Perverse rewards.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side - Punishment and rewards

Typically, experiments involving the administration of random rewards and electric shocks are conducted on rats in laboratories. These experiments--all hellish enough to serve as PETA recruiting material--have revealed much about rodents' reactions to cruel and totally arbitrary environments, in which there is no "right" or "wrong" and consequently nothing to learn. But if you look outside of the cage--I mean, the box--you will see that the same kind of experiment is now being conducted using human subjects, and on a population-wide scale.

Consider the case of Stephen Crawford, former co-president of Morgan Stanley, who was rewarded for three months of presiding over the company's decline with a $32 million pay-off. That's $32 million for screwing up, or, if we generously assume he put in ten hours a day at this task, about $30,000 per hour. Contrast that to the person who cleaned Crawford's office during his brief tenure and is likely paid far less than $30,000 a year for doing first-rate work. At least no one is attributing Morgan Stanley's problems to a buildup of dust bunnies in the executive suites.

Within the corporate culture in general, achievement is no longer connected to reward or failure to punishment. CEOs routinely see their earnings rise by millions while their companies' stock plummets. Meanwhile, at lower levels in the hierarchy, white collar folks get laid off simply because they have been successful enough to make their salaries a tempting cost cut. Thus, the relationship between accomplishments and success seems to have been inverted. "Wall Street has traditionally rewarded people who succeeded," a consultant on executive pay told The New Fork Times. "Now they are rewarding people who fail."

Moving into the realm of politics, take the case of Karl Rove, the man who--all the current evidence suggests--outed CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson in retaliation for her husband's refusal to go along with the myth of an Iraqi nuclear threat. If a Democrat were to reveal the identity of a CIA agent or otherwise leak classified material to the press, you may be sure he or she would be tarred, feathered, and suspended from a lamppost within hours of the crime. But Rove carries on with his vicarious presidency--continuing to promote Bush's voter-repelling Social Security plan and playing a visible role in the selection of the new Supreme Court justice.

Far more serious crimes are no less amply rewarded. Of the top perpetrators in the...