisal of futurism that revolutionizes its understanding within the context of Italian modernism.

To read the rest of the press release, click here. To see other recent prize-winning books from PUP, click here.