Was Communism Doomed? by Simon Kemp

Author:Simon Kemp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Incentives and Motivation

An incentive is something that should motivate a person to perform an activity, and an appropriate incentive is something that is regarded by the person as desirable, at least at that particular time. So, for example, someone who is outside on a cold, wet day might have as an incentive the prospect of a hot shower. When she has had the shower, she might be further motivated by the prospect of a meal or a glass of wine.

As we saw in Chap. 5, psychologists have sometimes attempted to reduce the different motivations that people have to a manageable set of different wants and needs. Probably the best-known psychological theory, and one that still commands respect, was the theory of a hierarchy of needs advanced by Abraham Maslow (1908–1970). In this theory, the most basic needs are physiological: quenching thirst, sleeping if one is tired, eating food if one is hungry, and so on. When these needs are satisfied, there is a need for safety, or perhaps freedom from fear. There is then a need for love or belonging—a need which emerges most clearly in the apparent need of children for attachment. Someone might then strive for esteem—“Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise,” as John Milton put it in Lycidas. Finally, after these needs are satisfied, a few people strive for the self-actualisation which is at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy.1

The lower-order needs, such as the physiological, should be satisfied before the higher-order ones are achievable, or capable of acting as motivators. So, for example, someone who is shivering with cold is unlikely to be strongly motivated by a need for esteem. Also implicit in the theory is that few people are capable of achieving self-actualisation because, for many, the lower-order needs remain unsatisfied and thus dominate motivation.

An implication of Maslow’s theory is that some kinds of needs cannot be simply satisfied by a rising material standard of living. Physiological and safety needs clearly can be satisfied by an increase in productivity coupled with some attention to distributing the resources to those who might otherwise miss out. But esteem needs cannot be dealt with in this way. For example, one’s need for esteem might depend on living in the best house in the street. Such competitive incentives are, by their nature, not possible for everyone to have and thus are not strongly related to the overall standard of living of society. The economist, Robert Frank, labels goods which by their very nature cannot be obtained by everyone as conspicuous consumption goods, following the lead of Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), and contrasts them with inconspicuous consumption goods which can be obtained by all. He points out that conspicuous consumption goods can produce a kind of consumption arms race and are thus undesirable—a point that many Marxist thinkers would agree with. He also suggests that the existence of such conspicuous consumption goods might be a reason why increasing the wealth of a society generally produces little, if any, increase in its subjective well-being.

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