Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher (eMail • Web site) have worked as a collaborative team for twenty years, producing illustrations for annual reports, brochures, posters, advertisments, book covers, movies and magazines. Together they have illustrated several children's books—including: Jon Scieszka's The Frog Prince, Continued, Anne Mazer's The Salamander Room, Garrison Keillor's Cat, You Better Come Home, and My Many Colored Days, by Dr. Seuss.

Johnson grew up in Minnesota and studied illustration and painting at the School of Associated Arts in St. Paul (BFA). Fancher was born in Michigan and studied art history while earning her BFA in Dance at the University of Cincinnati. In addition to her work with Johnson, she works for the Alberta Ballet as ballet Mistress.

Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher are married and live in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Imagine this happens to you:

Some big Manhattan publisher gives you a $100,000 advance to write the Great American Novel. Then, you look at the fine print and realize that your deal gives you $100,000 every year until you finish the book.


You call to double check. "Does this mean I get $100,000 per year...forever?" you ask.

"Not forever," the publisher says, "just until whenever you're finished writing." And once the book is completed, the publisher says, you'll receive a $2500 bonus.


This would never happen in real life, of course, because any capable publisher would realize that such a deal would provide a major incentive for you never to finish the job.

But while no publisher is that dumb, the Bush administration is. This, essentially, is the deal the White House has with the Pakistani government for helping us track down Osama bin Laden. Crooks and Liars sums it up:

The Bush administration is also offering a $25 million bounty for information leading to the capture of bin Laden. Let's do the arithmetic. If you're Pervez Musharraf, which would you choose—a one-time award of $25 million or 40 times as much this year, and next year, and every year after that?

Let's try one more analogy. Imagine you're Halliburton. You've been hired by the U.S. government to rebuild Iraq's refineries and oil infrastructure. In the meantime, until that job is completed, you've also been hired to supply Iraq with gasoline at whatever prices you see fit to charge. So, do you diligently work to complete the first task, thus killing the goose that lays the golden egg? Or do you do the economically sensible thing and ensure that the lucrative "meantime" lasts as long as possible?

This analogy, unfortunately, isn't hypothetical.

I stated, above, that one would have to be pretty dumb to create these kinds of perverse incentives. That's true, but only if the purported aims of such incentives are one's genuine goals. If the actual goal were to prevent these things from occurring—to ensure that bin Laden is never caught, that Iraq's infrastructure is never rebuilt—then incentives like this would be just the kind of thing needed. Perverse incentives are an intelligent strategy if one is pursuing perverse goals.