Any, and every, system will be gamed. Always

This does not surprise us in the slightest:

Civil servants are abusing “flexi time” to claim up to 50 days’ holiday a year, The Telegraph has been told.

Abusing seems a little strong to us. Optimising might be better.

Civil servants are required to work 37.5 hours a week as standard, but can claim overtime and take it as days off – up to a maximum of two days a month.

But staff are said to be gaming the system by leaving their laptops open at the end of the day while working from home, as well as counting their commuting time as work.

On top of 25 days of annual leave, it means they can take almost 50 days off in a single year.

Optimising for the individuals undertaking the actions that is. Rather than optimising for society, or their employers - us - or anything like that. Of course, we’ve that observation of this point from 250 years ago:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest

Whether it should be true that everyone optimises for their own experience of life is different from that observation that everyone does. What is important is that we go on to design matters noting this point. Incentives matter and all that, Charlie Munger used to point out that if we showed him the incentives he’d show us the result.

People do not work their fingers to the bone for the glory of the great society to come. They do not obey sules, they optimise them for their own experience. Plans for society that depend - as an alarming number of them seem to - upon the “But surely no one would….” fail. Because, yes, people would and people inevitably will.

That everyone, but always, optimises under the rules to their own benefit means that plans that depend upon lots of such rules aren’t going to work. Or, perhaps, aren’t going to produce the desired outcome. This is true of days off for civil servants and for the wider economy as a whole.

Pity, but there it is, the planned society fails over those planned - us humans.

Tim Worstall