People tend to do what a system rewards them to do. That is a design fact, not a character judgment.

People tend to do what a system rewards them to do. That is a design fact, not a character judgment, and it is the single most useful lens I know for looking at institutions that are producing outcomes nobody claims to want.

None of the four rules is an accusation. A member of Congress who spends four hours a day fundraising is not a worse person than you; they are responding rationally to a system where the marginal hour on the phone is worth more than the marginal hour in a hearing. A staffer who is careful not to antagonize a contractor is doing what anyone with a mortgage and a career would do. If you replaced every person in Washington tomorrow with people you personally admire, the new set would drift toward the same behavior within a decade, because the payoff matrix is unchanged.

This is also why I distrust reforms built on exhortation — ethics pledges, norms, appeals to statesmanship. They ask individuals to absorb a cost the system is set up to punish. That works occasionally, briefly, and never at scale.

The alternative is boring and durable: change what the system pays for. Make the ordinary, self-interested move also the public-spirited one. Fix the incentives and most of the behavior you were trying to shame out of people simply stops being worth doing.