The False Rationale For more than two centuries, we have absorbed, as a society and as individuals, some false ideas about our relationship to work. It is a long-accepted tenet of economics, buttressed by some theories from psychology, that if you want to get someone―an employee, a student, a government official, your own child―to do something, you have to make it worth his or her while. People do things for incentives, for rewards, for money. You can see this view operating in the "carrot and stick" approach that has dominated efforts to solve the world's recent financial crisis. To prevent a financial meltdown from happening again, people argued, we needed to replace the "dumb" incentives that led to it with "smarter" ones. We had to get incentives right. Nothing else really mattered. This idea animated the inventor of the free market, Adam Smith. In The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, he wrote that: It is in the inherent interest of ...