Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
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> you're able to use government to force everyone to live the way you do...
No.
> Quick and consistent capital investment...
How's that work? Most of what goes on in the financial markets doesn't exist in Socialism. Public banking and social control over investment does, but that's about it.
> ... disinterest in active business ownership in like 90% of people...
Most people find individual autonomy and self-determination far more rewarding than purely financial incentives and extrinsic reward.
> ... ability to own and trade stocks for income now and in retirement later...
Stocks don't exist. In existing cases already, Co-Op's operate individual capital accounts for purposes of retirement by their workers later to live on.
> ... the general tendency for humans to be capitalistic...
This is completely false.
Most people mistakenly think material wealth is the only thing that people labor for.
Marginal increases in happiness are very scant and don't actually provide a noticeable increase in overall happiness for people.
Money is just an indirect means for us to pursue those things we actually want to do in the first place. It's a means to an end. Individual autonomy is always more fulfilling and rewarding than amassing wealth, because those pursuits are what you engage in with it.
Capitalism as a system is not about making people's lives better. Most of the improvements people have experienced in the labor process have been a result of violent labor class struggles (the US has a very violent labor history) and not some efficient inner-workings of the free market.
The 8 hour work week didn't even get established until 1938, and wasn't the result of some market force. In fact it got thrown out the first time the law was implemented. Capitalism naturally tends to grind down on labor because as a cog in the machine, you are a factor of production. You are a cost. You're labor that the Capitalist has to purchase. You exist to serve Capital, Capital doesn't exist to serve you.
Throws out a new perspective on what motivates people.
The reward scheme is dubious though: I love working on open source because it's intrinsically rewarding. But if you try to pay me a few bucks, chances are I'll lose interest because my day job pays better.
Extrinsic motivation killing intrinsic motivation is a known phenomenon in psychology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory It means that splashing money around to get people to do stuff can have the opposite effect. Also see the book Drive by Daniel Pink: http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivates...
I haven't read it, but at least for me it seems like common sense that these 3 things have positive effect on motivation.
If you have autonomy over how you complete your tasks for example, you will do it in, according to you, most efficient way, and that will make you feel satisfied. Mastery is from the same desire to be as efficient as you can. Purpose is something different, but you can clearly imagine how much more willing to do your best you are when you know that the thing you do will be seen and used by other people and how it will make people's life easier, for a primitive and simple example.
Compare it to my job - software is bloated, something I myself would never use, our customers are actually forced to used, almost nobody, except the people who earn money from it at the management, likes it, and often you find out that some bug that existed for a year and that completely disabled some functionality was never noticed because no one, not even testers bothered to check those parts of the system. Combine that with heavy restrictions on what can be done, both by time restraints on tasks and by accumulated technical debt that makes any improvements economically not viable, and add the natural tendency of such systems to resist to anything new and you get individuals with gradual decline in motivation over time.
I understand why there's such an ageism "problem" in the industry - the only way to make these companies with these systems afloat is to hire only young people who aren't worn out from these things yet to keep it alive. From my experience, I don't know how it was a couple of decades ago, but it seems like younger and younger people are getting their motivation destroyed by such environments.
You don't often see occupations where people are already sick of their job in general by late twenties to the point of considering switching profession that would pay considerably less.
One source[1] showed that:
- For highly creative jobs, respect and autonomy to function and just enough $ to cover comfortable living expenses produced the best results.
- As you add more money, the performance for these jobs decreased.
AND
- For highly repetitive jobs, performance increased with pay almost linearly.
- Offering more autonomy for lower pay in these types of jobs lowered performance.
Programming is a highly creative job. While you are making very logical assumptions (more $ == more work) I would argue that after the first month or so, that would no longer be the case.
You would then just be equating (more $ == more HOURS working) but not necessarily producing.
The findings of the study did hinge on the person seeking autonomy to make enough to cover their living expenses such that the concern for money was off the table.
Really interesting stuff.
I think from my own experience, after the honeymoon period of the giant paycheck wears off, this tends to be absolutely true.
As for passion, it has to come from the top down.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivates...
Thanks to yengz for the reminder where this study came from!