FUTURE INCENTIVES
By NIGEL BALCHIN
IF people see posters, read advertisements or listen to speeches, there can scarcely be a man or woman in the country who does not know by now that we need More and More Production, that we must Work or Want and that the only path to More for All is More from Each. Yet the report on building reminds us once more that the willingness of the individual to work hard remains, to put it cautiously, no higher than it was when families did not " squat " in Nissen huts and nobody ever talked about the dollar deficit. The most usual expltmation (and one that is undoubtedly
partly true) is that people simply cannot grasp the . connection between their own efforts and the national position on one hand ; and between the national position and their own standard of life on the other. But there is another possibility that I have never seen mentioned—that the threat to the standard of life implied in all these warnings may have less power than we tend to think.
We know that, in general, everybody wants a higher material standard of life, and would object strongly to a lowering of present standards. But the value of the material standard of life, like the value of anything else, must have a limit somewhere ; and there is nothing inherently absurd in the idea that its maintenance or improvement in this country at the present time might involve more effort than people are willing to make. Indeed, it has always been one of the standard difficulties of the " efficiency engineer " that material rewards, as an incentive to effort, only work up to a point. The piece-worker sets himself a certain standard of earning corre- sponding to a standard of effcrt well below his maximum maintain- able capacity ; and all the ingenuity of the devisers of bonus incentive schemes will not make him increase his efforts for more than a short while.
This refusal on the parr, of workers to break their necks to earn another pound a week has usually been conveniently overlooked, because it does not fit it with our normal social and industrial theory. For many years the concept of an ever-rising material standard of life has been put before .us as the be-all and end-all of social effort. The first step, sensibly enough, was to be the abolition of the crudest forms of want—of hunger, cold and raggedness. But after that the theory has always tended to disappear into a rosy mist of universal motor cars and television sets. Vaguely, there was to be more leisure. But the keynote of the future Utopia was to be more and more of everything for everybody, with the sky as the limit.
Now, as America is busily showing us, it is perfectly possible to go on almost indefinitely inventing new things for people to want.
But the fact remains that, despite all the technical and mechanical advances we may make, if the sky is the only limit to our material demands, the sky is also the limit to the amount of work that will be demanded of us. And there is no doubt that after a certain, fairly early point the value of more and more material things, in terms of the individual's happiness, begins to fall sharply. It has always seemed to me that to base the whole future of society on the incentive-value of an ever-rising material standard of life takes too little account of the law of diminishing returns. There are always a certain number of people about who will do anything for money. But they are comparatively rare, and it is extremely dangerous to read their peculiarities into the ordinary man and woman. Sooner or later there must come a time when the extra material things are simply not worth the extra effort involved in earning them—when a man will decide to spend his time listening to his old wireless set, instead of working so hard to buy a new one that he never gets time to listen at all.
Yet this entirely rational approach to the value of material standards is a thing of which our present industrial system takes no account. It demands that a man shall spend the best hours of his day and the best years of his life in work which may give him no pleasure or satisfaction. It demands that he shall go down a mine to work on a two-foot seam on a spring morning. It asks a girl of twenty to sit in a factory from nine till five, doing a deadly monotonous job about which she cares, and can care, precisely nothing. And in return it offers money with which, in the hours that are left, they can try to buy back, at the local cinema, the life they have wasted.
There was only ever one thing that could make such a system work, and that was fear. As long as the man who did not work starved, then at least there was the brutal appeal to the instinct of self-preservation. Rightly, we have felt that fear was the curse of industry, and have sought to remove it. But we have not fully realised that fear was also the mainspring of our industrial system, and that, when we abolish it, we must necessarily reconstruct the whole mechanism. As it is, we have taken away the strongest of all incentives—the preservation of a man's own life—and have put nothing in its place but the offer of an ever-increasing number of material toys for him to play with. And the toys won't do, because they are not worth what we ask him to spend on them—his life.
But this does not mean that fear is the only possible incentive. Very few people wish to be idle in the sense of doing nothing. What they want is happy and satisfying activity, instead of the unhappy and unsatisfying activity that they call " work." There is in fact no basic reason why happy and satisfying activity should not also be productive. There are plenty of people in the world who get more satisfaction out of productive work than out of anything else, whether they happen to earn their living by it or not. Not only the artist, the author, the farmer and the doctor, but even the managing director of the industrial concern, get this satisfaction. But nobody has ever thought it necessary to consider the job of the average man in these terms. In the old days we offered him the incentive of fear. Now we offer him more money with which to buy happiness (if he can find it) during his leisure time. What we don't offer him is happiness in his working hours.
Yet surely there is no other way ? If we have on the one hand a reasonable demand for a rising standard of life, which means productive work, and on the other a demand for more of the happy activity that we call " leisure," the only solution is to make productive work itself the happy activity. An industrial job, in the past, has been anything that a human being could be persuaded to do, by any combination of threats, bribes and external pressures. The future of industry in civilised communities may well depend upon making it the first essential of any job that it shall be some- thing which a normal human being might wish to do for its own sake.
To achieve this would, of course, demand a revolution in industrial technique and organisation. But what is far more important, and probably more difficult to bring about, is the revolution in our concept of what work is and what it should be. All of us, from Conservatives at one end to Communists at the other, have inherited from the Industrial Revolution the idea that the primary object of work is to produce material things rather than to produce satis- faction and happiness. This was the creed of the old-time boss. His satisfaction lay in making money, and economic circumstances allowed him to exploit other men to give him that satisfaction. But though we have got rid of him, we have not got rid of his creed. We have merely inherited it, whilst scrapping the circumstances that made it workable. All that is wrong with our approach to the problem of incentives is that it is about fifty years out of date. In a state of full employment, with present-day social services, the problem is not " Why does the miner sometimes stay away from the pit ? " but " Why does he go there as often as he does ? " ; not " Why won't people go into the mills ? " but " Why should they ? ". Until we can offer some better reason than an extra pound a week, or the vague threat of a "lower standard of life" at some time in the future, we shall not get the willing effort that comes only with satisfying activity, and which alone can solve our problems.
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