🍕 Free Pizza! 🍕

And Why That May Not Be A Good Idea…

“Antigonus of Socho received [the oral tradition] from Shimon the Righteous. He used to say: do not be like servants who serve the master in the expectation of receiving a reward, but be like servants who serve the master without the expectation of receiving a reward, and let the fear of Heaven be upon you.”

-Pirke Avot 1:3

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In elementary school, Pizza Hut bribed me to read.

For the past forty years, Pizza Hut has run a program called “Book It!,” which incentivizes children in elementary schools to read by giving them free pizza. The premise is simple: Kids love pizza. Kids don’t love reading. So if kids know that they will get free pizza the more they read, everyone wins.

As a child, I simply enjoyed the pizza and did not ask too many questions. And today, as someone who loves reading and has a dysfunctional relationship with buying books, I honestly have no idea whether or not this program helped me or anyone at Reisterstown Elementary School develop a love of reading.

But Josh, the founder of Moneyball Judaism, wants to use the beginning of a new school year to look at “Book It!” through the lens of incentives.

Many Jewish organizations use financial incentives to try and solve systemic problems. Synagogues pay families to relocate to increase membership, camps offer to provide college tuition to encourage young adults to work as counselors instead of getting an internship, and an increasing number of CEOs, rabbis, and executive directors have contracts contingent on hitting membership and enrollment targets.

In principle, I love these programs; the reality is that Jewish life is expensive, and if you can nudge someone by lessening a financial burden or increasing a financial incentive, more power to you.

But do these incentives work?

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Incentive Effect

Perhaps you are wondering, “Wait, why WOULDN’T one of these programs work?” The argument in favor seems obvious: If you give someone something they want in exchange for something you want them to do, it makes sense that one action would lead to the other.

And the truth is that incentives largely work, except when they don’t. This is known as the “incentive effect” or the “incentivization effect,” the idea that incentives impact behavior, but not always the way we intend.

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This is one reason why Alfie Kohn HATES Pizza Hut’s “Book It!” program with missionary zeal. Kohn is a brilliant educational contrarian, making everyone think even when disagreeing with him. Kohn is an educator, not an economist, but he understands the powers and pitfalls of incentives, and despises “Book It!” because of something called “intrinsic motivation.”

Kohn’s theory is that understanding the impact of an incentive requires an understanding of why someone is motivated to do something, in the first place. In general, all kinds of motivation can be divided into two categories:

1. Extrinsic Motivation: Sometimes, people want to do things because they will receive an external incentive like a salary in exchange for working at their job. Presumably, if one takes away that incentive, the motivation disappears. This is “extrinsic motivation.”

2. Intrinsic Motivation: However, sometimes people do things because they value the thing in and of itself, regardless of whether or not they receive a reward. This is “intrinsic motivation.” If you’ve ever heard someone say that they are so lucky to be paid for a job that involves something they love to do already, you are hearing the power of intrinsic motivation.

Kohn’s issue with “Book It!” is that it takes reading, activity educators should want students to be intrinsically motivated to do, and gives an extrinsic motivator in the form of pizza to do it. Kohn writes:

“…the more people are rewarded for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.  It doesn’t matter whether children can be induced to read an extra book today; what counts is whether they will still want to read tomorrow.  Or, to put it differently, it doesn’t matter whether they’re motivated; it matters what kind of motivation they develop.”

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In other words, once a child starts to associate reading with free pizza, they might assume that they will always get free pizza when they read. But what if the child stops reading when they no longer receive free pizza?

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All of a sudden, what started as an incentive resulted in a perverse outcome.

Kohn’s argument should give us pause as a learning community because it highlights the tension between the vitality of Jewish institutions and the richness of Jewish life. Jewish institutions live in the realm of economic incentives, and thus, it makes sense why extrinsic motivators will lead to better outcomes. But Judaism is a pursuit more like reading and requires intrinsic motivation to stay rich and thick over time. Thus, how do incentives impact the vitality of Jewish life in a world where incentives are often necessary?

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Misbehaving

If the previous section made you think, fantastic. 

If the previous section made you hungry, get something to eat.

When you return, pause and remember that just because we want to be wonkier does not mean that all ideas we learn will be consistent with each other. Part of the reason the ideas are not consistent is that our minds are not consistent, and incentives are a perfect example of how our minds can go in unexpected directions based on the nature of what we are trying to accomplish.

To dive deeper into this tension, we will turn to Richard Thaler’s Misbehaving, a fusion of autobiography and intellectual history of behavioral economics.

Misbehaving begins by contrasting the idealized model of humanity proposed by modern economics with the reality of how humans actually behave. This economic model is built around a term first coined by John Stuart Mill called homo economicus, what Thaler calls “Econs.” Thaler argues that the “core premise of economy theory [is]…that people choose by optimizing.”

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In practical terms, what this means is people are naturally inclined to seek the best possible option at all times, always seeking the most self-interested outcome for their needs.

However, Thaler argues that if you accept the premise that people behave like homo economicus, the conclusions you would draw quickly devolve into the absurd:

“In a world of Econs, there is a long list of things that are supposedly irrelevant. No Econ would buy a particularly large portion of whatever will be served for dinner on Tuesday because he happens to be hungry when shopping on Sunday. Your hunger on Sunday should be irrelevant in choosing the size of your meal for Tuesday. An Econ would not finish that huge meal on Tuesday, even though he is no longer hungry, just because he had paid for it and hates waste. To an Econ, the price paid for some food item in the past is not relevant in making the decision about how much of it to eat now. An Econ would also not expect a gift on the day of the year in which she happened to get married, or be born. What possible difference can a date make? In fact, Econs would be perplexed by the entire idea of gifts. An Econ would know that cash is the best possible gift; it allows the recipient to buy whatever is optimal. But unless you are married to an economist, I don’t advise giving cash on your next anniversary. Come to think of it, even if your spouse is an economist, this is probably not a great idea.”

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If I may channel Thaler, you probably read these examples and thought, “Why would anyone think this way?” And that’s the point. Thaler wants economists and people who listen to economists to recognize that if the assumptions made by conventional economic theory rest on a highly flawed theory of humanity, how must economics adapt to incorporate a more realistic picture of humanity?

Returning to Pizza Hut, Econs should absolutely LOVE the “Book It!” program because it optimizes how they spend their time, combining the intellectual stimulation of reading with the satiation of hunger (and perhaps the reduction of a financial burden for parents.) Win. Win. Win. Right?

Wrong.

Alfie Kohn’s objection to “Book It!” is a perfect example of why Thaler is right: Econs don’t have passions. All Econs want to do is go through life maximizing their self-interest. But human beings live in the real world where people do develop lifelong passions, and thus, something as innocuous as pizza in exchange for reading may not have the impact that one hopes.

The Jewish Community lacks the research necessary to explore the impact of various incentives utilized to achieve desired outcomes. However, the ideas raised by Kohn and Thaler need to give us pause when short-term incentives have the potential to negatively impact long-term outcomes.

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Boring Economics Lecture!

But I wasn’t bored…in fact, I’ve watched it 100 times.

(I particularly enjoyed the CUBA Fund…)

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What I Read This Week

1. Jesus at the Ballpark: I can’t say that I love the idea of faith nights at the ballpark, but it’s good for everyone to know about them, whether you like baseball or not. Read this.

2. Can Religion Be For More Than Just the Soul?: I just read Random Acts of Medicine by Christopher Worsham and Bapu Jena and look forward to reviewing the book another week. In the meantime, read this article.

3. Open AI Used Workers Making Less Than $2 Per Hour: I’m embarrassed I did not see this article in January, but better late than never. AI and LLMs come “cheap” but not “free.”

4. Transforming Habitual Urgency: One of the easiest leadership strategies is treating every issue like a fire that needs to be put out; the problem is that this strategy rarely leads to transformation. I loved this piece from the Rockwood Leadership Institute on how to change the paradigm.

5. Taylor Swift AND Beyonce!?!?!: Yes, please.

1. No one person coined the term “incentive effect.” The study of incentives is as old as the study of economics.

2. Alfie Kohn, “Close the Book on ‘Book It!,’” March 2007.

3. Kohn’s formulation about the potential boomerang effects of bad incentives, many of which he outlines in Punished By Rewards, poses an interesting conflict for us as a learning community.

4. Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015), 4.

5. Ibid., 5.