Word: carrot
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When minority stockholders bought out his fat string of publications in 1941, one of the conditions was that the carrot-chomping millionaire physical culturist would give them no direct competition for the next five years. The five years are up in October. Last week, ancient (77) Bernarr Macfadden was all ready to announce the debut of the new Bernarr Macfadden's Detective Magazine, to appear then...
...psychologist, I cannot refrain from commenting upon "The Carrot and the Stick," the article from the London Economist which you quote approvingly (TIME, July 15) as "some simple, understandable words to the British people...
Certainly man is motivated by fear of hunger and desire for gain-by the stick and the carrot if you will. But the oversimplification and the error is the assumption that these are the necessary motives to human social action as they may be for donkey biological action...
...strongest motivation is desire for prestige, status, the approval of his group? Is the businessman who gives up a $50,000 a year job to become a college president at $15,000 motivated primarily by fear of hunger or desire for material gain? . . . Are college professors motivated by the carrot? The truth is more nearly that they labor for ego-satisfaction in spite of a paucity of carrots in their chosen academic course. . . . Whatever is the case for the donkey", the incentive for human behavior need not be material gain...
Several ways to restore the carrot suggest themselves. Any form of payment by results works in the right direction. So does any attempt to preserve the margins of income that can be secured by greater skill or experience -and it is the real margin, after taxation, that counts. ... It will only lead to disaster to pretend that ordinary human beings are angels or philosophers (of either the Marxist or the Spencerian professions). . . . Even in the 20th Century, most of them are more like donkeys driven by desire for gain or fear of hunger...