2 people, 1 child family at 100,000 is in the negative in the US. My fellow debt slaves… Like other than longer life, at the age of 70… I don’t really see why being at the so-called top of the world has bought Americans.

Take the case of American Gen Y-er Blake Mycoskie and TOMS Shoes, the company he launched in 2006. TOMS doesn’t fit snugly into the traditional business boxes. It offers hip, canvas, flat-soled shoes. But every time TOMS sells a pair of shoes to you, me, or your next-door neighbor, it gives away another pair of new shoes to a child in a developing country. Is TOMS a charity that finances its operation with shoe sales? Or is it a business that sacrifices its earnings in order to do good? It’s neither—and it’s both. The answer is so confusing, in fact, that TOMS Shoes had to address the question directly on its website, just below information on how to return a pair that’s too big. TOMS, the site explains, is “a for-profit company with giving at its core.”

Got it? No? Okay, try this: The company’s “business model transforms our customers into benefactors.” Better? Maybe. Weirder? Certainly. Ventures like TOMS blur, perhaps even shatter, the existing categories. Their goals, and the way companies reach them, are so incompatible to Motivation 2.0 that if TOMS had to rely on this twentieth-century operating system, the whole endeavor would seize up and crash in the entrepreneurial equivalent of a blue screen of death.

Motivation 3.0, by contrast, is expressly built for purpose maximization. In fact, the rise of purpose maximizers is one reason we need the new operating system in the first place. As I explained in Chapter 1, operations like TOMS are on the vanguard of a broader rethinking of how people organize what they do. “For benefit” organizations, B corporations, and low-profit limited-liability corporations all recast the goals of the traditional business enterprise. And all are becoming more prevalent as a new breed of businessperson seeks purpose with the fervor that traditional economic theory says entrepreneurs seek profit. Even cooperatives—an older business model with motives other than profit maximization—are moving from the shaggy edge to the clean-cut center. According to writer Marjorie Kelly, in the last three decades, worldwide membership in co-ops has doubled to 800 million people. In the United States alone, more people belong to a co-op than own shares in the stock market. And the idea is spreading. In Colombia, Kelly notes, “SaludCoop provides health-care services to a quarter of the population. In Spain, the Mondragón Corporación Cooperativa is the nation’s seventh largest industrial concern.”5
These “not only for profit” enterprises are a far cry from the “socially responsible” businesses that have been all the rage for the last fifteen years but have rarely delivered on their promise.

The aims of these Motivation 3.0 companies are not to chase profit while trying to stay ethical and law-abiding. Their goal is to pursue purpose—and to use profit as the catalyst rather than the objective.

…in April 2008, Vermont became the first U.S. state to allow a new type of business called the “low-profit limited liability corporation.” Dubbed an L3C, this entity is a corporation—but not as we typically think of it. As one report explained, an L3C “operate[s] like a for-profit business generating at least modest profits, but its primary aim [is] to offer significant social benefits.” Three other U.S. states have followed Vermont’s lead. An L3C in North Carolina, for instance, is buying abandoned furniture factories in the state, updating them with green technology, and leasing them back to beleaguered furniture manufacturers at a low rate. The venture hopes to make money, but its real purpose is to help revitalize a struggling region.
Meanwhile, Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus has begun creating what he calls “social businesses.” These are companies that raise capital, develop products, and sell them in an open market but do so in the service of a larger social mission—or as he puts it, “with the profit-maximization principle replaced by the social-benefit principle.” The Fourth Sector Network in the United States and Denmark is promoting “the for-benefit organization”—a hybrid that it says represents a new category of organization that is both economically self-sustaining and animated by a public purpose. One example: Mozilla, the entity that gave us Firefox, is organized as a “for-benefit” organization. And three U.S. entrepreneurs have invented the “B Corporation,” a designation that requires companies to amend their bylaws so that the incentives favor long-term value and social impact instead of short-term economic gain.

Neither open-source production nor previously unimagined “not only for profit” businesses are yet the norm, of course. And they won’t consign the public corporation to the trash heap. But their emergence tells us something important about where we’re heading. “There’s a big movement out there that is not yet recognized as a movement,” a lawyer who specializes in for-benefit organizations told The New York Times.6 One reason could be that traditional businesses are profit maximizers, which square perfectly with Motivation 2.0. These new entities are purpose maximizers—which are unsuited to this older operating system because they flout its very principles.

There is still tons of room for abuse, but he does seem to lead in the right direction.

So the simple test to judge an idea like this is, does it moves us into even a stronger cage or not? If it moves us into a stronger iron cage, then it’s a problem. It is breaks or loosens the chains, then it is not a problem.

this is the counter-intuitive surprise at work here. studies have shown that people are not appreciably happier in direct relation to income after somewhere around $60K on average (if i remember right). money isn’t an effective motivator after that point.

The message is simple – people are best motivated to do things when the things that they do are fun.

I have known this as a scientific fact for about 8 years or so. It’s not new information, it’s just every few years some writer that wishes to popularize and an idea writes a book and everyone gives praises.

The message is simple – people are best motivated to do things when the things that they do are fun. And, if you pay someone to do what they think is fun, you can screw up the fun, and disincentivize them to doing it further.

No, the message is when it’s fun, it’s fun and not work as “work” as we have defined it in society requires coercion. As in there is no coercion to do it, we are instinctively curious and love to play and figure stuff out and become experts in it. When work is coerced it’s not fun any more as it’s coerced. The only way to get more productivity to make it seem more fun is to use false rhetoric to trick people into thinking it’s not coerced as you “have a purpose” ™ and you are serving that purpose when this is in fact not the truth.

So you say human beings are wired against coercion. No shit! Tell me more! Well, using rhetoric to fool them into thinking it’s not work won’t work long because people in general are not that stupid. They just keep their mouths shut because they don’t want to be punished by power.

post-information age economy and the skills we have to foster to survive.

The point is that there is an economy. That we don’t have to work, as we have machines to produced the majority of the shit we need with little work; or we will soon. But we have designed a system so that we must work. Now science tells us that not only do we have to work but we are more productive if we are rhetorically fooled into liking it, all sorts of advanced tools of creating the better worker. I hate to sound dismal, but give a bit of thought and this interpretation is generally correct.

Society historically has had class, though for short periods and in small groupings egalitarian societies have existed. I think all of this rhetoric does not move us in that direction, but instead in the opposite direction. The ultimate freedom is freedom from coercion. All the other freedoms that we talk about are rhetorical privileges and really even with them we are not very free.