I took my numbers from one of multiple tables that of "Filing as Head of the Household". You probably fall into a different class of people.
"But unless you have some system which rewards people for hard work, people generally will not work or they will work the absolute bare minimum that they can get away with."
Really? Then we aren't reading the same books and we aren't members of the same species. People actually work harder toward a goal if it is their goal. If they are given the flexibility to be creative and feel like they've made a genuine contribution to the product. The carrot-and-stick incentive system occasionally backfires and otherwise keeps people chasing an unattainable dream.
Google attributes some 20% of employee time to whatever the employee wants to do. Out of that time Google produced many of its innovative applications like Google Maps.
The carrot-and-stick approach to incentives is based on a free-market ideology and not fact. There are facts on human psychology available to economics and several psychologists have published books on the research. Check out Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational.
Or subscribe to TED (Technology Entertainment Design) they host such presentations to do with economics.
Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories -- and maybe, a way forward.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_p ... ation.html
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we're not as rational as we think when we make decisions
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_a ... sions.html
"If you take away all incentive and rewards then nobody will work. Even if you get rid of money as a reward system, you have to replace it with a new system of reward which is equally compelling"
You can engender an environment where people feel as if they have a creative contribution to the product and consequently a sense of well-being, as for example Google does.
Humans are not all about money, although I wonder sometimes about some of us.
" there are many who have become rich because they unlike others were willing to take risks which worked"
All that requires extant CAPITAL and its a major gamble.
For someone who dislikes the theory of biological evolution, you seem to embrace the "Survival of the fittest" mentality when it comes to economics. You even embrace CHANCE.
"And the sad thing is, you'd not even know what you were missing out on because it was never invented. How many peoples lives have been saved because of CAT Scans, MRI's and the medicine private industry has developed? And yet we wouldn't even know better if we lived in a Riskless society where everyone had the same amount."
Plenty of people throughout history have made discoveries and inventions in abject poverty and contradiction of the social ethos. For example Galileo and Copernicus. No one paid Giordano Bruno for his work on the cosmos which would bridged Copernicus and Galileo - leading to modern satellite television, etc.. - and he was executed by his peers for developing his theories.
People are not entirely consumed by material wealth, that is just one element of human nature which has become engendered in our modern free-market system. We've chosen to cultivated our wordly-half and neglect the spirit-half.
As for CAT and MRI, there is no indication that any of the inventors were incentivized by monetary gain. All of those inventors had their ideas outside of any business owned by them. MRI inventor Dr. Raymond V. Damadian founded FONAR after inventing MRI. Neither contributor to the invention of CAT went into commercial production. The first CAT was built at Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon, London, UK.
More often than not physicians and the like invent things out of concern for the health of their patients or simply out of a deep insight (as in CAT) or even an accident (Penicillin).
Inventions like the Treasure Trolls or Beanie Babies are completely valueless, vacuous luxury. Completely unnecessary and an utter waste of resources. That is the kind of crap the free-market usually makes.
robably the most influential force over human psychology is this: Approval. The reason people come on social networking sites to make boring statements about their life is for self-affirmation. For the response of other individuals. To feel loved and accepted in a group.
People who pursue material wealth at the expense of genuine human relationships often find themselves unhappy as a result. Approval trumps gratuity.
In many respects the incentive to becoming rich is to have the approval of the society. The society, as your statements reflect, approves of wealth as an indication of hard-work or merit and disproves of poverty (even with extreme malice or exile/jail).
The incentive for owning a flashy fast car is not so much getting from A to B, or even getting their faster, it is getting their flashier in order to earn the approval of members of society at large. To appear successful and win friends.
A lot of what humans do is for approval and when you come across someone like Bruno who does things not for approval but for curiosity - at the expense of approval (death in his case). These people who free themselves from their inherited chains, appear as a threat to the society at large, but quite often are liberators of society.
One can't necessarily see the value in the unchained when one is still in chains.
The marketting sector understands this far better than anyone else it often seems. Commercials explicitly appeal to the desire for social approval. A currently airing BMW commercial remarks "Smart is owning the car today everyone else will want tomorrow.". Gillette asks "Where can you find confidence these days?" Guess where...Gillette razors!
Marketers set out to appeal to our basic desires, and in large part our base desire for approval. They barely even tell us anything about the product anymore, they simply promise to satisfy a basic desire. Usually, however, these desires cannot be satisfied by material products. This was traditionally the place of "God". Material products are temporary gratification to a life-long lacking.
Confidence is not to be found in Gillette razors or any other product, it is to be found in a deep philosophical understanding of reality. The only way to throw of the chains of our base desires and inadequacies is to confront them face-to-face and philosophy/religion is supposed to provide that avenue. However, it is up to the individual to follow that path and take the necessary steps, and an individual rarely does so contrary to the society they exist in. Because it requires an individual contradict their own basic desires to even consider it a worthy pursuit.