To be fair, a lot of work is self-rewarding. To understand Steven Jobs, you cannot really just look at his bank account.
But a lot of other work isn’t. But I guess a good answer would be that people use money to buy status anyway, so any system that that just gives status to people doing the best work could roughly work and in small communities it indeed does.
On the other hand, money has clear advantages as a vehicle of conveying status, rather obvious ones. The real “trick” seems to be that money also buys productive resources, not just status. So a succesful businessman can cash out into a yacht or reinvest the profit. This seems to be the difference, it is possible to give status to someone just through popularity, or a king giving a medal and a knighting, but this cannot be converted into productive resources. Probably every transactional system needs a medium of exchange that buys both status and productive resources and if it does it will be effectively equivalent to money.
On the third hand, lacking status does not make people starve.
I guess I am back to the idea I talked about before. Within small communities, like an extended family, socialism. Give status to best workers but not through money, because you want to feed etc. everybody inside your microcommunity. And between these microcommunities capitalism.
To be fair, a lot of work is self-rewarding. To understand Steven Jobs, you cannot really just look at his bank account.
And yet he did in fact wind up with a rather large bank account. Are you seriously going to argue that if managing Apple wasn’t profitable he wouldn’t be doing something else?
For some values of “not profitable” yes. The point is that the “profits” must came in the form of success, achievement and status. Not necessarily money, although indeed money is the most common form of success, achievement and status in a commercial, peaceful period of history. Jobs may have been a stellar general during WW2, and in that case making headlines and history books would be the “profit”, not the generals salary.
To be fair, a lot of work is self-rewarding. To understand Steven Jobs, you cannot really just look at his bank account.
But a lot of other work isn’t. But I guess a good answer would be that people use money to buy status anyway, so any system that that just gives status to people doing the best work could roughly work and in small communities it indeed does.
On the other hand, money has clear advantages as a vehicle of conveying status, rather obvious ones. The real “trick” seems to be that money also buys productive resources, not just status. So a succesful businessman can cash out into a yacht or reinvest the profit. This seems to be the difference, it is possible to give status to someone just through popularity, or a king giving a medal and a knighting, but this cannot be converted into productive resources. Probably every transactional system needs a medium of exchange that buys both status and productive resources and if it does it will be effectively equivalent to money.
On the third hand, lacking status does not make people starve.
I guess I am back to the idea I talked about before. Within small communities, like an extended family, socialism. Give status to best workers but not through money, because you want to feed etc. everybody inside your microcommunity. And between these microcommunities capitalism.
And yet he did in fact wind up with a rather large bank account. Are you seriously going to argue that if managing Apple wasn’t profitable he wouldn’t be doing something else?
For some values of “not profitable” yes. The point is that the “profits” must came in the form of success, achievement and status. Not necessarily money, although indeed money is the most common form of success, achievement and status in a commercial, peaceful period of history. Jobs may have been a stellar general during WW2, and in that case making headlines and history books would be the “profit”, not the generals salary.