Indeed, the very premise of extrinsic incentives is that we’ll always respond rationally to them. But even most economists don’t believe that anymore. Sometimes these motivators work. Often they don’t. And many times, they inflict collateral damage. In short, the new way economists think about what we do is hard to reconcile with Motivation 2.0. What’s more, if people do things for lunk-headed, backward-looking reasons, why wouldn’t we also do things for significance-seeking, self-actualizing reasons? If we’re predictably irrational—and we clearly are—why couldn’t we also be predictably
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