[anonylizard]

That's not true, and only seems true because of highly selective examples.

Money can force people to work, out of the necessity of survival. What it buys is reliability. You can force a toilet cleaner to come to work day after day, and the toilets stay clean.

But human progress, social progress, economic growth, does not solely come from people grinding through their jobs. It comes from people 'giving it their all', look at the great scientists, Newton, Von Nuemann, all the people at bell labs etc. These people create titanic economic value in their wake, and they are motivated by passion, which heavily mixes altruism with self interest.

Indeed, the 'developed economies' are precisely the ones that also allow 'care' to scale, that's why we have social welfare, that's why we have free education.

Its that 'Care' doesn't scale, its that its impossible to centrally monitor and control. People in the third world work harder than the first world, and are 10% as rich, because no one in their societies care.

[bccdee]

> free education

Public schools are notoriously uncaring. It's expensive private schools which can afford to have small class sizes, so the teachers can develop personal relationships with the students. "Care" in this context isn't just "doing something for someone's benefit"; it requires a caretaker's undivided attention, which is why it doesn't scale.

[blargey]

The quality floor of "reliable" work produced solely by economic self-interest is also quite vulnerable to misaligned incentives.

If you don't provide the right balance of economic incentives for quality, the rational economic answer becomes "quiet quitting", and quality plummets. And maintaining that balance of incentives is also someone's job, which needs the right economic incentives to be done well, so it's turtles all the way down (or up).

In practice, it's an unstable, patchwork combination of care and economic incentives that keeps real-life institutions in working order.

[r14c]

> People in the third world work harder than the first world, and are 10% as rich, because no one in their societies care.

typically they "care wrong" and the first world comes in and dismantles everything to keep raw resource prices at a price point that they like. advanced third world economies are a threat to first world prosperity.