There's a video I want you to see. Actually there are two or three, at least. If you don't have the time right now, save them for later but if you can, watch the first one now.
Everything that mainstream economists base their assumptions on is wrong. Higher pay does not necessarily lead to better performance. In other words, the financial wizards on Wall Street could be replaced by others making a fraction of the money for better results, including, possibly, not trashing the world economy.
The most incredible stuff happens when money is no longer an issue and people are free to, for lack of a better word, play. Think of all the wonderful things we have because people donated their work, ingenuity, talent, and creativity to make Linux, Wikipedia, this site, and so much more.
Actually, if you think about the amount of financially unrewarded intellectual effort expended just on and for this site, it is mind-boggling. I have a feeling that those who share their effort in this way have more that unites them than divides them.
We have long heard that the cut-off point in the correlation between increasing wealth and increasing happiness is around ten thousand dollars per year. If you divide world population by world GDP, we are not far from achieving an average global per capita GDP in that range. If we actually redistributed world wealth evenly, money would no longer be an issue for anyone, and everyone would we free to really follow their drives and their empathy.
A fantasy? Sure. But as Murphy says: "When working toward the solution of a problem, it always helps if you know the answer."
These videos are important enough, in my truly humble opinion, if we truly appreciate the implications, to be attached to the list of things coming together to avert catastrophe in my previous diary.