When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants Read Online Free PDF

politicians’ salaries, we would attract a better class of politician.
    This is an unpopular argument for various reasons, one of them being that it would be the politicians themselves who have to lobby for higher salaries, and that isn’t politically feasible (especially in a poor economy). Can you imagine the headlines?
    But the idea remains attractive, doesn’t it? The idea is that by raising the salaries of elected and other government officials, you would a) signal the true importance of the job; b) attract a kind of competent person who might otherwise enter a more remunerative field; c) allow politicians to focus more on the task at hand rather than worry about their income; and d) make politicians less susceptible to the influence of moneyed interests.
    Some countries already pay their government officials a lot of money—Singapore, for instance. From Wikipedia :
    Ministers in Singapore are the highest paid politicians in the world, receiving a 60% salary raise in 2007 and as a result Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s pay jumpedto S$3.1 million, five times the US$400,000 earned by President Barack Obama. Although there was a brief public outcry regarding the high salary in comparison to the size of the country governed, the government’s firm stance was that this raise was required to ensure the continued efficiency and corruption-free status of Singapore’s “world-class” government.
    Although Singapore recently cut its politicians’ pay substantially , the salaries remain relatively very high.
    But is there any evidence that paying politicians more actually improves quality? A research paper by Claudio Ferraz and Frederico Finan argues that it did for municipal governments in Brazil:
    Our main findings show that [paying a] higher wage increases political competition and improves the quality of legislators, as measured by education, type of previous profession, and political experience in office. In addition to this positive selection, we find that wages also affect politicians’ performance, which is consistent with a behavioral response to a higher value of holding office.
    Another, more recent paper by Finan, Ernesto Dal Bó, and Martín Rossi finds that the quality of civil servants also improves when they are paid more, this time in Mexican cities:
    We find that higher wages attract more able applicants as measured by their IQ, personality, and proclivity toward public sector work—i.e., we find no evidence of adverse selection effects on motivation; higher wage offers also increased acceptance rates, implying a labor supply elasticity of around 2 and some degree of monopsony power. Distance and worse municipal characteristics strongly decrease acceptance rates but higher wages help bridge the recruitment gap in worse municipalities.
    I am not willing to argue that paying U.S. government officials more would necessarily improve our political system. But, just as it seems a bad idea to pay a schoolteacher less than a commensurately talented person can make in other fields, it is probably a bad idea to expect that enough good politicians and civil servants will fill those jobs even though they can make a lot more money doing something else.
    There’s an even more radical idea I’ve been thinking about for a while: What if we incentivized politicians with big cash payouts if the work they do in office actually turns out to be good for society?
    One big problem with politics is that politicians’ incentives are generally not aligned well with the incentives of the electorate. Voters want politicians to help solve hard problems that have long-term time frames: transportation,health care, education, economic development, geopolitical affairs, and so on. The politicians, meanwhile, have strong incentives to act in their own interests (getting elected, raising money, consolidating power, etc.), most of which have short-term payouts. So as much as we may dislike how many politicians act, they’re simply