Psychologists have long been interested in what happens when people's internal drives are replaced by external motivations. A host of experiments have shown that when threats and rewards enter the picture, they tend to destroy the inner drives. Paychecks and pink slips might be powerful reasons to get out of bed each day, but they turn out to be surprisingly ineffective -- and even counterproductive -- in getting people to perform at their best.

This interesting topic is discussed in some depth in Dan Arially's book "Predictably Irrational" where he devotes a chapter to it, "Why we are happy to do things but not when we are paid to do them. It is the distinction between social norms and market norms and the problems that occur when we mix them. One example he used was of a children's daycare that had a problem with parents picking up their children on time. In an attempt to encourage them they started charging them a fee when they were late. They moved from the social norm of it's not polite to keep people waiting to a market one I'm paying for it. The result was a worsening of the situation the customers no longer view it in social terms reasoning that if I'm paying for it the social responsibility of being on time no longer applied. But that was only the beginning of the problem. When the daycare abandoned their misguided attempt at encouraging on time pickups the situation didn't improve. They had destroyed the social contract by injecting money into it

You can consider this a strong recommendation for his book. It also has great chapters on the fallacy of supply and demand and behavioral economics, as well as the costs of zero. Try this ask someone if they would rather have a $10.00 gift certificate for free or a $20.00 gift certificate for $7.00.

“Edible landscape” seems to be going head to head with “staycation” as the most popular catch phrase of Summer 2008. Lawns may not be disappearing before our very eyes, but citizens are definitely swapping out blades of grass for bushels of beans in increasing numbers.

Hitchens on Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is so much identified with seriousness—his choice of subjects, from Kashmir to Andalusia; his position as a literary negotiator of East and West; his decade and more of internal exile in hiding from the edict of a fanatical theocrat—that it can be easy to forget how humorous he is. In much the same way, his extraordinary knowledge of classical literature sometimes causes people to overlook his command of the vernacular. Here are two examples of wit and idiom from his latest fiction, The Enchantress of Florence. In the first, an enigmatic wanderer, appareled in a coat of many colors, enters a splendid city: