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> “What makes capitalism so successful is that there’s motivation to succeed,” said Ted Clark, executive director of the Northeastern University Center for Fami
by nluken 4y ago
> “What makes capitalism so successful is that there’s motivation to succeed,” said Ted Clark, executive director of the Northeastern University Center for Family Business. “If you take all the financial incentives away, the family will have essentially no more interest in it except a longing for the good old days.”
Pretty telling that a business school administrator has no concept of being motivated by anything other than pure profit. Always a depressing wake up call to remember that these kinds of people exist and that people actually take anything they have to say seriously.
- alistairSH 4y agoAnd the statement is based on a falsehood... the two adult children remain on the payroll. Sure, they aren't getting a slice of the profits, but they do have a financial interest, at least enough to keep their jobs.
- mountainriver 4y agoYeah what makes capitalism successful is that you will starve unless you work hard. Once you have a certain level of money it becomes much less of a motivator for most people.
- svnt 4y agoUnless you just enjoy the process of acquisition. I’ve seen people shake and twitch with existential rage during negotiations that would result in their net worth possible going from ten figures to a marginally higher ten figures, and the same for the next order of magnitude. They were made either way, and they acted as though their life was at risk. It is nothing but a greed impulse that most of us were taught to overcome during early childhood, but we give it license and credibility as some ultimate good.
- Ferrotin 4y agoThere is a guy on the other side of that transaction who would capture that surplus value.
- svnt 4y agoThis assumption promotes the behavior and at the same time assumes everyone in the room is playing for the same ultimate incentive. The problem is a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop. It seems that only if you can avoid (or want) a tragedy of the commons should you solve that by introducing more self-reinforcing feedback loops.
- MisterBastahrd 4y agoStarving people are not a feature of a successful system. Capitalism does not reward hard work. Smart work, maybe, but not hard work.
- jay_kyburz 4y agoCapitalism is designed to get people to work their fair share. It's Democracy that supposed to prevent starving people. (And crime, and that people are educated, and healthy)
- sophacles 4y agoCapitalism is designed so that a relatively few leeches can skim value off the work of others.
- MisterBastahrd 4y agoCapitalism is designed to allow the ownership class to exploit the labor of the masses.
- ChadNauseam 4y agoCapitalism is designed to get people who want each other's stuff to trade with each other
- melenaboija 4y agoCapitalism is designed that you better have luck the day you are born
- yazaddaruvala 4y agoCapitalism is designed to increase the ceiling of the human experience. It is also designed to let people fall to the floor of the human experience. Specifically, if there is a human that cannot participate in capitalism (strong enough, focused enough, educated enough, lucky enough, conforming enough), then capitalism pushes those people to the floor of the human existence.
- 4y ago
- hackerlight 4y agoIf you just replace "financial incentives" with "status incentives", he's fairly correct. I view a lot of community contribution as a pursuit for status and recognition, even if it's done behind an anonymous avatar that proxies for the person's ego, with the ultimate unconscious objective of attracting a mate who recognizes your high standing in the community as judged by your peers. Financial incentives are just a subset of that psychological process that economists focus on because it's liquid and quantifiable. The beautiful thing about capitalism is that it takes that selfish part of our psyche and tries to point it in a direction that's productive, instead of pretending that such selfish motivations don't exist. Self-serving psychopaths have a hope of contributing positively to society by simply self-maximizing. In any other system that makes no allowance for healthy self-maximizing, they are only capable of destruction. Obviously the outcome is a disaster when the profit motive doesn't align properly with what's good, so that's where regulations come into play.