What motivates us?
This is an answer to @dwinblood post titled “Dismal thought entered my mind related to unemployment and UBI”
For those of you that no know the term: UBI means Universal Basic Income – in short, everyone gets the money he needs to live regardless of age or working status or any other condition. Universal.
Now, this post is not about the UBI, if I remember my headline correctly. It is about motivation. And I will talk about that, but it needs a bit of text getting up to speed.
@dwinblood hypothesis is that with an UBI a lot of people would stop working (which I, with the environment in mind, don’t find that scary, but that is again a different topic).
But is that true?
Will people stop working when they don’t need work to get food on the table?
To be sure it is hard to come to any numbers how many people would actually stop “working” (there is a lot of work done, mostly in the family, that is not paid) in this case. There were several experiments, but they were always to low in amount or too short in time.
Even the Mincome experiment was too short, even while showing some serious positive results like better health even decades later.
To answer the question we have to ask:
Why do people work?
The answer seems straightforward and easy. To earn money and pay their bills. But while that is undoubtedly true, would you say that is the only reason?
What about all those managers, professional football or go players, the millionaire writers (yes, they exist!) and all the other people who already have more money then they would need for their life? What about 170 times millionaire Elon Musk for example? He certainly didn’t stop working after selling Paypal!
Why do these people still work – often more then a “normal” person? Not for the money I would say!
Could the reason be that they just have a different personality?
Well, certainly experiences and also genetics play a role here. But as the IQ can change dramatically, as I have mentioned here so can be the motivation to put in double shifts.
I would argue that motivation is more important then personality. And while motivation can be money, money is not the most important one! And even worse, on cognitive tasks giving money incentives (like… boni for bankers?) actually lead to worse results!! (You don’t believe that? I can understand that! But please follow me a bit here.)
But what other motivational factors can there be?
Turns out there are three:
- Autonomy
- Mastery
- Purpose
(Can you see Elon Musk and his World Improvement Plan in there?)
Autonomy means you steer your work. You decide the direction of where you go. And certainly, short of already being a millionaire, there is nothing that can help you more for this then not having to worry about your food because the UBI takes care of it.
Want an example? You are just reading something based on autonomy! I wrote this text completely voluntarily and autonomous, without being told to do it or getting money for it!
(Well, I do appreciate upvotes of course, but that was not the deciding motivation, in fact as this post is an answer, money was no motivation.
Your upvotes finally could have the same result as an UBI would – making me free of “work for money” and doing what I want here, the money from the upvotes just the coincidentally result.)
Mastery describes your proficiency in doing something. You are good at it. And still getting better. And because you are good at that something, you have fun!
I mean, ever played chess? It would be really really boring if you would not be able to think several moves ahead. Doing that (and out-mastering the other player) is the core of the fun!
Purpose is just things like making the world a better place.
Phuh!
Not so easy to understand the Holy Trinity of Motivation? You want it a bit more flashy? Congratulations, I have just that!
This really cool video is already 7 years old, which makes some parts of it additionally interesting.
Now let’s close the circle here. @dwinblood stated that giving money for living needs “for free” would lead to people stop working. In the same post he linked to his earlier post where he describes that work will get more and more brain-based and even manual labor work will get more and more specialized.
Now, after watching the video, would you not say @dwinblood that an UBI is exactly what we need for this scenario? Make the people’s head free of money worries, don’t make them nauseating from the thought of earning bonuses and allow them to be masters at what they want to do?
And for the strict manual task where the carrot approach works, you can still pay the people money to get the task done and they will do it! Fantastic, isn’t it?
A body of research is emerging on unconditional cash transfers. What they find is that:
They are about to conduct a 12 year trial on UBI in Kenya, so we'll have to be patient for those results.
To me, the important thing about all of those trials, however, is that they're funded with voluntary donations, so no one really has to consider hardship being placed on any of the donors. I think it would be a mistake to assume that the findings would be the same if the program were funded through government coercion, since then you would have to weigh offsetting harms to contributors and benefits to recipients.
OK I have some first hand experience here, I quit my job 2 months ago and am now unemployed.
I have enough money to live on for a while and I dont have any pressures to get back to work. Summer time is here.
So am I sitting in the garden doing nothing getting a sun tan, yes. But Im also working on all kinds of other things like learning computer programming, building raspberry pi prototypes for a crypto project, presenting my work at conferences and conference calls.
Im donating blood more regularly, sorting out stuff on my house, getting fit at the gym and seeing more of my family, am a much happier and more motivated person.
I think the modes of office work we have now will be looked upon by future generations as very unhealthy; like we look back on factory work of the 19th century; dirty and dangerous.
There will always be two outcomes of UBI; the lazy, entitled and degenerate will waste their UBI on cigarettes and alcohol while their kids go hungry, but they are a minority. Most people will do things they feel are valuable for their family and community. People dont like being idle.
2 month is too early btw.
Tests show that for many people 2 month is about the time they are "lazy", but for some it takes up to 6 month. That also depends on how much they despised their last work.
I was ill for the preceeding 7 months so could not go to work even though I was employed.