why many of our fundamental assumptions on human motivation appear to be incorrect

Page 80-83: why many of our fundamental assumptions on human motivation appear to be incorrect

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like the one felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain come to success…such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

—Nikola Tesla

If the argument of the previous section is correct, one could perhaps conclude that Eric's problem was just that he hadn't been sufficiently prepared to the pointlessness of the modern workplace. He had passed through the old education system—some traces of it are left—designed to prepare students to actually do things. This led to false expectations and an initial shock of disillusionment that he could not overcome.

Perhaps. But I don't think that's the full story. There is something much deeper going on here. Eric might have been unusually ill-prepared to endure the meaninglessness of his first job, but just about everyone does see such meaninglessness as something to be endured—despite the fact that we are all trained, in one way or another, to assume that human beings should be perfectly delighted to find themselves in his situation of being paid good money not to work.

Let us return to our initial problem. We may begin by asking why we assume that someone being paid to do nothing should consider himself fortunate. What is the basis of that theory of human nature from which this follows? The obvious place to look is at economic theory, which has turned this into some kind of science. According to classical economic theory, homo economicus, or "economic man"—that is, the model human being that lies behind every prediction made by the discipline—is assumed to be motivated above all by a calculus of costs and benefits. All the mathematical equations by which economists bedazzle their clients, or the public, are founded on one simple assumption: that everyone, left to his own devices, will choose the course of action that provides most of what he wants for the least expenditure of resources and effort. It is the simplicity of the formula that makes the equation possible: if one were to admit that humans have complicated motivations, there would be too many factors to take into account, it would be impossible to properly weight them, and predictions could not be made. Therefore, while an economist will say that while of course everyone is aware that human beings are not really selfish, calculating machines, assuming that they are makes it possible to explain a very large proportion of what humans do, and this proportion—and only this—is the subject matter of economic science.

This is a reasonble statement as far as it goes. The problem is there are many domains of human life where the assumption doesn't hold—and some of them are precisely in the domain of what we like to call the economy. If "minimax" (minimum cost, maximum benefit) assumptions were correct, people like Eric would be delighted with their situation. He was receiving a lot of money for virtually zero expenditure of resources and energy —basically bus fare, plus the amount of calories it took to walk around the office and answer a couple of calls. Yet all the other factors (class, expectations, personality, and so on) don't determine whether someone in that situation would be unhapy. They only really affect how unhappy they will be.

Much of our public discourse about work starts from the assumption that the economists' model is correct. People have to be compelled to work; if the poor are to be given relief so they don't actually starve, it has to be delivered in the most humiliating and onerous ways possible, because otherwise they would become dependent and have no incentive to find proper jobs. The underlying assumption is that if humans are offered the option to be parasites, of course they'll take it.

In fact, almost every bit of available evidence indicates that this is not the case. Human beings certainly tend to rankle over what they consider excessive or degrading work; few may be inclined to work at the pace or intensity that "scientific managers" have, since the 1920s, decided they should; people also have a particular aversion to being humiliated. But leave them to their own devices, and they almost unvariably rankle even more at the prospect of having nothing useful to do.

There is endless empirical evidence to back this up. To choose a couple particular colorful examples: working-class people who win the lottery an find themselves millionaires rarely quit their jobs (and if they do, usually soon say they regret it). Even those in prisons where inmates are provided free food and shelter and are not actually required to work, denying them the right to press shirts in the prison laundry, clean latrines in the prison gym, or package computers for Microsoft in the prison workshop is used as a form of punishment —and this is true evenwhere the work doesn't pay or where prisoners have access to other income. Here we are dealing with people who can be assumed to be among the least altruistic society has produced, yet they find sitting around all day watching television a far worse fate than even the harshest and least rewarding forms of labor.

The redeeming aspect of prison work is, as Dostoyevsky noted, that at least it was seen to be useful —even if it is not useful to the prisoner himself.

Actually, one of the few positive effects of the prison system is that, simply by providing us with information of what happens, and how humans behave under extreme situations of deprivation, we can learn basic truths about what it means to be human. To take another example: we now know that placing prisoners in solitary confinement for more than six monhs at a stretch inevitably results in physically observable forms of brain damage. Human beings are not just social animals, they are so intrinsically social that if they are cut off from relations with other humans, they begin to decay physically.

I suspect the work experiment can be seen in similar terms. Humans may or may not be cut out for regular nine-to-five labor discipline—it seems to me that there are considerable evidence that they aren't—but even hardened criminals generally find the prospect of just sitting around even worse.

Why should this be the case? And just how deeply rooted are such dispositions in human psychology? There is reason to believe the answer is: very deep indeed.

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