Word: carrot
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...human donkey requires either a carrot in front or a stick behind to goad it into activity. It is fashionable at the moment to argue that the carrot is the more important of the two: "incentive" is the watchword, and all classes of the community are busy arguing that if only they are given a little bit more in the way of incentive (at the expense of the rest of the community) they will respond with more activity. ... But it is probably more realistic (though it has that touch of brutal cynicism that is so much frowned upon these days...
...Raspberry. The whole drift of British society for two generations past has been to whittle away both at the carrot and the stick, until now very little of either is left. . . . There is a conspiracy of labor, capital and the state to deny enterprise its reward.. . . The embattled trade association movement has [put] any attempt to reduce costs and prices by greater skill or enterprise under the ban of "destructive competition." The industrialist who discovers a way of making better things more cheaply (which is what he is sent on earth to do) is deprived by the state...
...stick has been whittled away no less than the carrot. . . . The more comprehensive the protection and the higher the benefits [under social security], the less, quite inevitably, is the urge to stay in employment or to seek it when it is lost. . . . There are already signs that the admirable principle of full employment is likely to be translated in practice into fixed employment, the doctrine that nobody must ever be thrown out of work...
...success and failure, is still unmistakably sharp. . . . The Soviet economy made an original attempt to do without incentives or sanctions, but it has long ago reintroduced them. . . . Nowhere, certainly, are the penalties of incompetence or laziness more sharp. Both the Russian and the American economies are, avowedly and deliberately, carrot-and-stick economies; the British is rapidly becoming a sugar-candy economy...
...next birthday and I've never had a family. . . . I've tried radishes, cabbage, celery leaves, carrot tops, and with no luck. . . . Do you suppose a change of climate would help...