arm the homeless with blowguns and pay a per pelt bounty. then gamify it and display the leader board in time square.
Here's the famous textbook example usually given: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre
It's been tried many times, the results are effectively the same and the programs end up getting canceled (such as Chicago's 1977 program)
Almost like marketplaces of individualistic privatized incentives are a really terrible bad fit for collective societal problems.
This won't stop people from doing it though. If you've got municipal authority and don't know this history, you're probably the type that considers themselves brilliant for coming up with such a creative market-driven solution and don't anticipate the eventual consequences which have repeated themselves quite a number of times.
Incentive programs works for say cans, because the cost of pulling them out of the waste stream is less then the cost of building a factory to produce them. But for hearty robust animals that eat garbage and have lots of offspring, probably not.
As far as a working system, we should look to Alberta (https://alberta.ca/albertas-rat-control-program.aspx) - lots of free resources and budget is set aside for rat proofing and removal - as in calling in exterminators and DIY rat killing things (such as poison) are free.
Call that socialism if you want, it's worked for decades.
Not that this isn't tried constantly. Heck, we did it in the war on terror and it basically just resulted in kidnapping and human smuggling.
It's not that these market approaches for social problems are impossible - they just usually need markets on top of markets on top of markets to fix incentives and distribute money around in a complicated way with a bunch of administrative overhead. At the end you get at best mediocre results at exorbitantly high cost and enormous complexity. For example, the american health care system...
The real problem is, especially in the USA, some people just totally lose their marbles and become frothing lunatics if anything even looks like it has a remote resemblance to anything socialisty so cost effective reasonable proven solutions that have worked many other places for decades are off the table and we get these 7-layer wedding cake Rube Goldberg machines because we want to show how ideologically pure we are in our demonstration of market efficiency
I'm just joshing around. You make good points, and I appreciate your sincerity.
>we get these 7-layer wedding cake Rube Goldberg machines because we want to show how ideologically pure we are in our demonstration of market efficiency
This simply doesn't connect for me in this case, given that the the New York and Chicago rat problems stem from trash collection issues under the purview of public agencies.