Would this work??
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/09/12/2030497.htm
“A doctors group has proposed that overweight people be given a $170 subsidy to attend an accredited weight-loss program.”
At first glance this idea seems to have merit; the obesity crisis is apparently worsening in Australia and as such obesity related diseases are also on the increase. Plus on a more shallow level, they’re unsightly…
But would paying people work?
I am going to argue that it might in some cases but on the whole it would be ineffective and using some shaky ‘economic logic’ that I have read and now think I know I will try to explain why.
At the moment there is for many people a certain level of moral, social, and ‘health’ obligation to stay in some sort of decent physical shape. This can come from other people telling them ‘that it is for their own good’ they owe it to them selves to get healthy. The problem then with using money as a motivator is that money becomes the overriding incentive to loose weight and people will stop loosing weight for more personal reasons and only do it for the money. This may seem at first to not matter a whole lot, after all, they’re losing weight so why does it matter what their motivations are? I guess it doesn’t really matter, but the problem with having money as an incentive is that it is too easy to just say ‘I can’t be bothered doing it, it’s only a small amount of money anyway, and I’m not actually loosing money’. This effectively negates the only remaining incentive and people will fall back into their old habits content with the knowledge that they are not loosing money, they are just not gaining any. There are many other factors in play here but the main point I am making is that using money as the main incentive for something as personal as a person’s health and well being is not necessarily the most effective scheme.
Here is an example of a similar situation from ‘Freakonomics’ in which a child care centre charged $3 per child every time a parent was late to pick up their kids. This backfired terribly and the rate of late pickups increased. The main reason being that the $3 fee negated any moral obligation the parents felt to pick up their kids on time; they obviously thought ‘well they obviously don’t care too much about late pickups; anyway, they are making more money off of it’. I suppose you could make the late fee $100 but then people would most likely not use the service at all.
Anyway, let’s hear your thoughts on whether this scheme would work and if not, what would work better?
