You can do a lot of good if you don't worry about who gets the credit

Shane Greenstein's' piece on false claims of credit for inventing email got me thinking about the larger question of attributing and claiming credit (especially after I initially mis-identified Shane as his co-blogger JG who shared the post to G+...).  Often, accomplishments have many parents. (And sometimes someone who helps disseminate the news is mistakenly credited as its source.)

Market design in particular is an outward facing part of economics, and much of what needs to be accomplished requires economists to play a helping role. So I've always liked the sentiment in the title of this post, whose origins turn out to be (fittingly) hard to attribute. Quote Investigator looks into it and finds many early origins and variations.

[1] A man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it.

[2] This was the opportunity for a man who likes to do a good thing in accordance with the noble maxim … “Never mind who gets the credit.”

[3] The way to get things done is not to mind who gets the credit of doing them.

[4] There is no limit to what a man can do who does not care who gains the credit for it.

"These sayings are certainly not identical, but they are closely interlinked thematically. Quotation number [1] appeared in a diary entry from the year 1863 in which the words were recorded as spoken by a Jesuit Priest named Father Strickland. This is the earliest citation located by QI.

In 1896 the text of [2] was published, and the phrase “Never mind who gets the credit” was dubbed the noble maxim of Edward Everett Hale.

In 1905 quotation [3] was published, and the words were attributed to Benjamin Jowett who was a theologian and classical scholar at Oxford University. But one of the author’s who made this attribution decided it was flawed, and in a later book he reassigned credit for the saying from Jowett to a “Jesuit Father”. This is probably a reference to Father Strickland. This maxim is the same as quote [A] given by the questioner above.

Expression [4] was used by Charles Edward Montague in 1906, but he did not claim coinage of the phrase. He said it was the favorite saying of his friend and colleague the journalist William T. Arnold. But Montague did not credit Arnold as originator either. He left the attribution anonymous by using the locution “someone has said”.

In 1922 Montague published a close variant of saying [4], “There is no limit to what a man can do so long as he does not care a straw who gets the credit”, in his book “Disenchantment”. For this reason he is sometimes cited in modern texts and databases.

Finally, quotation [B] which is similar to [4] appeared in the 1980s on a small plaque atop the desk in the Oval Office of the White House during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan."

[B] There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.

Credit cards, data mining, incentives

Two recent stories point to the fact that banks, seeking to control their lending, are selectively suspending credit cards or cutting credit limits, based on data about individuals' credit card use. This introduces some interesting incentive problems, quite different from usual credit card decisions.

The NY Times story, American Express Kept a (Very) Watchful Eye on Charges , reports
"In some instances, if it didn’t like what it was seeing, the company has cut customer credit lines. It laid out this logic in letters that infuriated many of the cardholders who received them. “Other customers who have used their card at establishments where you recently shopped,” one of those letters said, “have a poor repayment history with American Express.”
"It sure sounded as if American Express had developed a blacklist of merchants patronized by troubled cardholders. But late this week, American Express told me that wasn’t the case. The company said it had also decided to stop using what it has called “spending patterns” as a criteria in its credit line reductions. "...

"American Express wouldn’t have been the first company to try cordoning off certain industries. Last year, CompuCredit, a subprime lender, got in trouble with the Federal Trade Commission for failing to disclose that it could reduce customers’ credit lines for using their cards at various establishments.
What was on CompuCredit’s no-go list? Marriage counselors, tire retreading and repair shops, bars and nightclubs, pool halls, pawnshops and massage parlors, among others. "

The Globe story, Lenders abruptly cut lines of credit, focuses on customers who have had their cards suspended.

"Many of the credit lines being taken away or reduced have not been used recently, according to people who track the business. Dennis Moroney of TowerGroup, a Needham research firm, called it the "kitchen drawer" syndrome because some consumers keep cards they don't need or don't use often. Card issuers are trying to rein in such accounts before they get tapped for emergencies in the slumping economy, Moroney said."...

"...if you have a card you haven't used in a while that you want to keep, ... "Buy something inexpensive and pay it off that month." "

Marriage markets and credit markets

 With attitudes about money being an important ingredient of marital compatibility, is it any wonder that a readily available index for one is (apparently) increasingly being used to judge the other? The NY Times is on the story: Even Cupid wants to know your credit score


"The credit score, once a little-known metric derived from a complex formula that incorporates outstanding debt and payment histories, has become an increasingly important number used to bestow credit, determine housing and even distinguish between job candidates.

"It’s so widely used that it has also become a bigger factor in dating decisions, sometimes eclipsing more traditional priorities like a good job, shared interests and physical chemistry. That’s according to interviews with more than 50 daters across the country, all under the age of 40.

“Credit scores are like the dating equivalent of a sexually transmitted disease test,” said Manisha Thakor, the founder and chief executive of MoneyZen Wealth Management, a financial advisory firm. “It’s a shorthand way to get a sense of someone’s financial past the same way an S.T.D. test gives some information about a person’s sexual past.”
...
"A handful of small, online dating Web sites have sprung up to cater specifically to singles looking for a partner with a tiptop credit score. “Good Credit Is Sexy,” says one site,Creditscoredating.com, which allows members to view the credit scores of potential dates who agree to provide the numbers.

"On another site, Datemycreditscore.com, a member posted on the Web site’s home page that others should to “stop kidding” themselves and realize that credit scores do matter."

Medical credit cards and high interest medical debt for services often not covered by insurance

Borrowers beware.  Medical procedures that are often not covered by insurance can be paid by credit card.  Special medical credit cards offer an extended interest-free period.  But when that period expires, a high interest rate is applied back to the time the card was charged (i.e. interest is charged for the period that would have been interest free if the balance had been paid in full.)

Bruch, Joseph Dov, Cal Chengqi Fang, and Betsy Q. Cliff. "Prevalence of Medical Credit Cards by Specialty." In JAMA Health Forum, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. e250174-e250174. American Medical Association, 2025. 

"Financial institutions are increasingly marketing medical credit cards as a solution to rising medical debt.1 Medical credit cards offer deferred interest terms, allowing patients to avoid interest payments for a promotional period of 6 to 18 months. However, if the balance remains unpaid by the end of this period, accrued interest from the start date is added to the balance.2 While the promotional period has the potential to allow relatively frictionless borrowing and alleviate financial burdens for patients, the average annual percentage rate on medical credit cards is 26.99%, which tends to be higher than other payment types. A recent survey found that about a quarter of patients who financed through medical credit cards did not pay off the balance in time to avoid the deferred interest.3 Medical credit cards were used to pay $23 billion in health care expenses, resulting in $1 billion in deferred interest payments from 2018 to 2020.2"