My Mama Done Tol’ Me (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

Michael Lewis, prolific author of books that include “The Big Short,” “Moneyball” and “The Blind Side,” was on one of my favorite podcasts last week to promote his current bestseller, “The Fifth Risk.” Podcast host Preet Bharara, former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, asked Lewis if there was some common thread in the people he writes about — in sports, in business, in government.

Lewis’ answer boiled down to one word: incentives.

It reminded me of dozens of conversations I’ve had with our CEO, Olivia Farrell, over the past two decades. Be careful what you incentivize, she’s told me in the pained voice of experience, because you will surely get it.

“I think if there’s a pattern that leads people to both stupid behavior or corrupt behavior, it’s that there’s some carrot out there that they are following, and they just don’t stop themselves,” Lewis told Bharara in an interview for the Dec. 13 episode of “Stay Tuned With Preet.” The financial crisis a decade ago, the subject of Lewis’ “The Big Short,” was a textbook case of people following short-term incentives to do “unbelievably self-destructive and socially destructive things,” he said.

Other examples of perverse incentives can be ripped from the headlines on any given day.

► Wells Fargo incentivized cross-selling in a way that led low-level customer service representatives to create fraudulent customer accounts in order to keep their crummy jobs.

More than 5,300 employees were caught and fired — but even such undeniable evidence of the unintended consequences didn’t make Wells Fargo change the incentive structure until federal regulators stepped in.

► Rubber-stamp approval by economic development boards with no real authority or accountability incentivized kickbacks to legislators from state General Improvement Fund grants.

► Michael Cohen was in his early 40s and earning about $75,000 a year as a personal-injury lawyer in New York when he was incentivized to do a favor for a famous real estate developer and TV personality. Suddenly he was making $500,000 a year, and all he had to do was fix any inconvenient problems that cropped up for that developer — even by committing federal crimes.

“Time and time again,” Cohen told his sentencing judge last week, “I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds rather than to listen to my own inner voice and my moral compass. My weakness can be characterized as a blind loyalty to Donald Trump, and I was weak for not having the strength to question and to refuse his demands.”

That inner voice and the strength to listen to it came up in Bharara’s interview with Michael Lewis. “Why is it that when a mob moves in one direction, some people are able to step outside and say that’s not what we should be doing?” Lewis asked. And then he answered his own question:

“The quality in the person who behaves well even when the world’s paying him to behave badly, I’d say — you know, this is going to sound trite — but if there’s one unifying trait in the characters I’ve written about who sort of stand apart, it’s they still hear their mama’s voice in their heads.

“They haven’t become so detached from who they were when they were little kids when their mom was trying to raise them and their dad was trying to raise them. They hear that voice and they kinda like, eh, say no.”

Lewis’ advice for parents: “Raise them well and stay in their heads.”

Another pattern Lewis has detected: “[E]ven the most corrupt people don’t think about themselves as corrupt” while “the good people don’t think of themselves as the good people … because anybody who’s really good isn’t spending a lot of time dwelling on his own goodness.”

Lewis’ latest book is just one of the many books I should have read but haven’t. I did read an excerpt published online by The Guardian, the venerable British newspaper that also keeps an eye on news on this side of the pond. It was the part of the book about former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s noble effort as head of Donald Trump’s transition team.

Rather than doing nothing and thus making an entirely new team necessary when Trump pulled off his surprise win, which is how it appeared here in the hinterlands, Christie actually did a lot of work — good work, according to Max Stier, who advises presidential transition teams as head of the Partnership for Public Service.

The Trump political organization promptly dumped it all in the trash after the election.

Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com and follow her on Twitter at @gwenmoritz.