Эксперт связывает рост популярности социализма с разрушением связи между личным трудом и вознаграждением

I’ve been a big fan of Daniel Pink since 2009, when his presentation “The Puzzle of Motivation” took the internet by storm. TED had been around for a quarter-century before it began publishing videos online. When Pink’s talk was posted, it became one of the first to truly go viral, racking up tens of millions of views. I know that as a conservative, being a fan of a speechwriter and policy expert in the Clinton White House will be shocking to some, but Dan has a knack for combining detailed research with stories that make his arguments compelling. I’m addicted to his work, including “A Whole New Mind” (2005), “Drive” (2009), “To Sell Is Human” (2012), and “When” (2018).  “Drive” is especially compelling because Dan demonstrates that people perform their best when they are motivated. Based on his research, he makes the case that deep motivation is driven by three factors: autonomy (ability to direct our own lives); mastery (getting better at what you do); and purpose (service to something larger than ourselves). One thing that caught me by surprise was Dan’s premise that if-then rewards backfire. One example he gave argued that tying an allowance to household chores transforms a familial responsibility into a commercial transaction. Compensating for chores undermines the responsibility of contributing to the household and creates transactional conditioning so that when the reward is not enough or stops, the behavior will stop.  Pink argued that separating money from chores was the key to keeping family responsibility intact without killing motivation. I had just finished “Drive” when my daughters’ mother suggested giving the girls an allowance so they could learn about managing money. Make no mistake, instilling financial literacy in young women is essential. But the idea of giving them money for nothing was, to me anyway, crazy. After all, unearned money isn’t something they will encounter in the real world. Dan’s book had completely quashed the next alternative, paying for chores.  If we really wanted to teach financial literacy, why not compensate the girls for saving? I got the idea from David Owen, a staff writer for The New Yorker, who came up with the idea of a “Daddy bank.”  Each time the girls came into any money — birthday cash, babysitting, lemonade stands, or, as they got older, jobs — they could deposit cash into the Daddy bank. I would keep a ledger of any deposits and pay an inflated interest of 8% per month. For you math experts, money left untouched in the bank would double every year.  Some of you would say the premise of the Daddy bank with super-high interest is just semantics. You are still giving your kids money. You would be correct, but the why had changed.  As adults, both are successful, hardworking, and more importantly, avid savers and investors. While their political beliefs are left of mine, I’ve never heard either espouse the virtues of socialism.  I can’t help but wonder that with a couple of generations of children raised by parents who provide their children with free food, free laundry service, a free place to stay, free cars, free cell phones, free tuition, free gas, free health insurance and free vacations, if we are raising generations that expect to be cared for. It is no surprise then that socialist policies feel so natural to them — from free healthcare and subsidized housing to the belief that the government should take care of their every need. A successful campaign by one of our most popular presidents was based on the idea of “a hand up, not a handout.” Another in his 2012 State of the Union address said, “Millions of Americans who work hard and play by the rules every day deserve a government and a financial system that do the same. … No bailouts, no handouts and no copouts. An America built to last insists on responsibility from everybody.” Who were those radical free-market presidents? Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, respectively. That does not sound like socialism to me — anything but!  Reflecting on Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform reveals a bipartisan idea: True human dignity, purpose, and motivation stem from autonomy, effort and mastery, not unearned subsidies. When parents provide everything for free, children naturally grow into adults expecting the world to operate like their childhood homes. Could the modern surge in socialist ideals be the direct result of severing the link between personal input and reward? Just like the Daddy bank, society functions best when offering a ladder of opportunity rather than a guaranteed outcome. As Presidents Clinton and Obama said, the ultimate lesson of drive remains: The most valuable things aren’t handed to you. They are earned. Ari Ioannides, chair of the Summit County Republicans, is a recovering tech entrepreneur, founder of BootUP PD, and serves on local government and nonprofit boards. He offers a conservative perspective on local politics. He can be reached at [email protected]