Beyond Self-Interest by Krzysztof Pelc

Author:Krzysztof Pelc
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mouth-Watering Market Implications

The first takeaway from these studies is that some of the suspicion of sellouts is in fact warranted. When working within the realm of disinterested commerce, we may actually put greater effort into tasks. The passionate artisan who turns his mind from passion to profit may continue to ply his craft, but there is actual reason to believe that the product may be affected by the shift in allegiance.

The market itself may suggest some of these changes—sometimes it outright imposes them. And subtle though they may be, we have a keen intuitive sense for these transformations; we see them coming. If a supermarket wants to capitalize on the passionate baker’s passion, it may offer him a large licensing contract. The smaller margins on the bigger order may then require a little less marzipan in the almond croissants, and fewer raisins on the brioche; the increase in scale means the production must become more standardized, and each strudel now appears a little more similar to the next. The baker himself becomes more occupied with questions of marketing and distribution, and we never see him at the bakery any more, though a photograph of his face now adorns all the shop’s packaging. We say, “I used to go when it was still a tiny hole in the wall, they made the best sourdough, but then they went big, completely sold out, and now no one buys their bread any more.” So when the baker at the corner assures us that they’re “not in it for the money,” they are actually attempting to credibly signal, “My sourdough tastes better.” And behavioral science backs them up.

Similarly, creditors may be right to put more faith in the original Puritans than in their descendants, who came to regard prosperity as a goal, rather than an unintended byproduct. Just like the subjects of lab experiments who quit working on a puzzle sooner when they were earning a fee for it, the lapsed Puritan may break his commitment earlier than his progenitor when the going gets tough. The creditor may be right to doubt what social scientists call his level of “resolve”: the likelihood of carrying through on commitments made.

But these findings also hold another lesson, and this one has a darker side. In Ariely’s experiment, it takes a five-dollar reward for a five-minute task to approach, without actually surpassing,27 the level of effort that subjects put into doing the same task for no reward at all. That amounts to the handsome wage of sixty dollars an hour. In the case of Steve Jobs, once Apple’s board got him to shift from one realm to the other, it took a private jet and millions of dollars-worth of stock options to get Jobs to keep doing the same task he’d been doing for its own sake for two and a half years. The takeaway is that it is of course possible to replicate the commitment and keenness of workers operating within the realm of disinterest by offering them material incentives—it’s just very expensive.

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