Some people want to be artists, but it is hard to make a living that way unless you are really good. Some people want to play the business mogul, but they own five businesss and they could still play it if they owned only one.
It seems to me that this rests on a bad model of motivations. Not bad because inaccurate, though; it’s a simplified model but it’s about as accurate as any equivalently simple one. Bad because it creates bad incentives.
I’ve met a ton of people that want to be artists, i.e. to fill the social role of “artist”, and I’ve also met a ton of people that want to be entrepreneurs, i.e. to fill the social role of Tony Stark. (You can’t swing a dead cat in California without hitting one or the other.) Most of them stop at wanting, but the ones that don’t universally produce bad art and bad companies. Good art comes from the people that want to produce good art, which is hard, takes a lot of directed effort, and doesn’t actually have much to do with the social role.
One could argue, of course, that that implies extrinsic policy goals and you’re rather concerned with intrinsics. I don’t live in these people’s heads, so I don’t know how intrinsically satisfied they are, and I haven’t seen any research covering that ground either; but even if we’re concerned only with pure hedonics, I can’t help but wonder how good an idea it is to set people up to be frustrated in their ambitions.
It seems to me that this rests on a bad model of motivations. Not bad because inaccurate, though; it’s a simplified model but it’s about as accurate as any equivalently simple one. Bad because it creates bad incentives.
I’ve met a ton of people that want to be artists, i.e. to fill the social role of “artist”, and I’ve also met a ton of people that want to be entrepreneurs, i.e. to fill the social role of Tony Stark. (You can’t swing a dead cat in California without hitting one or the other.) Most of them stop at wanting, but the ones that don’t universally produce bad art and bad companies. Good art comes from the people that want to produce good art, which is hard, takes a lot of directed effort, and doesn’t actually have much to do with the social role.
One could argue, of course, that that implies extrinsic policy goals and you’re rather concerned with intrinsics. I don’t live in these people’s heads, so I don’t know how intrinsically satisfied they are, and I haven’t seen any research covering that ground either; but even if we’re concerned only with pure hedonics, I can’t help but wonder how good an idea it is to set people up to be frustrated in their ambitions.