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Comment by thriftwy | Hacker News Reader

The economy which caps maximum income at some small value removes incentive to perform. When combined with helping the poor it would encourage parasitism.

Parasitism is a very convenient life style once you adopt to it, and very hard to abandon even if you wish to.

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I wonder if previous eras (before the massive space taken by economic principles) had a different view on incentives and performance.

The current system doesn't reward performance in general, just a few instances here and there, the rest is actually backward (good employees are ignored, sometimes hated, sometimes fired even).

The fault is within a decadent culture that has stopped striving for excellence as an ideal and demanding quality as an underlying mental tenet.

The "performance indicators" are often calibrated permissively towards a "very pessimistic perspective taken as realism" which lets ample pools of bestiality in. When this becomes "locally" systemic, it will be a chocker for the individual potential, systemically misfit.

I don't blame the culture in itself. It's a byproduct of itself.. when you live with nothing, excellency == survival and better life, but when capital/marketing makes people live "softer" by doing nothing.. the incentive is removed. At least on the surface.. I don't think people are that happy binging on netflix.

That said I'm curious about how to revive this, before the potential climate collapse especially :)

> The current system doesn't reward performance in general

The current system rewards performance more than any other system in history. You can go from living in poverty to earning hundreds of thousands of dollars just by doing well at enough tests. Things are stacked against you, true, but that path is still possible today. Is the system worse today than 30-40 years ago? Maybe, it is hard to tell, it is the same system though so you can't blame the system, it is other factors.

Could it reward performance more? Yes! But we have already came extremely far.

Wrong, tests are not the bottleneck, you'll have to present well, play along politics, fake. You could be the best person on earth, if someone doesn't feel you, you're out.

You don't have to do any of that to get a software engineer job. Just do well on tests in school, do well enough that you get accepted into college with a free ride, do well enough in college tests to get an interview, do well enough on the algorithm tests in the interview to get a job. That is all you need. It isn't easy, having money etc helps, but ultimately all you need to do is pass a bunch of tests to get a lot of money.

I did all of these multiple times and got rejected. You're view on life lacks data I'm sorry. The harder I worked, the more I adapted to peoples need, the less I got. A simple friend in the field gets me a job without effort. Society doesn't reward excellency that often, the social structure comes first.

Getting rejected from multiple interviews isn't a particularly big roadblock, you just need to do more. Or you have to improve. If you have a degree and aren't completely incompetent you will get a job sooner or later as long as you don't stop applying.

"But I got rejected once, it is proof that hard work and performance doesn't pay off!"

No, hard work includes trying multiple times. Over multiple tries the probability of you being unlucky in the interview goes to 0. It might take hundreds of tries, but if you can do the work you will get accepted at some point. Life being unfair doesn't mean that performance or hard work doesn't pay off, just that they maybe don't pay off as much as they ought to.

The argument was not about interviews but tests and skills. Which I did.

The "luck/unfair" argument is exactly what I was talking about. You shouldn't need luck to get hired in a system after 7+ years of hard work.

Add to that that I've seen a lot of incompetent people (both in skills, dedication or even diligence) in the field. This renders the excellence argument moot.

The system is filled with low efficiency bits at every scale, HR only call you if they match a tag or a fancy school, the tech interviewer might very well be a young dude knowing moot but not willing to annoy his superior with bad hires. It's mostly tribalism and politics driving the machine. Not objective qualities.

At first I thought you were one of those who spent years not getting their first job, but no you worked in the industry for 7 whole years! Did you get paid much more than McDonalds wage during those years? Then you got rewarded for your performance! You are therefore a perfect example of someone getting rewarded for performance. Rewards aren't perfectly correlated with performance, no, but that doesn't mean that performance doesn't get rewarded.

Sure, it is hard to earn more than you earn now. But you are still earning way more than most, and all that required was to pass a few tests. How can you call that not rewarding performance?

7 years of study.

Also we're not on the same page about reward/excellency. Having a high salary after graduation doesn't mean you're doing good / excellent work. You can, and I've heard a lot of people saying it, coast along being paid for not a lot.

Every company I worked at had terrible software, there was no excellency in them (which backfires toward all society). Another proof to me that the system is not optimizing excellency. It's short term gain spread over a wide network of ignorance (your customer can never assess of your work quality, he has no clue about the domain).

Furthermore, there are many other paths to wealth. Not that any of them are easy, but they allow a variety of different types of people to succeed.

For anyone who thinks it is harder now: Name the specific time period where performance was rewarded more and let the HN commenters pick apart your choice.

I don't get it. If you cap income then some people stop working and other people start working. There is no need for parasites. The idea of an income cap is wrong because absolute income does not determine willingness to spend. It is unspent money that should be capped via taxes.

It would be very cool if money would need to be invested in the real sector at the end. we would be sending people to Mars already.

Right now they just fuel blowing bubbles.

> The economy which caps maximum income at some small value removes incentive to perform.

And yet there is no shortage of t-shirts, shoes and cheap clothing. And parasites do thrive off of the worker's back.

This is because poor people have to make them or starve.

If those countries had safety nets, no more t-shirts for you, since producing these, not to mention cotton farming, is not exciting at all. You just do it for money.

Why would you think that the economy would be limited to some small value? The value of the maximum limit can be very large. Other than that, the maximum is personal to each resident. It is to reduce the size of giant enterprises, such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon. Imagine that these companies would have competitors in the form of ordinary start-ups. The startups would have plenty of money to do that. Maximum restrictions will not reduce the incentive to work in any way. On the contrary, there will be even more incentive to work, because you can make a lot more money and buy a lot more things with that money. The maximum can be from 0 to infinity. No parasitism will occur. Businesses will plan their budgets properly.

I think this article is out of your hands. You didn't even realize that the discussion should be in a Telegram group. You read and do not understand what is written. I recommend you reread the article many times before commenting.

How does that worldview jive with the notion that I'd do my job even if I wasn't so handsomely paid?

There will always be differentiators.

I don't work with garbage or have to break my back, this is worth "performing" for.

This is because you have culture which encourages performance.

Once you enable parasitism other cultures also arise, which discourage performance, and the people of those cultures just don't have that notion.

They may even look attractive. Think hippies. They surely look better and have greater outlook than wage slaves, housewives or salesmen.

And that trend is notoriously hard to reverse. Even in EU they have massive problems with even getting some minorities to attend school.

>Even in EU they have massive problems with even getting some minorities to attend school.

I think you're reaching a conclusion that the evidence doesn't completely support here.

I live in the EU and I was one of the people who didn't want to attend school, because school is glorified daycare and in impoverished areas it quite literally feels like prison.

I don't really know if you're right, my mum and I grew up living on income support and while it was awful I do cherish the fact that I got to spend time with her.

She now works for the government, I work in tech, we've both "done more" but the money she earns now isn't the reason for that, it's because:

1) It's BORING to sit on your arse and do nothing

2) People identify with their purpose (hippies identified with anti-war, and even hippies have had productive impacts on society with social movements, music and art)

3) When free to do anything: you do the thing you love

This last point means you can't keep treating service workers like shit, which is why it's unpopular.

> When free to do anything: you do the thing you love

The thing is, what you love is not what others need. Do you love tinkering with my sewage system? Clean my house? Wash my toilet?

Clean your own house and wash your own toilet. You, not me, are the one who has to live there, anyway.

No it just removes one incentive to work, enriching yourself beyond what is needed shouldnt be necessary as an "incentive"

It he only incentive to do stuff money?

Asking because I find myself building a lot of stuff despite not really making money off it.

building what ? I'm curious

I've built and operate a search engine.

Are you building hobby things for your entertainment (which I do as well) or building things which make society advance and which others benefit from?

It’s the loss of incentives for the latter that concern me.

Well, both. I'm building and running this: https://search.marginalia.nu/

Paid the server out of pocket, built the code all by myself.

I do take donations that currently just about cover the running costs, but at this surplus it will take me something like 30 years to get back the hardware investment (assuming no hardware fails in the interim and running costs don't increase).

Don't take this as complaining, it's just a statement of facts. I'm incredibly grateful that so many people are supporting it.

The idea that the only, or even primary, incentive to do stuff is money is an invention of 20th century economics. It was then tragically taught to most educated people, especially business leaders. That made it a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, along with the shareholder value myth (the idea that companies should be (may even be required to be) entirely short term profit motivated out of a duty to shareholders. These are among the most harmful ideas from the 20th century. To answer your original question, no money is not the only incentive to do stuff. But in Econ 101 that assumption is made to make the math easy.

The incentive to do work is to gain power. The power to feed and house your kids, the power to not be tortured or killed if you are a slave, the power to obtain other things you want. Money is a proxy for power. Has a better alternative proxy to power been demonstrated to exist?

Do all people want power? Seems like Nietzsche would probably agree, but Damocles would voice objections.

Seems like what most people want is something more akin to self-determination. It isn't quite power, and it isn't quite freedom, but somewhere in the middle.

What is self determination? Having the freedom to do what you want to do is the same as having the power to do what you want to do.

Having the power to attract your desired mate is also a power, and it involves showing you have power.

The nuance is in the contrast between freedom from compulsion and the ability to compel. Most care about the former but power only grants the latter.

Do you want to enslave your partner? Compel them to live with you against their will?

The power to be free from compulsion is also power. I understand the distinction you are trying to make, but it is all on one spectrum.

Do I want to enslave my partner or compel them to live with me against their will? No. I am sure others in history have wanted that and still do today. But the important thing is you need power to not be enslaved by others, even if that just means living within the borders of a tribe of people who act against slavery.

Since money is a proxy for power, and since resources are finite and we do not live in this world without effecting others, I would say the distinction of having the power to be free from compulsion and the power to compel others is very, very murky.

For example, I am not using my power to directly compel someone with violence like a slave owner, but I know that living the quality of life that people in the top 10% to 20% of the US do is for sure compelling others to live with more pollution and/or fewer resources due to me consuming so many resources. I am pretty sure this claim could be made for anyone living in a detached single family house, or even people with more than 2 kids. Or maybe even 1 kid.

If we go back to the original claim:

> The idea that the only, or even primary, incentive to do stuff is money is an invention of 20th century economics.

Yes, people like doing things for their community or helping others here and there, but functionally no one is going to change bed pans in a nursing home without getting something in return.

It is questionable whether these two ever actually met, but the moral of the story is relevant so I'll repeat the tale.

Alexander the Great, the embodiment of power, approached notorious hobo philosopher Diogenes the Cynic and asked if there was anything he can do for him. Sunbathing Diogenes asks Alexander if he wouldn't mind stepping to the side a bit, as he is blocking the light.

Alexander is able to compel armies and lay countries to ruin, but Diogenes is resistant to all compulsion but is without land, possessions, rank, title, nobility, reputation, and so on. There is nothing you can take away from him he hasn't already given up, no hardship you can impose on him that he does not willingly endure. Even the times he is de facto enslaved, he is still free, because he willingly subjects himself to any punishment.

It would be an absurd conclusion that the reason Diogenes is able to make a mockery of this request is because this homeless man is more powerful than Alexander the Great.

> It would be an absurd conclusion that the reason Diogenes is able to make a mockery of this request is because this homeless man is more powerful than Alexander the Great.

The only moral of this story I understood is that it is nonsensical to compare two different metrics. I do not know how one would come to the above conclusion, comparing Alexander’s power over many others to Diogenes’ power over himself and presumably pain receptors.

Alexander being able to kill Diogenes more easily than Diogenes being able to kill Alexander would be a proper comparison, or Alexander being able to compel more people than Diogenes, but even then, I fail to see the utility for this discussion.

Well let's go back to the statement you made a few comments ago

> Money is a proxy for power. Has a better alternative proxy to power been demonstrated to exist?

Here the a man with no possessions suddenly has power, and the richest most powerful man in the world struggles to exert power.

I disagree with characterizing Person A not wanting something from Person B as person B struggling to exert power.

Aristotle's virtue ethics is a helpful lens to view the power dynamic within this story. Virtue is defined as a purpose or reason for being: Alexander is good where he fits his purpose, like how you would judge a tool to use. As a great ruler, he should be able to demonstrate not just his ability to kill and threaten, but positive qualities like providing for his subjects.

When Diogenes asks Alexander to move aside, it demonstrates the limits of this power, and therefore Alexander's virtue as a ruler: someone who doesn't want anything gets exactly as much benefit from this king as from anyone else. If the only thing Alexander can contribute is threats, that would simply make him unvirtuous - and equivalent in power to any armed madman.

> When Diogenes asks Alexander to move aside, it demonstrates the limits of this power, and therefore Alexander's virtue as a ruler: someone who doesn't want anything gets exactly as much benefit from this king as from anyone else.

This seems like a trivial fact to me, or I am missing what is notable about this “virtue”.

> If the only thing Alexander can contribute is threats, that would simply make him unvirtuous - and equivalent in power to any armed madman.

I guess so in this specific interaction, but it would be ridiculous to say a person that commands armies is equivalent in power to any armed madman in the big picture. My responses are in the context of societies using money as a tool to incentivize people, to which I am not aware of there being a better known alternative.

That's essentially modernism (or at least, its economic side); there's a reason postmodernism is hot right now, and it's because modernism is both wrong and rubbish.

> along with the shareholder value myth (the idea that companies should be (may even be required to be) entirely short term profit motivated out of a duty to shareholders

The only myth here is you thinking that "shareholder value" = "short term profits". Amazon (in the past) and uber are counterexamples of that.

The author thinks so. Money isn't the only way to be compensated, but it's a measure of value.

I wonder if the author would cap all value transfers, or just monetary. What about limiting in-kind compensation by transfers of land, securities, food, or reputation?

For some stuff, the only incentive is money. Nobody's going to haul your garbage away because that's what fulfills them.

If nobody wants to do that, that seems like a real big incentive to find a better solution to the problem.

> Nobody's going to haul your garbage away because that's what fulfills them.

Maybe not directly as individuals but a number of companies makes money from trash ;-)

Money isn’t the only incentive to do anything, but there are plenty of things for which money is the only incentive, a lot of which are pretty critical for functioning societies.

Define 'perform.'

If I am to be working without monetary incentive, as many here suggest, I would still do something. But I will mostly focus on things which amuse me, and not on anything in real demand by society. Even then I will only do the most exciting part while leaving a trail of technical debt.

Would you expect anything else? People fixing obscure bugs in legacy products for you instead of reinventing the wheel, poorly?

Someone from 1800 or earlier would call us parasites.

We work so little and own so much!

Time to go back to owning nothing and working all day every day under threat of actual violence and starvation.

Now that's performance!

(I'm afraid some rich assholes actually believe that today, of course they'd be the leaders of such a society)

There's still room for QoL improvement, and income isn't the only incentive.

> Parasitism is a very convenient life style once you adopt to it, and very hard to abandon even if you wish to.

100% agree, look no further than current communist, and ex-communist countries.

Even ones which succesfully "decommunized" still have that ex-party member class which still lives off fraud, and economic crimes 30 years after.

You actually think the political class is not full of thieves anywhere else?

It's a career path that attracts this kind of people, like flies to shit.

I am calling countries in which communists are no longer the political class, but even when turned into a social underlayer class, these fellows, and their offspring, or even their grandchildren cannot vean themselves off economic parasitism, and economic crime.

They are becoming a multigenerational class living off economic crime.

Yeah, I often hate doctors myself. Doesn't mean the majority are bad.

I can't help but laugh because your last line perfectly describes inheritance, a practice whose abolishment was demanded in The Communist Manifesto.

I think you're forgetting (or deliberately ignoring) all the great political and economic frauds that have happened in capitalist systems too.

I don't think any political/economical/social system can ever be immune to fraud and sociopaths.

It’s true that fraud and corruption will always exist but it’s also true that it’s less prevalent in a capitalist system because it’s more (not completely) transparent than any other system that has been tried by humans so far.

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