Theft at the Public Till
incline, until, at the highest percentile, our gentle hill, has become a nearly impossible vertical ascent. Why do income gradations, so proportionate one to the other below the 85 th percentile, become so steep above it? Below the 86 th percentile, incomes largely reflect the actual work people do. Above the 85 th percentile, incomes start reflecting not income from jobs, but the return from property rents, interest from bonds, dividends from stocks, speculative gains. Thus these higher incomes represent something other than hard work. It is widely and erroneously assumed that if you add an inducement to do something, an individuals motivation to do it will automatically increase . . Our intrinsic interest evaporates after rewards are introduced. . By re- warding people for something they had been doing voluntarily, they came to see themselves as doing it in order to get paid. As soon as the reward was no longer there, neither were they. This of course was the whole idea; to sap their intrinsic motivation. But that is what millions of us -well meaning par- ents, teachers, and managers -- are doing to the people we reward, whether we realize it or not; killing off their interest in the very things we are urging them to do.” The more you want what has been dangled in front of you, the more you may come to dislike whatever you have to do to get it.” The hunger for ever greater wealth may well be an addiction, but it’s an addiction, fostered and nourished by the very structure of modem American economic life. Our society rewards and honors, above all else and above all others, wealth and those who accumulate it. This money, others have ob- served, makes for an empty symbol. “Money brings some happiness,” notes playwright Neil Simon. “But after a certain point it just brings more money.” To make matters worse, this constant grasping for more, most often by those who already have enough, simply makes no sense. What many people are be- ginning to realize is that now time is more precious than goods, that indeed we hardly have time to consume what we can already afford. For some, money is simply the best way of keeping score in an ambigu- ous world. For a miserly few, it is an end in itself, quite apart from anything it buys in the marketplace. New appetites are constantly emerging under the stimulus of ingenious entrepreneurs and advertisers. Beyond possessions,
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