Oregon's failed antisocial experiment

The state's slide across nearly every social measure stems from its inverted incentives that encourage bad, and discourage good, behavior

Oregon’s slide. (Photo courtesy ODOT)

Oregon’s state government makes Oregonians’ lives worse by warping incentives to encourage socially harmful behaviors and to discourage beneficial behaviors. Usually, governments try to encourage people to do things that, at least, do not harm others. Oregon is trying the opposite approach, and is suffering the expected across-the-board social decay. Reversing that trend is how we save Oregon.

The root of Oregon’s self-inflicted crisis

The thesis, if you will, of Oregon Roundup is that Oregon is committing suicide by public policy. It is, but the policy, or more precisely the policies, with which my state is gradually strangling itself exist downstream from its compulsion to protect people from the consequences of bad behavior and to reduce the rewards of good behavior.

Society exists because we exert pressure on one another to behave in a way that fosters, rather than undermines, our ability to live in close proximity to each other with minimal friction. We do this by expecting people to act in a certain way, and sometimes adjusting our behavior toward them when they act in a manner we deem harmful to others, to society. The result is a mishmash of social norms, laws, expectations and customs that create incentives for people to do things that help, not hurt, others. It’s not a perfect system, and it is constantly in flux as societal norms change over time, usually pretty gradually.

Oregon has spent at least the last five years using laws, the farthest reaching, least flexible and most punitive social pressure point, in an attempt to force a drastic and immediate change in social norms from the top-down. It has done so, foremost, by eroding the negative consequences of bad behavior.

Sleeping outside, on public property, has its downsides, especially during an Oregon winter. Oregon gives people tents, food, mobile showers, mobile medical care, mobile counseling, exempted homeless people from Covid restrictions and otherwise does everything possible to make people’s stay on the streets as comfortable as possible. Some of this is charitable; much of it is public policy. The result is huge, and growing, numbers of people sleeping on Oregon streets, inhibiting others’ use of those public facilities and often ultimately dying.

Relatedly, using hard drugs is generally considered a bad idea, and for good reason. Oregon was permissive toward use of those drugs, often in full public view by people sleeping on the streets, before it outright decriminalized them before sort of recriminalizing them. The result is a drug crisis of nearly unrivaled magnitude, with the attendant social damage and, again, death for many who partake.

That crime is bad should go without saying, but Oregon has slashed punishment of people who commit crimes. Here, as with homelessness and drugs, the changes to the law are spawned and accompanied by an elite ethos that criminals should avoid substantial punishment. That leaves society, especially criminals’ future victims, to bear the more of the cost of criminality.

Choose any other policy area, and the same inversion of incentives is at work: public education expects, and gets, ever less from workers and students; Oregon’s Medicaid system buys air conditioners for people who either can’t afford them or have chosen to spend their money on other things; people who force the closure of the library of a state university, and severely damage it, are shielded from the worst consequences of their actions.

The attempt to reduce the negative individual consequences of bad behavior by definition creates more of it. But Oregon is working on the other end of the behavior spectrum, too. If you have conducted yourself responsibly and done ok financially, your reward is to pay punitively high taxes and, increasingly, to be surrounded by the social decay to which Oregon has contributed.

Oregonians have less incentive to behave well, and fewer consequences for behaving poorly. Because people can move freely between states, and because Oregon is such an outlier in its embrace of antisocial incentives, over time it attracts people who want to do antisocial things with fewer consequences, and repels people who act responsibly, because the rewards of doing so are curtailed, relatively speaking.

The Oregon experiment attempts a top-down change in the conception of a social good. No one likes crime, but did you know punishing criminals via an allegedly racist criminal justice system is worse? No one likes going to downtown Portland anymore, but it is inhumane to deprive people of their “right” to sleep on sidewalks. Producing stuff is great and all, but the accumulation of wealth as a result of production is inequitable. The through-line is that individuals should not enjoy the fruits, or suffer the consequences, of their actions.

Everything is crumbling because our state government has its thumb on the wrong side of the scale. That is how Oregon finds itself on a sharp downward trajectory on a wide range of social measures. Whether that trajectory accelerates or reverses is within our control.

How to stop the slide

We can reverse Oregon’s slide by fixing incentives. Make criminals, within Constitutional bounds, pay more for the price of antisocial behavior. Do not actively encourage people to sleep outside, or even better, prevent them from doing so. Treat hard drugs as the scourge they are, not as an understandable life choice that should be made easier, and “safer” for the individual but not for society, by government. Stop telling students, explicitly or implicitly, it’s ok not to learn. Simply put, in deed and rhetoric, encourage good behavior and discourage bad.

This is not as easy as it sounds. Oregon’s government and most of its elite institutions have to varying degrees bought into the inversion of incentives, at least publicly. I suspect that very few of these people practice personally what they espouse publicly. Most of them know right from wrong, and expect those around them to know it, too. But they believe they have too much to gain from taking public positions that celebrate, or at least excuse, antisocial behavior.

Most Oregonians have been content to go along for the elite incentive inversion ride, so far. There have been indications of a rollback. Portland was moving in a relatively sane direction on homelessness and crime. We’ll see what the new elected leadership of the city does. Oregonians forced a reluctant legislature to recriminalize hard drugs. Polling consistently shows people don’t like the negative effects of Oregon’s experiment on their families, their neighborhoods and their communities.

In this global populist era, Oregon is as ripe as anyplace for a populist electoral revolt. Our elites espouse values, and support policies, most people disagree with. Our elites abuse their power to an astounding degree, as anyone who reads this here Oregon Roundup knows. They serve themselves, and a destructive ideology. They do not serve us.

Politically, there are options, because our elites are so far off base from where most people of any political party are. Democrats could take us in a different direction by voting for liberals who wish to preserve a functioning society, not try (and inevitably fail) to remake it to achieve their view of perfection. My fellow Republicans could right the ship by going hard and directly at the ethos that is ruining our state and welcoming non-Republicans who believe similarly, even if they don’t buy into the full conservative agenda.

The truth is that Oregon is failing. The state is making people’s lives worse. The experiment has failed. It is up to us to reverse Oregon’s slide. We must shout the truth from the rooftops, and celebrate each and every move, however halting, to get the state government out of the society-destroying business.