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Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

jiggy2011

What about the jobs that still need doing but people are not generally highly intrinsically motivated to do relative to other things they could be doing if they had free choice?

For example if you gave software developers a bunch of cash and told them to work on whatever they wanted, how many would go and build video games or invent esoteric programming languages (fun but not important) vs how many would want to build (or worse maintain) a system for the administration of taxes (less fun but very important). Hell, how many would even develop software at all vs just take up some other activity of even less value.

Therefor the best way to motivate these people is to extrinsic motivate them with money. However what happens if most of that money is taken as taxation and spent on people who sit around and do whatever they want all day? Do they still have the same incentive to do the boring but necessary jobs?

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> What about the jobs that still need doing but people are not generally highly intrinsically motivated to do relative to other things they could be doing if they had free choice?

There will be luxuries some people want that are beyond the reach of those who live just on the guaranteed basic income. Those people will do the jobs that have not yet been replaced by technology to earn the extra money they need.

For instance, some people might want more living space. Some might want fancier cars than those people on the GBI can afford. Some might fancy a boat. Some might want a high end home entertainment system. Some might like expensive food and drink.

If you want to earn money to have these luxuries , why pay to those who don't give you anything in return (nor have the potential to)?

Well, first of all, I'm not arguing for equal pay for everyone, I'm in favor of a guarenteed minimum income. Secondly, money doesn't work as a motivator for non menial tasks.[1] And you know, a task that seems boring and uninteresting to you might not for someone else. As for how many of us would even develop software at all, I need only point to the open source community. Extrinsic notivation has its place, but it is no substitute for that internal drive.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

I don't think it's true that money doesn't work as a motivation for non-menial tasks, if that were the case then there would be no incentive for tech companies to offer developers anything over a sustenance wage since they would show up to work for free.

Open source software is an interesting example, but I think it mostly supports my case.

If you look at the projects out there, you can divide them into roughly 3 camps.

1) Projects that have a lot of paid developers working for companies or organisations that pay wages to their developers. So stuff like Android , V8 and Ubuntu would fall into this camp.

2) Projects that people were not necessarily paid to develop , but were developed mostly as a biproduct of something that they were or as a way to do that thing more effectively. "Scratch an itch" software effectively. I guess something like RoR would fall into this category.

3) Pure passion projects that were developed for fun. This is the only group that is purely intrinsically motivated.

The thing with projects that fall into camp #3 is that they tend to be stuff that the developer themselves found useful or interesting rather than something that necessarily serves society at large, though the two may sometimes intersect there is no guarantee.

If you don't make peoples incomes at least somewhat dependant upon the software they develop you will see far more camp #3 projects than camps #1 or #2.

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