Tuesday, 8 September 2009
Profit Motivation and Incentive Motivation Questioned by Research
What creates wealth? Pink's TED video
In his TED video Dan Pink, a failed law student turned creativity advisor, refers to research that establishes as fact that the profit motive of incentive for business development does not produce the goods as well as other motives! This fact has been well documented by economists of the Schumpeterian School of economics but ignord by orthodox teaching of economics in most US grad schools that do not have a strong historical analytical base.
Economic history demonstrates that innovation is not the result of the search for profit and incidently security.
Rather individuals who are entrepreneurs and innovators are driven by other motivations. This is known by PHD studies of market development as conducted by myself at Cambridge university in the 1970s. The orthodox view of the supremacy of profit as the driver of market development I determined to be false, but most left and right wing economists at the time at Cambridge were hostile to my ideas that other motives drove business innovation and market development.
Now Dan Pink refers to many studies that reinforce my earlier views which are not so different from those of Schumpeterian economists who were ignored by macro economists unwilling to recognize the serious gaps in their thinking and historical realities.
Indeed as Pink says invention and innovation by such companies as Google, Apple and Microsoft tend to follow other economic models where they achieve actual market development. I would humbly add that these models are of my school of thought.
Where companies have perpetrated social injustice frequently is where the profit motive has stifled other motives and resulted in market stagnation and the severe limiting of competition.
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