I would like to live in Equal-land, I could live there, slouch around, work the absolute minimum and avoid work, and enjoy exactly the same benefits as those working the hardest to maintain that utopia.
I'm not saying that Equalland is desirable. I'm just saying that I think you're overestimating the effect money has on how productive people are.
What if the job was laying in a park, testing out the effectiveness of new marijuana strains?
Fyi, reductio ad absurdum is a valid method of argument.
I imagine I'd get a lot more applicants applying to my job post if I paid $1million vs. minimum wage. You may say money is a terrible motivator, but people will go through all sorts of horrible things for very small amounts of it.
Also, it's important to note that if you posted the job for $1 million you'd get a lot of applicants, but they wouldn't be happy or last very long. It turns out that there is such thing as paying someone too much. The reason being that money is a form of external motivation. Too much external motivation decreases intrinsic motivation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Intrinsic_and_extrin...
(Okay, it wasn't quite 80hr-weeks, and I earned slightly more than minimum wage, but...)
You failed to provide any alternate motivation. Some people actually take conditions similar to ones you described but they work in the greatest labs on the most interesting problems of contemporary science. They also usually get a phd after a few years.
There is also no implication from "Money is a poor motivator for me" to "80 hr week is not a demotivator for me".
Money's a great motivator until you're near your threshold earnings, and then other things start slipping in, like, for instance, the ability to make a point. Then, of course, is the discussion about why anyone wants money...and the fact that there's more direct ways to affect the value in someone's life. Hate to sound the sociopath, but money doesn't stack up against a family.
That's why a hell of a lot of people are working - if they don't work, their family would get to go live in a box on the sidewalk. That's another way of saying that workers are motivated by money, for a sizable fraction of workers.
And for the record, nobody paid me to write that comment in the first place.
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/08/daniel_pink_on.html
They did end up adding incentives (in the USSR) which started looking more and more like capitalism.
This meme that money is the only significant benefit from ones efforts should be plainly false. Why smart people believe it is beyond me.
Noone's saying it's the only significant benefit, but for a lot of people, it is the overwhelming majority of the benefit of what they do. Programmers live in a privileged bubble compared to most.
But in all cases, money is not the motivator. If money were such a strong motivator video games would be a lot less popular.
But this is not the case for many (most?) other workers - they would rather do something else and only work because they have to, or because their job pays better than other alternatives.
If money were such a strong motivator things like video games would be a lot less popular. Pickup basketball would be a lot less popular.
One of the things they showed an inverse correlation on amount someone gets paid and what they produce when it's anything above menial labor.
Highly worth a watch.
Why did it collapse then?
For example, I'm sure sanctions from the rest of the world [1] from the beginning didn't do them any favors. Having a wolf in with the hens (named Stalin) was also unfortunate.
[1] All terrified that revolution would kick off in their countries. Justified fear as well, it did just that in Spain.
Further, capitalism can't possibly be the solution to every problem. For example, capitalism will probably never take us "to the stars". There isn't enough money in it to cover such a massive expense. But yet, going to the stars is the only possible way to defend against the thread of a "planet killer" meteor/asteroid. The only time there would be money in it is when we knew such an event was imminent but by then it would be too late.
But if life problems, accidents, aren't as urgent due to capitalism solving most of our problem, I am assuming we would be thinking of large aspiration beyond a nice house and 2 1/2 kids.
I also think "due to capitalism solving most of our problem" is a bit of a stretch. It's solving most of the problems of the rich people of the west but I bet the world's hungry don't find it so grand. Especially since there is plenty of food to feed them. There's just no money in doing so.