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Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

Theory Z: The prime motivation for every single employee in every single organization is improving their own local working and living conditions. Whether that materializes as X or Y behavior is a question of how well management can align the employee's self-interest with the organization's interest.

Aligning incentives is harder in some jobs/industries than others, so for the hard ones, behavior would tend toward X, and for easier ones, behavior would tend toward Y.

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Was rereading some stuff about european manorialism (feudal economic model) and a line really stuck out to me. Something like "left to their own determination farmers will optimize for resilience, not surplus production." But surplus production is the resource extracted and used by landowning elites to support their lifestyles. So a lot of the mechanics of that system emerged out of the need to coerce farmers into producing surplus against their own interests. And yes to some extent surplus and resilience are interrelated; but not really if the surplus is going to someone else.

Anyway the words and the details have changed but the fundamental relationship is still the same, and I think fits what you're describing as well. Left alone a worker would optimize for a safer or less stressful environment, or a shorter workday, over surplus production. But that surplus remains the resource that supports the lifestyle of people higher up in the hierarchy. You can only align these interests so far and they will never perfectly match.

Reminds me of in pre/early revolutionary France, the common/poor fought so hard against allowing for free trade and free pricing on bread, in favor of the existing price controls that had them massively overpaying most of the time and spending the majority of their earnings on bread alone, even in years of plenty.

Do you have any pointers to that story? (I'm French with interest in history and have not heard of it before son I'd like to know more about it!)

Just-price economics and its consequences…

Sounds to me you just described every overworked family. In buying the lie that constant consumption/fashion is the path to happiness. The landowning elites in your model are still doing the same thing. Coercion is still happening, yeah it's not by physically violent means but psychological and societal peer pressure.

An non-brainwashed family would probably work less if they realized that they can optimize for resilience and regain their freedom.

Good luck turning off the media.

Then add the foundational component called debt(financial,other types) to these relationships and you really have a match for your model.

The most expensive things for many, many, many individuals and families is not consumption or fashion but shelter and healthcare.

But if we're talking upper-middle-class-and-higher where we can assume they have decent options for that into retirement... I don't think there's nearly as much that really moves the needle enough to let them work a lot less short of "move to places in much lower demand"? Like "retire 10 years earlier and then go somewhere dirt cheap" seems about the only option, unless it's a larger societal change so the jobs move with the people to the dirt-cheap places, like what happened with the move to the Sun Belt in the US in the latter half of the 20th century but which isn't happening now in the US.

Maybe remote work will stick for enough people that that can happen again, but I don't see great signs of decentralization yet...

Would love to know more about this if you've found any related literature of how this relates to our modern society.

I know aligning incentives is usually something that falls under the broad category of "management" or people skills in a company, but there's a subfield of economics that studies exactly how to do this in a structured way (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design). It's usually applied to things like auctions, but I've always thought applying incentive alignment in a systematic way (in which, for instance, middle management submits "bids" for metrics that they want to track and for headcount) could be a viable way to run things. Any thoughts on something like this?

Whoa, I’ve never come across Mechanism Design specifically, though I did dabble in some research (and application in pharmaceutical R&D software) of market/auction design. I found that stuff to be profoundly useful, so I’ll definitely dive into mechanism design.

Have you found any particularly good resources/books on this?

FWIW I loved Alvin Roth’s “Who gets what and why” which is about market design mostly.

Sorry for the late reply. I've never heard of the Al Roth book, but seems interesting. I'll check it out. I mostly became familiar with Mechanism Design when I took the first year microeconomics sequence in graduate school (basically one of the few departments this stuff is covered academically is in Economics). So my best reference that I can vouch for is, unfortunately, probably this: https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/microeconomic-theory-978...

There's also Matthew Jackson's book which might be better. I've read his class notes for other topics and I think he does a good job explaining: https://web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/mechtheo.pdf

> Theory Z: The prime motivation for every single employee in every single organization is improving their own local working and living conditions.

That's the thesis of Culture of Narcissism (1979) by Christoper Lasch.

Interesting! By the title it seems a little more negative-valence than what I intended, but I will have to check that out. I appreciate the pointer!

Yeah, absolutely

E.g. doordash drivers are clearly X, and engineering teams are usually Y

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