Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by devilshaircut 2693 days ago
In your own citation:

"Rewards kill creativity. Some twenty studies have shown that people do inferior work when they are expecting to get a reward for doing it, as compared with people doing the same task without any expectation of a reward. That effect is most pronounced when creativity is involved in the task."

Would this not suggest that people do their best work when they aren't doing it for the paycheck? In other words, given UBI, anything an individual may do would be his or her own prerogative and therefore represent higher quality output.

2 comments

Artists represent 1.4% of the workforce in America. Lots of people (the ones who need support) don't do jobs requiring creativity.
>given UBI, anything an individual may do would be his or her own prerogative and therefore represent higher quality output.

But having fun making art means little to an economy.

Having less fun designing a robot to pick potatoes will transform an economy.

Creativity is nice, but it doesn't directly correlate with additional value.

I guess I'm kind of confused- additional value to what exactly? The GDP in America is massive but I don't know what are the returns of a growing GDP to my experience as a human, to my family, to my friends, to my quality of life. Will I pass by less homeless people on the way to work if I work harder? Will there be less hungry children in my schools if I make the economy grow, and by how much? What "additional value" is actually occuring?

(EDIT: This is a genuine question; I'm not highly educated on economics and I'd like to know the approximate models that currently exist on how much growing the economy helps numbers like homeless population, healthcare coverage, lifespan, birth survival, food security...)

I wasn't really referring to economic value, nor was the quote or the cited article itself.

The proposition was that people will do the least work for the most reward where possible.

The cited article suggested that rewards result in poor quality work.