Paid to Save (And Not From Your Pocket)

Over at Inc. is yet another story you'll find incredible -- if you share the suspicion of self-interest so common today. Suzanne Lucas writes of a trucking company that set up a bonus program in order to encourage its drivers to save money. Lucas quotes the following from a Wall Street Journal report before she applies the lesson to other types of employment:

Image via Pixabay.

Pitt Ohio, a Pittsburgh trucking company that employs 1,800 drivers, in 2016 began offering $56 to employees who contribute at least $19 a week for six months to an emergency-savings account without making withdrawals. Employees who maintain that for another six months qualify for a second $56 payment.

Pitt Ohio executives grew alarmed about employees' finances after researchers at the University of Pittsburgh discovered in a 2016 survey that drivers who reported financial stress are more distracted and had more accidents, inflating the company's total by about eight accidents a year.

Lucas rightly points out what some might sneer at as an "ulterior" motive: The company stood to make significant savings of its own if its program was successful.

Just as we saw with education recently, genuine self-interest should and does motivate astute businessmen to do things most of us have been misled to believe must be addressed by the government. (Not only is this untrue, doing so is immoral since government must violate individual rights in order to do anything outside its proper function.) It's good to see that yet another social ill can be mitigated by the fire of self-interest.

More important, because the widespread lack of personal savings might not exist at all without so much improper government, we also have an example of the fact that the interests of the rational do not conflict.

-- CAV