everything that requires going that extra mile. There’s no motivator quite like profit.
Yes, this is the question I would want to have answered first, when speaking about a hypothetical non-capitalist economy. Imagine that there is a situation where...
someone else needs you to do something for them (because they and their friends don’t have the necessary skills)
you are neither their friend nor family; after doing the work for them you will probably never meet them again
you would honestly rather spend your day doing something else, such as playing your favorite computer game
if required, you have a plausible excuse (you can pretend that the work exceeds your skills, even if it doesn’t)
...what would motivate you to do it for them anyway?
One option is to bite the bullet and say “well, in my utopian society such things would simply never be done”. It is an option; and maybe living in such society could still be better on average than what we have now.
Yes, a few people would sometimes die because all surgeons would be playing League of Legends online. But everyone accustomed to living in that society would understand that you cannot blame those surgeons, because they made their free decision they were entitled to; and if you have a different opinion about what surgeons should do, instead of complaining, you should have become a surgeon yourself and do what you believe is right. Maybe the number of people who would die this way would be still smaller than the number of people who today die for other capitalism-caused reasons.
But in our society we have this intuition that if you require other people to go an extra mile for your benefit, you should in return do something else for their benefit. Money, token money, barter, or just something nebulous like status. (“I will remove your appendix if you upvote all my LessWrong comments.”)
Other solution is coercion. You have a Taskmaster General, people tell him what they need done, and he assigns those tasks to people who have the necessary skills. If you don’t do the assigned task, you get shot. No money necessary, and people are still motivated.
This comes with a lot of problems, for example sometimes you are assigned a task that is truly above your skills, but no one believes you (too many people already tried to excuse themselves by claiming something was too difficult for them, but when a gun was put to their heads, they did it successfully), so you fail, and then you get shot. Also, the Taskmaster General will most likely abuse their powers horribly.
Yet another choice—beyond trade, coercion, and not having things done—could be perfect brainwashing. A society where people would be psychologically unable to refuse a request for help. Some people already tried this, but they overestimated their brainwashing skills. But for the sake of experiment, let’s suppose that the brainwashing is done successfully. We still have a problem of what happens when there are more requests than people can fulfill. You have to make priorities. How specifically? What if no one will give priority to your pressing needs, because they will always prioritize something else, including completely stupid stuff? Maybe the brainwashing should also include making people unable to requests things they don’t seriously need. Or maybe, before you make your request officially, a jury of your peers will evaluate whether your request is reasonable. -- But I feel this direction assumes that the brainwashing itself will act like an intelligent and benevolent entity. Otherwise you could get a society where e.g. most people become religious, and most of the tasks done will be religious rituals. People will request them because they will honestly feel that making God happy is the most important thing, and their brainwashed neighbors will be unable to refuse.
Good points. I don’t know, I genuinely don’t know yet; this problem is by far the biggest obstacle in the face of a non-capitalist economy (all the rest require more easily conceivable technological and institutional infrastructure). Still racking my brains...
(A more detailed, but still incomplete presentation of this little snippet of an idea was actually the theme for a mega-post I got planned, but it looks like every time I open my mouth about a potentially controversial topic my karma barely manages to break even and I get trolled to hell and back, so that’s a bit of a deterrent for me to even talk about politics any longer.)
The challenges are on multiple levels: 1) to show up at all at work; 2) to exceed expectations and do a great job; 3) to innovate, invent, revolutionize a field.
The only other bunch who has about the same stated goals consists of the anarcho-communists (which provide most of the availabe discussion on the topic), but they don’t go about it in a rational way. When confronted with the problem of laziness, their approach is 60% “revolution will kiss it and make it better”, 30% “we need to indoctrinate everyone thoroughly into communism” and 10% “if someone refuses to work, off with their heads!”. (Broadly, the three approaches you mentioned.) They can’t into incentives, disapprove of even mild and justified hierarchy, are heavily into Marxist concepts, and allow wishful thinking to heavily bias their model of how things would happen. That’s not how you succeed in such an endeavour.
Coercion is probably the worst way out of this. Creating an atmosphere of fear is inimical to prosperity, innovation, industry, and the entrepreneurial drive. It puts people out of the “thrive” mode and into “survive” mode. The output is bound to be mediocre at best.
It might be very necessary to think outside of the box on this topic, to step outside the contemporary Western paradigm and explore the matter from all possible angles. Who knows, maybe money isn’t the end-all-be-all of it. The neural underpinnings of self-interested motivation certainly predate the invention of money. I’ve considered rewards in luxury goods and in status, promotion to aristocracy, demotion to serfdom, consumers as management class… heck, even getting people on stimulants to improve their productivity. I’ve even considered limited monetary circuits for certain classes of goods, but before becoming convinced of the merit of this idea, I need to quell my fears that down that road lie Wall Street, landfills, corporate jargon, and mandatory ubiquitous advertising.
I won’t expand on this any more until I feel like I have something especially useful to say, and will only post that essay (which gets a few FAQs out of the way) if I have reasons to expect that more good stuff than bad will come out of the ensuing discussion. And even that, probably not here but on Omnilibrium.
Good points. I don’t know, I genuinely don’t know yet; this problem is by far the biggest obstacle in the face of a non-capitalist economy (all the rest require more easily conceivable technological and institutional infrastructure). Still racking my brains...
So do you have any evidence this is doable, because right now you sound like the crackpot saying “my perpetual motion machine will work just as soon as I figure out a way around the second law of thermodynamics”.
By the way, getting money for your work is not only about motivating you by a reward. It is also a way to give you resources for your future plans.
“If your plans work, you get money, which you can use to finance more ambitious plans” is a nice feedback mechanism that channels money towards plans that work, as opposed to wasting resources on stupid plans that fail. (Yeah, it does not work perfectly. But in many small cases it does.) Without this mechanism, your ability to realize your plans would only depend on your military power or social skills.
So it’s not just about the risk that the possible startup investors would not be allowed to keep their profits, but also the risk that they would simply not be allowed to create the startup, because they couldn’t accumulate the necessary capital. -- Imagine that you have a great startup idea, which requires 100 days of uninterrupted full-time work, and then will revolutionize the world. But as soon as you don’t participate in your usual work for 20 days, your comrades become resentful, and after 40 days they will physically stop you from working on your startup (which they believe is a bad idea that cannot work; this is why no one already did it before you). Even without violence, maybe just everyone will refuse to cooperate with you anymore, and let’s say that you need some cooperation to succeed.
you would honestly rather spend your day doing something else, such as playing your favorite computer game
Is quite easy to have a system where there’s social disapproval for people who spent a lot of time playing computer games. Especially when you have social norms where it’s normal that people are open about how they spent their time.
Then instead of freedom, you have to do what other people think you should do. Unless you have enough social skills to convince them to let you do something you actually enjoy.
If people can punish you for playing computer games, they can also punish you for e.g. writing a book about rationality.
You can have social norms that hold people who have passion for big long term goals in high regard. That discourages sitting around and playing computer games all day while it encourages big projects like writing a book about rationality.
Don’t treat present societal norms as universal when it comes to taking about possible systems.
Then instead of freedom, you have to do what other people think you should do. Unless you have enough social skills to convince them to let you do something you actually enjoy.
For a society like this to work in a way that people can do what they enjoy you might need a higher average social skill level than we have in our society. You need deeper interactions.
Then instead of freedom, you have to do what other people think you should do.
We also don’t have perfect freedom. In our society you get punished socially if you are poor. You can replace that norm with asking whether people work towards a life purpose that inspires them.
Yes, this is the question I would want to have answered first, when speaking about a hypothetical non-capitalist economy. Imagine that there is a situation where...
someone else needs you to do something for them (because they and their friends don’t have the necessary skills)
you are neither their friend nor family; after doing the work for them you will probably never meet them again
you would honestly rather spend your day doing something else, such as playing your favorite computer game
if required, you have a plausible excuse (you can pretend that the work exceeds your skills, even if it doesn’t)
...what would motivate you to do it for them anyway?
One option is to bite the bullet and say “well, in my utopian society such things would simply never be done”. It is an option; and maybe living in such society could still be better on average than what we have now.
Yes, a few people would sometimes die because all surgeons would be playing League of Legends online. But everyone accustomed to living in that society would understand that you cannot blame those surgeons, because they made their free decision they were entitled to; and if you have a different opinion about what surgeons should do, instead of complaining, you should have become a surgeon yourself and do what you believe is right. Maybe the number of people who would die this way would be still smaller than the number of people who today die for other capitalism-caused reasons.
But in our society we have this intuition that if you require other people to go an extra mile for your benefit, you should in return do something else for their benefit. Money, token money, barter, or just something nebulous like status. (“I will remove your appendix if you upvote all my LessWrong comments.”)
Other solution is coercion. You have a Taskmaster General, people tell him what they need done, and he assigns those tasks to people who have the necessary skills. If you don’t do the assigned task, you get shot. No money necessary, and people are still motivated.
This comes with a lot of problems, for example sometimes you are assigned a task that is truly above your skills, but no one believes you (too many people already tried to excuse themselves by claiming something was too difficult for them, but when a gun was put to their heads, they did it successfully), so you fail, and then you get shot. Also, the Taskmaster General will most likely abuse their powers horribly.
Yet another choice—beyond trade, coercion, and not having things done—could be perfect brainwashing. A society where people would be psychologically unable to refuse a request for help. Some people already tried this, but they overestimated their brainwashing skills. But for the sake of experiment, let’s suppose that the brainwashing is done successfully. We still have a problem of what happens when there are more requests than people can fulfill. You have to make priorities. How specifically? What if no one will give priority to your pressing needs, because they will always prioritize something else, including completely stupid stuff? Maybe the brainwashing should also include making people unable to requests things they don’t seriously need. Or maybe, before you make your request officially, a jury of your peers will evaluate whether your request is reasonable. -- But I feel this direction assumes that the brainwashing itself will act like an intelligent and benevolent entity. Otherwise you could get a society where e.g. most people become religious, and most of the tasks done will be religious rituals. People will request them because they will honestly feel that making God happy is the most important thing, and their brainwashed neighbors will be unable to refuse.
Good points. I don’t know, I genuinely don’t know yet; this problem is by far the biggest obstacle in the face of a non-capitalist economy (all the rest require more easily conceivable technological and institutional infrastructure). Still racking my brains...
(A more detailed, but still incomplete presentation of this little snippet of an idea was actually the theme for a mega-post I got planned, but it looks like every time I open my mouth about a potentially controversial topic my karma barely manages to break even and I get trolled to hell and back, so that’s a bit of a deterrent for me to even talk about politics any longer.)
The challenges are on multiple levels: 1) to show up at all at work; 2) to exceed expectations and do a great job; 3) to innovate, invent, revolutionize a field.
The only other bunch who has about the same stated goals consists of the anarcho-communists (which provide most of the availabe discussion on the topic), but they don’t go about it in a rational way. When confronted with the problem of laziness, their approach is 60% “revolution will kiss it and make it better”, 30% “we need to indoctrinate everyone thoroughly into communism” and 10% “if someone refuses to work, off with their heads!”. (Broadly, the three approaches you mentioned.) They can’t into incentives, disapprove of even mild and justified hierarchy, are heavily into Marxist concepts, and allow wishful thinking to heavily bias their model of how things would happen. That’s not how you succeed in such an endeavour.
Coercion is probably the worst way out of this. Creating an atmosphere of fear is inimical to prosperity, innovation, industry, and the entrepreneurial drive. It puts people out of the “thrive” mode and into “survive” mode. The output is bound to be mediocre at best.
It might be very necessary to think outside of the box on this topic, to step outside the contemporary Western paradigm and explore the matter from all possible angles. Who knows, maybe money isn’t the end-all-be-all of it. The neural underpinnings of self-interested motivation certainly predate the invention of money. I’ve considered rewards in luxury goods and in status, promotion to aristocracy, demotion to serfdom, consumers as management class… heck, even getting people on stimulants to improve their productivity. I’ve even considered limited monetary circuits for certain classes of goods, but before becoming convinced of the merit of this idea, I need to quell my fears that down that road lie Wall Street, landfills, corporate jargon, and mandatory ubiquitous advertising.
I won’t expand on this any more until I feel like I have something especially useful to say, and will only post that essay (which gets a few FAQs out of the way) if I have reasons to expect that more good stuff than bad will come out of the ensuing discussion. And even that, probably not here but on Omnilibrium.
So do you have any evidence this is doable, because right now you sound like the crackpot saying “my perpetual motion machine will work just as soon as I figure out a way around the second law of thermodynamics”.
By the way, getting money for your work is not only about motivating you by a reward. It is also a way to give you resources for your future plans.
“If your plans work, you get money, which you can use to finance more ambitious plans” is a nice feedback mechanism that channels money towards plans that work, as opposed to wasting resources on stupid plans that fail. (Yeah, it does not work perfectly. But in many small cases it does.) Without this mechanism, your ability to realize your plans would only depend on your military power or social skills.
So it’s not just about the risk that the possible startup investors would not be allowed to keep their profits, but also the risk that they would simply not be allowed to create the startup, because they couldn’t accumulate the necessary capital. -- Imagine that you have a great startup idea, which requires 100 days of uninterrupted full-time work, and then will revolutionize the world. But as soon as you don’t participate in your usual work for 20 days, your comrades become resentful, and after 40 days they will physically stop you from working on your startup (which they believe is a bad idea that cannot work; this is why no one already did it before you). Even without violence, maybe just everyone will refuse to cooperate with you anymore, and let’s say that you need some cooperation to succeed.
Doctors already have a high status in our society. If you look at upvoting LW post you miss how most status works.
Is quite easy to have a system where there’s social disapproval for people who spent a lot of time playing computer games. Especially when you have social norms where it’s normal that people are open about how they spent their time.
Then instead of freedom, you have to do what other people think you should do. Unless you have enough social skills to convince them to let you do something you actually enjoy.
If people can punish you for playing computer games, they can also punish you for e.g. writing a book about rationality.
You can have social norms that hold people who have passion for big long term goals in high regard. That discourages sitting around and playing computer games all day while it encourages big projects like writing a book about rationality.
Don’t treat present societal norms as universal when it comes to taking about possible systems.
For a society like this to work in a way that people can do what they enjoy you might need a higher average social skill level than we have in our society. You need deeper interactions.
We also don’t have perfect freedom. In our society you get punished socially if you are poor. You can replace that norm with asking whether people work towards a life purpose that inspires them.
You forgot an important qualifier: in Northern Europe.
You miss the point. We are talking about possible social systems.