The Lottery Salesman Who Agreed With Me and Kept Selling

A few years ago I got a call from a representative of Mifal HaPayis, Israel's state lottery. He wanted to sell me a subscription. I told him that the lottery is a scam, that it is a tax collected almost entirely from the poor, that the expected return is a fraction of the ticket price, and that I could show him the arithmetic.

He agreed with me. Not politely, not to get me off the phone. He said, in effect, yes, I know, you are right.

Then he asked whether I wanted the subscription.

What Did Not Happen

Consider what this small exchange rules out.

He did not quit. He did not go back to his supervisor and raise the matter. The lottery did not sell one fewer ticket that month because one of its salesmen had privately conceded that the product is a scam. Nothing in the organisation registered the event at all.

And I had not achieved anything by persuading him. I had won the argument completely and changed nothing, because the argument was with the wrong entity. I was talking to a person. The thing selling me the ticket was not a person.

This is the whole observation, and I think it is worth enlarging, because most of our political effort is spent exactly this way.

Organisations Are Immune to Their Members' Opinions

An organisation is a set of incentives and procedures that happens to be executed by people. The people can hold any opinion they like about the procedures, and the procedures run anyway, because the people are paid to run them and not to agree with them.

The salesman's situation makes this plain. He needs the salary. The job consists of making calls from a script. Whether he believes the script is irrelevant to whether the calls are made, and the organisation, quite sensibly, never asks him. It measures tickets sold. His private conviction that the tickets are a swindle is not an input to anything.

Multiply him by every employee and you get the general result. An organisation can be staffed, top to bottom, by people who think its product is harmful, and produce exactly as much of it as one staffed by true believers. The convictions of the members are simply not connected to the output. The output is connected to the incentives, and the incentives are connected to whoever designed them.

I have written elsewhere that corporations defect where individuals cooperate because the moral equipment that restrains a person has no corporate equivalent. This is the same fact seen from the inside: the equipment is present in every employee, and it is not wired to anything.

Why Persuasion Is the Wrong Tool

The instinct, when something an organisation does offends you, is to persuade the people in it. Write to the employees. Explain to the clerk. Convince the salesman.

The lottery call shows what that buys you: agreement, and no change. And the agreement is not even rare. I suspect a large fraction of the people inside most institutions hold a fairly accurate view of what the institution does. Bank employees know what the fees are for. Tobacco company staff know what the product does. Civil servants know which regulations exist to protect whom. Knowing is common. It is also inert.

Contrast that with the things that do change what an organisation does. Change its revenue. Change the law it operates under. Change who can sue it and for what. Change the metric its managers are promoted on. None of these require convincing a single employee of anything, and any one of them would have more effect on the lottery than a thousand salesmen conceding the point on the phone.

If you want an organisation to behave differently, you change the conditions it operates in, not the minds of the people executing them. That sounds cynical about people. It is not; it is realistic about where the behaviour comes from.

The Same Mistake in Politics

This is why the standard political move of blaming individuals is so satisfying and so useless.

A regulator fails and we demand the resignation of its head. A ministry behaves badly and we want the minister gone. We get the resignation, a new person arrives, and the ministry behaves the same way, because the person was never the variable. We were persuading the salesman again, this time by replacing him, and the script stayed on the desk.

The lottery is a small case with no stakes. But the structure is identical in the cases that matter. The arms exporter, the polluting utility, the bank that mis-sells: each is full of people who could tell you exactly what is wrong with what they do, and each will keep doing it until something other than their opinion changes.

What the Salesman Taught Me

I did not persuade anyone that day. But I learned something I had known abstractly and not felt: an argument won against a member of an organisation is not an argument won against the organisation. The two are different targets, and the second one does not have ears.

He finished the call by wishing me a good day. I assume the next number on his list picked up, and I assume he read the script.