Item — HN Reader

Yes.

When a group of people get together to do something, the most visible effect will be that of GCD(each person's motivations).

If you collect enough people, with sufficient heterogeneity, you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest, everything else, while it may exist, contributes with an arbitrarily smaller intensity.

In my mind, there are various links from this to the financialization-led practice of securitizing and "cutting up" everything into an "optimal" number of pieces, without stopping to think if the objective function truly captures the desired end result. However, these links are not clear enough yet for me to expand further on.

1 comments

“ you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest”

I think most people want to have security and some predictability for their lives. One way to achieve this is by having money but there are other ways too. Reducing humans to purely economical beings who always want to maximize profit is a gross simplification that appeals to economists and bankers but it doesn’t reflect reality.

> reduce to purely economical

I didn't. Please read the multiple qualifiers I added to that phrase.

>> If you collect enough people, with sufficient heterogeneity, you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest.

What that means is that if you scale groups of people too much, the only common interest you'll find among _all_ of them will be financial self interest. Hence GCD - "greatest common divisor". Of course people do things without monetary incentives. But these interests don't overlap within a sufficiently large and diverse group of people, as much as financial self-interest does.

"But these interests don't overlap within a sufficiently large and diverse group of people, as much as financial self-interest does."

I honestly don't think this is true. Finances are a tool to get security and comfort in our society but it's still just a tool to achieve the real goal. I bet if we had viable UBI that gives people their basic needs, most people wouldn't worry about finances.

At the end of the day, most people are employed in part because they want to (or need to) make money.

Therefore, the greatest common denominator for an arbitrarily large and heterogenous group of employees at the company is the paycheck.

This isn't really disputable. Your argument doesn't really counter this fact, either. Sure, UBI might remove that common need that nearly every employee has, which could change the calculus entirely... But we don't have UBI, and the GP wasn't making an argument about some hypothetical world, they were making a point about the one we actually live in.