I am highly aware of the research on the negative effects of incentives. What it shows is that any kind of incentives -- moral as well as material -- undermines the tendency to perform activities for their intrinsic value. That's the basic result. The main research is done in the context of moral incentives, as a matter of fact. This research undercuts the argument, invoked here, that moral incentives are a good substitute for material ones. It is also irrelevant to activities which are not particularly intrinsically rewarding, like a lot of necessary labor.
The issue of fair distribution of wealth income is quite seperate from the abolition of the wages system. Virtually all of us here agree that wage labor should be eliminated and banned, like slavery is today. That still leaves open the question of how workers should be remunerated for their work under a system where they are not working for wages. Under my own ideas, they'd be working for profit shares. In John's, they'd get some sort of vouchers that would entitle them to satisfy their needs and wants.
But the question remains about how the social wealth should be distributed, what principles might guide its distribution. The slogal, Abolition of thewages system! doesn't answer that question. And people will ask, Do you mean that everyone should get the same thing? To which, to my astonushment, some people here say yes. I have given some of my reasons about why I say no.
jks
--- Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, 27 Jan 2005, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> > Although may people
> > have said extragavant and silly things here, no
> one
> > has actually yet said, I believe, that material
> > rewards do not motivate.
>
> What is extravagant and silly here is assuming that
> common sense ideas about incentives and rewards are
> verified by psychological research. In short:
> not as simple as Justin assumes. There is literally
> decades of research that demonstrates how increasing
> rewards does not necessary increase motivation or
> behavior. --e.g., cognitive dissonance research,
> the stuff on how rewards undermine intrinsic
> motivation,
> etc. I want to emphasize that this is not anecdote,
> speculation, or wishful thinking: this is a
> conclusion drawn from rigorous scientific research.
> People do not simply and blindly respond to rewards
> in the way Justin assumes.
>
> That said, I'm a little disappointed leftists are
> bickering about the fair distribution of income for
> workers. Are we really that well socialized into
> the capitalist worldview? Whatever happened to the
> abolition of the fucking wage system?
>
> Miles
>
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