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Date: | Fri Mar 31 17:18:22 2006 |
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===================== HES POSTING =====================
In reply to Craufurd Goodwin's question on the shift in the meaning
of the term "incentives." I know he said to sent it to a specific
address, but maybe the list is interested in the question too.
Craufurd: Great question. I don't have anything like a full answer,
but one piece might be this.
My study of Hayek and some of the turn of the century literature on
the possibility and prospects for socialism seem to show that what
modern economists call "incentives" were referred to as motivation,
as a psychological question, or sometimes even as an ethical
question back then. You can see this in Hayek's 1935 essays in his
edited work COLLECTIVIST ECONOMIC PLANNING. I think that motivation
was studied in business schools by industrial psychologists or
efficiency experts. People promoting the Taylor system and all that.
Then sometime in the 1960s (I don't know the literature very well
here so can't give you the watershed articles) economists started
thinking that these questions of motivation in fact were fair game.
It went hand in hand with the development of information theory.
What this crude history suggests is that there never was a change
in the meaning of incentive, or at least not a point-at-able
shift in which the word lost one meaning as it added the other.
Rather, there was one meaning (the old one having to do with the
passions). Then another concept not called by the term "incentives"
but rather by terms like "motivation" or "effort" grew up. Then this
new concept was dubbed "incentives" sometime pretty recently.
I have no idea how the first meaning died out.
How does that sound as a first cut? Bruce
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