3 ms·

> Profit surly shouldn't be the only consideration. If you've figured out a way to motivate a large number of people to do something other than pure profit (wh

> Profit surly shouldn't be the only consideration. If you've figured out a way to motivate a large number of people to do something other than pure profit (where to the layman profit = employment = paying his bills) then I'm all ears. Shit, EVERYONE is all ears. But thus far in the history of the world profit has been the best source of motivation we've discovered. When I say "profit" you can't say "ahh rapacious capitalism that's evil blah!" but rather you have to look at it as "the ability to stay alive and perhaps get ahead" Very few people willingly take a pay-cut. Most of the time the way a person figures out that they need to accept less money for their work is that they get fired from a job and they start looking for a new one. They can't get hired at $x per year anymore so eventually they accept some percentage of $x in order to again have SOME income rather than NO income. $x dollars per year is HIGHLY correlated with standard of living, so we can reasonably assume that people are not willing to accept a lower standard of living willingly either. They tend to accept a lower one only because they have to. This isn't a hard rule, but it's useful. As a result it is easy to see that people probably won't willingly take their standard of living down because it's the right thing to do for the environment. I agree that it would be better to do things for reasons which aren't purely profit-motivated. But I can't blame the world for not working that way because I haven't come up with a better system.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Hole in that logic: at some point more money is just ego. As I age and my cash flow lessens (mortgage paid off; kids thru school) I would certainly consider a job with < pay. In fact I have; I've joined a startup.
- msandford 12y ago
  >> Very few people willingly take a pay-cut. So I already addressed your point. I didn't say "no people" or "zero people" I said "very few". You're an outlier. That's great! But it's not reasonable to expect to organize the majority of people around things that motivate a minority of people. To you the idea that more money is just ego is true; I have no problems accepting that you could believe such a thing. To other people more money isn't necessarily ego. It can be of course, but it isn't necessarily. I mean, who really needs $200mm? Seemingly Elon Musk did and he's using it to make the world a better place re: Tesla and SpaceX. Who needs $500k in the bank? Anyone who wants to do a startup and fund themselves rather than run the angel/VC treadmill. Who needs to make $300k a year rather than $200k a year? Someone who wants to live in a nice place in Manhattan rather than commuting an hour from Brooklyn. Who needs to make $75k a year instead of $50k? Someone with kids! Someone who doesn't have their house paid off yet. Someone who doesn't own a house yet. Basically everyone. It's really great that you're in a position to be able to take a pay cut to work at a startup. But I don't think you took that pay cut altruistically; I imagine that you did in order to get something else that you want like more responsibility, more interesting work, to see your work used by millions of people, etc. I could be wrong of course but it seems unlikely to me. Not all people want more money to spend on themselves. A great plenty do, but there are also outliers who use more money to make the world better. I suppose you could argue that even for those folks it's just ego. If that's the case then I am all for more ego if it drags the future -- kicking and screaming -- into the present.
glomph 12y ago
Subsidies, taxes and regulation. Public awareness campaigns education and so on. All of these can change the way people approach a problem like this. The beginning of course is articles like this one.
- msandford 12y ago
  That's just trying to change the underlying economics of profit. Subsidies make things profitable which otherwise wouldn't be. Taxes make things less profitable than they otherwise would be. Regulations are a lottery-fine system where you "buy" a ticket to "win" by not complying with the regs. If you "win" the lottery you pay a fine of some sort. It's like speeding tickets in cars; they don't ensure 100% compliance with the speed limit but a rough approximation by fining some people who don't obey. I agree with you that these are ways to change behavior and I would also agree that they're fairly effective. But I am not sure that they motivate people in non-economic methods. I think they just shift the landscape of the economics. I think one possible way to motivate people to do something without economics is to make it illegal but poorly enforced. This will encourage contrarians to engage in it just out of spite. I'll agree that spite probably isn't the best driver of change but it's all I can come up with. This is supposedly what Frederick II did in Prussia during the 1700s to encourage people to cultivate potatoes for the sake of diversifying the food supply. The other way I've heard of motivating people to do things is basically to ask politely. I saw a study somewhere (can't find the link after 10min) that compliance with the law is inversely proportional to the amount of force. It was related to speed limits and they found that the more aggressive the wording was regarding how it's illegal to speed the less people complied. This seems like it's on the other end of spectrum above: more authoritarian encouraged non-compliance and more polite encourages compliance. They're non-economic at least on the surface.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

Hole in that logic: at some point more money is just ego. As I age and my cash flow lessens (mortgage paid off; kids thru school) I would certainly consider a job with < pay. In fact I have; I've joined a startup.

msandford 12y ago
>> Very few people willingly take a pay-cut. So I already addressed your point. I didn't say "no people" or "zero people" I said "very few". You're an outlier. That's great! But it's not reasonable to expect to organize the majority of people around things that motivate a minority of people. To you the idea that more money is just ego is true; I have no problems accepting that you could believe such a thing. To other people more money isn't necessarily ego. It can be of course, but it isn't necessarily. I mean, who really needs $200mm? Seemingly Elon Musk did and he's using it to make the world a better place re: Tesla and SpaceX. Who needs $500k in the bank? Anyone who wants to do a startup and fund themselves rather than run the angel/VC treadmill. Who needs to make $300k a year rather than $200k a year? Someone who wants to live in a nice place in Manhattan rather than commuting an hour from Brooklyn. Who needs to make $75k a year instead of $50k? Someone with kids! Someone who doesn't have their house paid off yet. Someone who doesn't own a house yet. Basically everyone. It's really great that you're in a position to be able to take a pay cut to work at a startup. But I don't think you took that pay cut altruistically; I imagine that you did in order to get something else that you want like more responsibility, more interesting work, to see your work used by millions of people, etc. I could be wrong of course but it seems unlikely to me. Not all people want more money to spend on themselves. A great plenty do, but there are also outliers who use more money to make the world better. I suppose you could argue that even for those folks it's just ego. If that's the case then I am all for more ego if it drags the future -- kicking and screaming -- into the present.

glomph 12y ago

Subsidies, taxes and regulation. Public awareness campaigns education and so on. All of these can change the way people approach a problem like this. The beginning of course is articles like this one.

msandford 12y ago
That's just trying to change the underlying economics of profit. Subsidies make things profitable which otherwise wouldn't be. Taxes make things less profitable than they otherwise would be. Regulations are a lottery-fine system where you "buy" a ticket to "win" by not complying with the regs. If you "win" the lottery you pay a fine of some sort. It's like speeding tickets in cars; they don't ensure 100% compliance with the speed limit but a rough approximation by fining some people who don't obey. I agree with you that these are ways to change behavior and I would also agree that they're fairly effective. But I am not sure that they motivate people in non-economic methods. I think they just shift the landscape of the economics. I think one possible way to motivate people to do something without economics is to make it illegal but poorly enforced. This will encourage contrarians to engage in it just out of spite. I'll agree that spite probably isn't the best driver of change but it's all I can come up with. This is supposedly what Frederick II did in Prussia during the 1700s to encourage people to cultivate potatoes for the sake of diversifying the food supply. The other way I've heard of motivating people to do things is basically to ask politely. I saw a study somewhere (can't find the link after 10min) that compliance with the law is inversely proportional to the amount of force. It was related to speed limits and they found that the more aggressive the wording was regarding how it's illegal to speed the less people complied. This seems like it's on the other end of spectrum above: more authoritarian encouraged non-compliance and more polite encourages compliance. They're non-economic at least on the surface.