"getting insurgents to behave is fundamentally a math problem."

Ainda me consigo admirar com o que vou descobrindo acerca do impacte dos economistas e da sua visão da sociedade povoada por econs. É impressionante o poder que tiveram e ainda têm.
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Ontem, ao ler mais um capítulo de "David & Goliath" de Malcolm Gladwell apanho com mais esta:

"The same year that Northern Ireland descended into chaos, two economists - Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr.- wrote a report about how to deal with insurgencies. Leites and Wolf worked for the RAND Corporation, the prestigious think tank started after the Second World War by the Pentagon. Their report was called Rebellion and Authority. In those years, when the world was exploding in violence, everyone read Leites and Wolf. Rebellion and Authority became the blueprint for the war in Vietnam, and for how police departments dealt with civil unrest, and for how governments coped with terrorism. Its conclusion was simple:

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Fundamental to our analysis is the assumption that the population, as individuals or groups,
behaves “rationally,” that it calculates costs and benefits to the extent that they can be related to different courses of action, and makes choices accordingly.…Consequently, influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism, but rather a better understanding of what costs and benefits the individual or the group is concerned with, and how they are calculated.
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In other words, getting insurgents to behave is fundamentally a math problem. If there are riots in the streets of Belfast, it’s because the costs to rioters of burning houses and smashing windows aren’t high enough. And when Leites and Wolf said that “influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism,” what they meant was that nothing mattered but that calculation. [Moi ici: Apetece dizer; Ah! Percebo agora o pensamento por detrás de certas campanhas publicitárias que, IMHO, só criam inimigos da marca publicitada] If you were in a position of power, you didn’t have to worry about how lawbreakers felt about what you were doing. You just had to be tough enough to make them think twice." [Moi ici: Se lerem este capítulo, pensem em todos aqueles professores que o são, sem vocação, porque não havia outro emprego mais à mão, e que espezinham o futuro de tantas crianças. Porque aplicam Leites e Wolf, autoridade para cima dos miúdos.]

Quantas áreas da nossa vida, da nossa sociedade, da nossa economia, são controladas, são comandadas, são influenciadas por tretas deste tipo, de outros Leites e Wolfs bem intencionados e que infernizam a vida das pessoas?