Jane Jacobs and Traffic Tickets

Rexford Township, Michigan, has started to pay police officers according to the number of tickets they write. In Systems of Survival, a book about moral systems, Jane Jacobs criticized something similar: ticket quotas for police. Treating guardians (such as police) as if they were in commerce doesn’t work well, she wrote. There are two ways of making a living (taking and trading). Both have value, but they need to follow different rules of conduct (which we may grandly call morals) to work well.

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