Good Entropy

Socialism and Human Nature. Critics of socialism claim that because… | by Ben Burgis | Arc Digital

This certainly sounds like Marx sees the butcher, the brewer, and the baker — or, rather, the self-managed workers at the collectivized slaughterhouses, breweries, and bakeries of the socialist future — being motivated in the “duration and intensity” of their work by the hope of material rewards. Of course, he envisioned this changing as socialism evolved into its next phase, but this too is easily misunderstood by those who are reading the line quoted by Pinker out of context.

This “next phase stuff” is carrying too much weight. 

I would argue that we can have socialism and incentives. It’s unlikely that workers in a democratic economy would feel the need to incentivize anyone by paying them 287 times what others were paid — the average pay differential between workers and CEOs last year in the United States — but this doesn’t mean they’d settle on completely flat pay scales either. If anything, they might reverse some of the inequalities we’re accustomed to under capitalism.

But the cart is in front of the horse. You pay for what is produced, not pay and reap all that is produced. This is in the vein of central economic planning as talked about by Hayek.