Why Paying People to Get Vaccinated Doesn’t Work

It actually makes things worse.

I’m going to start this week with a thought experiment.

I’m going to give you $1,000,000. Here’s the catch. You can’t keep any of it. You need to use it to get as many people vaccinated against COVID-19 as possible. How would you do it?

The sky’s the limit here. You could pay Jalen Hurts a million dollars to do an Instagram story about getting vaccinated. Or you could buy billboards all around your local area, encouraging people to get the shot.

Or you could send direct mail to people’s houses. Or robocalls! It’s up to you.

Some of you, brainstorming about this, might decide just to cut out the middleman. If I have a million dollars to get people vaccinated, maybe I’ll just pay people to get vaccinated. I could offer 100,000 people 10 bucks each or 10,000 people 100 bucks each.

This is the central insight behind financial incentives in public health. We spend a lot of money creating public service announcements to get people to eat healthy and exercise. We create websites full of accurate, reliable information about the benefits of quitting smoking or reducing alcohol intake. But instead of paying for an ad to convince people to stop smoking or something, what if we just pay the…