Chapter
Intro
The Invisible Force You Can Feel
Before you can name it, you can sense it. The unease that something in the system is off — and the language (Goodhart, Campbell, Cobra) that turns the feeling into a diagnosis.
Forthcoming 2027 · A book by Ricardo Rosselló & Aaron Bare
Perverse Incentives
Every system gets the results it rewards. A diagnosis of the hidden architecture inside healthcare, pharma, food, Wall Street, media, and governance — and the methodology to flip it.
The Book
Something is quietly wrong with every system we depend on. Not broken in obvious ways. Just drifting — slowly, steadily rewarding behavior that undermines the purpose it was designed to serve.
The hospital is paid to treat disease, not prevent it. The drug company is paid to maintain patents, not cure patients. The insurance company is paid to deny claims, not cover them. Political campaigns are funded by donors and PACs, not citizens. The food system is paid by the calorie, not the nutrition. Wall Street is paid by the quarter, not the decade. The school is paid by the test score, not the education.
And psilocybin — a compound that grows wild on six continents, used by indigenous healers for 9,000 years, with the most promising clinical results for depression and addiction in modern psychiatry — was Schedule I for 50 years. Not because it didn't work. Because no one could own it, and a cure has no recurring revenue.
None of the people running these systems are villains. Most are trying. But the systems reward the wrong things — and behavior follows rewards, not intentions.
This book is about that invisible force. It has a name. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
The Three Laws
The mechanics every chapter rests on.
Goodhart's Law
Charles Goodhart, 1975
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Campbell's Law
Donald Campbell, 1976
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more apt it is to distort and corrupt the processes it was meant to monitor.
The Cobra Effect
Delhi, British Raj
Incentives designed to solve a problem end up rewarding people for making it worse. Bounties for dead cobras produced bred cobras and a worse infestation.
The scale of the problem
These are not failures of effort. They are outputs of incentive architecture, operating exactly as designed.
$14,885
U.S. healthcare spend per person — nearly double Switzerland, worst outcomes in the high-income world.
Peterson-KFF, 2024
450,000
Americans dead from opioids, 1999–2018 — an epidemic manufactured by a per-script sales bonus.
CDC
77%
Global employees disengaged — $8.9 trillion lost output, 9% of global GDP.
Gallup, 2024
$942.5B
S&P 500 stock buybacks in 2024 — capital not invested in R&D or workers.
S&P Dow Jones
56%
Of U.S. adult calories come from federally subsidized commodity crops; 0.4% of subsidies go to fruits and vegetables.
CDC / Emory; Meatonomics
50 yrs
Psilocybin shelved as Schedule I — not because it didn't work, but because no one could own it.
Controlled Substances Act, 1970
The Three Layers
Human. Organizational. Institutional.
Every perverse incentive lives in one of three layers. Each layer is grounded in its own science and its own philosophical lineage. The book moves through all three.
Biology & Behavior
Human Systems
Science
Evolutionary psychology (Tooby & Cosmides) · behavioral economics (Kahneman, Thaler) · neuroscience of reward (Schultz, Berridge) · stress biology (Sapolsky) · psychedelic neuroscience (Carhart-Harris)
Philosophy
Aristotle on habit · Seneca on attention · Spinoza on conatus · Frankl on meaning · Marcus Aurelius on the examined life
Culture & Metrics
Organizational Systems
Science
Kegan & Lahey · Jensen & Meckling · Senge · Prosci, Kotter · Bare's Exponential Theory
Philosophy
Drucker · Deming · Dewey · Arendt on the banality of institutional evil
Policy & Governance
Institutional Systems
Science
Buchanan & Tullock · Acemoglu & Robinson · Douglass North · Stigler · Thaler & Sunstein
Philosophy
Machiavelli · Tocqueville · Rawls · Montesquieu · Rousseau
Full Chapter Architecture
11 chapters. One arc. From felt unease to field guide.
Chapter
01
The Ancestral OS Meets the Modern Environment
Eight evolved traits inside the brain, overlaid with the environment outside it — Haidt's moral taste buds, Rosling's Factfulness, and the Environment frame. Brain and field, together.
Chapter
02
The Anatomy of a Perverse Incentive
What it is, where it fits inside the architecture above, and why it has grown alongside society's complexity. Labeled internal/personal and external/systemic/organizational.
Chapter
03
Case Study · Person Scale
Hardware and software. Attention hijacks, identity-based habits, addiction loops, status hooks — the perverse incentives running inside one human being.
Chapter
04
Case Study · Organizational & Systemic Scale
Comp plans, healthcare reimbursement, food subsidies, the quarterly clock, and engagement-maximizing media. Different industries, identical anatomy.
Chapter
05
Case Study · Global & Civilizational Scale
Climate, regulatory capture across borders, geopolitics, and the commons — what happens when the incentive is global and the accountability is national.
Chapter
06
The Flip — Our Model
The four-move framework for identifying and reversing any perverse incentive. The methodology we teach in lectures, courses, workshops, and the Lab.
Chapter
07
Why This Matters — Complexity & Hyperconvergence
Why this is no longer a personal-growth or business-growth question. Complexity compounded faster than our reward systems. Hyperconvergence is the accelerant.
Chapter
08
The AI Case — Future-Crafting
AI as the proof case for why incentives are now civilization-level infrastructure. Whatever AI optimizes, the world reorganizes around. The question is who writes the objective function.
Chapter
09
Building Beautiful Futures
Three portraits of aligned incentive structures — the deliberate life, the developmental organization, the inclusive institution. Alignment, not perfection.
Chapter
Epilogue
The Proof
Rosselló returns to his story — not as confession, but as demonstration. The hardware reset, the software rewrite, the cloudware rebuild — and the 53,823 write-in ballots that followed.
The opening is live. Start with the Invisible Force →
Epilogue · The Proof
His story is not the curriculum. It is the proof.
Rosselló names the specific perverse incentives he was running inside the Governor's office: sleep deprivation as status; inner-circle loyalty over institutional truth; media engagement over governing outcomes; the Telegram chat as every mechanism in the book running simultaneously.
The psilocybin experience: the moment the default mode network went quiet enough to see the reward structure he had been running. The science of Chapter 7 and the phenomenology meet in a single page.
The hardware reset. The software rewrite. The cloudware rebuild — purpose, community, institutional trust.
The write-in election: 53,823 people wrote his name onto ballots. Without a campaign. Without a party. Because something had actually changed — and people could tell.
If the system that produced the fall can be diagnosed, designed, and flipped — then the thesis is not theory. It is lived.
Forthcoming
Perverse Incentives
A book by Ricardo Rosselló and Aaron Bare. Prepared by Syzygy Studio. For early access, speaking inquiries, and translation rights, write to us.