Via The Browser, Dan Ariely:

In my view, most people who behave badly are not bad people. They’re just good people who are put in bad situations—where it’s tempting and easy to cheat a little bit. Look at the whole financial crisis, if you and I were getting paid $8 million a year to view mortgage-backed securities as good products, we could do it. It’s inhumane to put people in situations that have tremendous conflict of interest and expect them to be unswayed by it. Ideally, professions eliminate these problems by not making people face them.

Previously on incentives.

In his weekly column, James Surowiecki deftly explains why so many bad laws persist: they matter a great deal to a few people and not so much to everyone else.

If we were starting from scratch, after all, it seems unlikely that the Senate would choose this particular moment to pass a bill subsidizing money managers to the tune of billions of dollars a year. But, because the tax break already exists, it exerts a kind of gravitational pull that makes it hard to get rid of. In part, that’s simple economics—those who benefit from the tax break have more money to lobby for it to be kept in place. Furthermore, while the cost of subsidies is spread out among all taxpayers, the benefits are highly concentrated, so, naturally, opposition is generally diluted and diffuse while support is intense. If you work in private equity, it’s possible that nothing the government does matters more than keeping this tax break intact. And this pattern is true not just of subsidies but of government programs in general: every government action creates a constituency with an interest in keeping that action going.

Former CIA operative cites deadly suicide attack on CIA agents in Afghanistan as proof the agency has lost its way, promoting desk skills over field skills; in passing, the author implies only dirty hands get the job done.

I usually cheer for Stephen Colbert’s guests to one-up him as it means a better repartee for the audience to enjoy. But I was very impressed when Stephen essentially shut down Mary Matalin. It’s a thing of beauty.

Republican party spokespeople have long enjoyed a rhetorical advantage on television because they changed their game while their interlocutors didn’t. (Imagine a rugby team playing against a touch football squad.)

Stephen Colbert plays the same game as these propagandists. And he’s better at it. The same can often be said for Jon Stewart.

It’s a great opportunity: send out comedians as your defensive line while attempting to score with reasonable policy. It might just work.

Overheard on the BBC: the reason why so many priests abused so many children isn’t that priests aren’t allowed to marry it’s that priests have too much power.

(In retrospect, the alleged link between celibacy and pedophilia is a nice piece of prejudice. “If only priests could live as normal heterosexuals they wouldn’t exploit children.” Because married heterosexuals never abuse positions of power.)