Variations on the rational motivation to work

In the previous article I proposed a toy economy set in an orchard with Alice and Beth and suggested that there is motivation work and gift without exchanges, and that it is at least as good as organising formal exchanges. Here I want to flesh out a few variations, not necessarily in any particular order.

Alice's workweek

In the orchard scenario I examined what would happen if Beth convinced Alice that she was not going to work, and that Alice would still be motivated to support Beth so that she has a replacement worker if she is ever sick. But, in fact, Alice doesn't need to be sick in order to get Beth motivated to work. Instead, Alice can declare that she is taking a holiday, and simply take a day off. And as long as Alice can convince Beth that, for at least this one day, she is not going to work, Beth will be motivated to work.

Perhaps Alice can convince Beth that she is going to take a holiday one day a week, giving herself a six-day workweek. Beth would then be motivated to work one day a week. And, in fact, if Alice can convince Beth that she can only work a four-day workweek, then Beth will be motivated to work three days a week. It is only one more step that to convince Beth that Alice would work just half the week, meaning Beth would work the remaining half, and we are back to the situation where each is effectively working for themselves. Any more, and Alice and Beth's contexts are reversed.

Beth is probably interested in taking some work off Alice from time to time, because if Alice falls ill then Beth will have to do all the work for an indefinite period of time until Alice is better. It is likely that Beth will make some consideration that it is in her best interest to prevent Alice from falling ill by giving her a chance to rest from time to time.

What about exchanges?

What would happen if Alice and Beth did make a formal exchange? It would depend, of course, on the formal exchange that is made. If it were the exchange described in the last article (that Alice will work unless she is sick, and then Beth must work), then the overall outcome might be indistinguishable from the non-reciprocal gifting scenario. But if it is more constraining than that, then there might be different consequences.

Let's imagine a scenario where they agree to do half the work each. But let's also imagine that Beth can convince Alice that she would at most work two days a week. Beth might be motivated to break the agreement not go to work on some of the scheduled days, and Alice would be motivated to work those days. (Because this is a scenario that only involves two people in total, there aren't any police or judges or prisons or any other real consequences for breaking the agreement.) Or imagine that they agree to work half the week each, but Beth becomes sick, and there isn't a clause in the agreement that covers sickness. Alice would be motivated to break the agreement and work the extra days to look after Beth. Or imagine that Alice and Beth keep track of labour hours with tokens, and trade tokens for food. At any point when Beth doesn't have enough tokens, Alice would be motivated to work to feed Beth, because she needs her potential replacement worker.

The point is that any time an agreement fails - and unless an agreement is exhaustive of all possible unknown future circumstances, and constructed in a manner that accounts for the necessarily outcomes, it will fail - Alice and Beth will fall back on the equilibrium determined by their non-reciprocal gifting motivations. The non-reciprocal gifting equilibrium ultimately underlies any exchange equilibrium. (And we can largely see this when governments, charities and communities find non-reciprocal gifting ways to mitigate market gaps and failures.)

Bigger economies

Does the reasoning scale up to economies with more than just two people? There are various ways it could scale up that need to be considered: there could be more people, or there could be more types of work, or both.

Let's imagine an economy with Alice, Beth and Charlie, and where Beth and Charlie both convince Alice that they are fully unwilling to work. Would Alice (assuming she is capable) be motivated to work to produce enough food to feed both Beth and Charlie? Well, the queston that Alice has to answer is: what if she, Alice, and one of the other two gets unwell at the same time? That wouldn't be too unusual if there were a disaster or a contagion. If Alice puts all her eggs into the Beth basket and she and Beth both get ill, it would have been good to have Charlie around to get them some food.

But as we add more and more people, it becomes less likely that Alice will need all of them. Perhaps there is a magic number of potential replacement workers that she calculates will be sufficient and anyone beyond that is expendable. Of course, those people who are expendable will then want to work so that they don't die, given that Alice is not looking after them, and they may form their own system of a worker and several potential replacement workers, and so on. And the less likely it is that someone is not going to be fed, the more likely they are going to be motivated to feed themselves.

Now imagine that there is more than one job necessary for survival. Alice does one type of job, but she cannot do all types of jobs with her time. Other people in the economy who do different jobs find themselves in the same position. They are happy to gift resources to each other so that each can get their job done. And they are also happy to gift resources to a pool of replacement workers. And while the size of the replacement worker pool might vary with the size and the complexity of the economy, the principle remains generally the same.

It does not even have to be that the outcome of not receiving resources is death. Instead, it could be lowered quality of life. Thus, while the foundational reasoning is that someone would work so that they could ensure their own survival, it is also the case that someone might work to ensure a certain quality of life. I'll come back to this idea in the articles on free riders.

Beth is permanently unwell

All these scenarios assume that Alice and Beth are both capable of work. But what about a scenario where Beth is not capable of work, such as if she were permanently unwell?

We are back, then, to the circumstance where Alice either cares for Beth's life, or does not. If she does not care (and it seems that there are many people who have this attitude) then she has no incentive to work and feed Beth because it does not help her own survival. If she does care (and it seems that this might be the attitude of the majority of people, at least for some people in their lives) then she will try to work a sufficient amount to ensure Beth lives.

This seems relatively straightforward, and it seems that there are sufficient people who feel this way to ensure that some form of non-reciprocal gifting can help such people even when markets fail them. I think a more interesting question occurs when we consider the idea that Alice may not be able to tell if Beth is unwell or not.

By this I don't mean a scenario where Beth is faking illness but is secretly capable of work - though such scenarios are possible and could be considered. But my primary consideration here is how Alice might categorise Beth's condition. Let's say that Beth says that she cannot work because of a physical health issue she is experiencing. Alice recognises this, can examine if it is true, and then decide to gift resources to Beth. But let's take it a step further and say that Alice is not able to examine Beth and determine if she is telling the truth - the condition is private, or doesn't exhibit any symptoms except those subjectively reported (like great pain). At the very least Alice should probably acknowledge that such conditions are possible and Beth could have one. Now let's imagine that Beth says she has a mental health issue that prevents her from working. This is similar to the un-examinable physical health issue in that Alice only has access to Beth's subjective reporting of it. And the point here is not to discuss whether Alice should be suspicious - let's say that Alice accepts all of these reports in good faith and believes them. Then Alice accepts that people can have issues that prevent them from working that she cannot examine, and thus examinaton is not a sufficient or even good way of determining if someone requires resources gifted to them. In fact, Beth could say that she has absolutely no motivation to work, and Alice could assess this as a mental health issue that Beth is experiencing, even though Beth does not recognise it as a mental health issue herself.

The point is that Alice might be faced with a person with no motivation to work, and not be able to discern whether they are capable of working or not. If she is morally dedicated to caring for people who cannot work for themselves, then she faces a difficult task of not knowing whether she should, under her principle, care for these people or not. But, given that she is motivated to care for people who are potential replacement workers, it does not really matter which category they fall into.

A lot of people will, therefore, have a motivation to care for anyone who does not have a motivation to work, even if they are undecided as to what that motivation represents. Can Alice take the risk of killing a potential replacement worker because she thought they were too incapable of ever working? Can Alice take the risk of the negative impact of moral integrity violation if she only desires to care for those who cannot work, but accidentally kills someone who can't? In either case, Alice is likely motivated to care for others, without the need to scrutinise them to determine the cause of their non-working circumstances.