We Won't Admit We Need Incentives

Many of the world's problems persist because we have insufficient incentives to do the right thing — and the reason is that we don't want to admit how much incentives matter, since direct incentive schemes expose the self-interested motive we'd rather hide; so we don't restructure things to produce the incentives we need, preferring a comfortable pretense of trust (as with doctors or financial intermediaries) over stronger but distrust-implying explicit incentives.