If at first you don’t succeed, find out if the loser gets anything.

Phelps’s quip twists the familiar moral maxim “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” into a wry comment on incentives. Instead of assuming persistence is always virtuous, it suggests pausing to examine the payoff structure: if “losing” carries rewards (sympathy, attention, reduced responsibility, or even material benefit), failure may be unintentionally reinforced. The line is less a celebration of cynicism than a satirical reminder that human behavior often follows incentives more than ideals. Read this way, it anticipates later commonsense insights from psychology and economics about motivation, secondary gain, and perverse incentives.