iWorks like a Charmi addresses a simple question Why are incentives everywhere now From inducements to work harder at our jobs to tax rebates for corporations, incentive names a general theory of motivation--according to economists, we are iincentive-driveni creatures. Yet far from being a neutral generalization, this understanding of human behavior smuggles in a quintessentially economic way of seeing the world. iWorks like a Charmi applies Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic concept of iretroactive causalityi to explain the metastasis of the language and logic of incentives To discover an incentive is to place in the untouchable past an economic cause for a contextual, historical force. Tracing incentive from its roots in antiquity to its uptake by neoclassical and then Chicago-school economists, Robert O. McDonald diagnoses the spread of incentives across the social, cultural, and political field and warns readers of the dangers of handing over causality to the economists.