Tag: Reward

Autocracy, Democracy, Risk, & Benefit

Autocracy, Democracy, Risk, & Benefit

Posted on by jabittan
How often do you pick up trash along the street when you are out for a walk? If you are like most people, you probably see trash, think that someone should do something about it, and keep on walking. If you were to pick up the trash you and everyone else would benefit, but you alone pay the price of removing the trash. It may be unpleasant to pick up someone else’s water bottle. It may be expensive to pick up a TV along the side of the road and recycle it. Even though these costs are small, they are real and when a single individual pays the costs, the fact that the benefit extends not just to the individual but to other people doesn’t make up for those individual costs. The fact that others will benefit in some ways makes the individual costs harder to go through with.
 
 
The little example of the cost and benefit of picking up trash extends to larger contexts, like disposing of an autocrat. To explain how democracies have helped people become more peaceful in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker shows how democracies can overcome the individual cost problem that I demonstrated. Pinker writes, “in a dictatorship, the autocrat and his henchmen have a strong incentive to stay in power, but no individual citizen has an incentive to depose him, because the rebel would assume all the risks of the dictator’s reprisals while the benefits of democracy would flow diffusely to everyone in the country.”
 
 
A transition to democracy, away from an autocracy, can be difficult and violent, but once you get there, society can be much more peaceful. Opposing an autocrat, as Pinker notes is dangerous. Everyone may despise the ruler and believe that things would be better without them, but taking action on their own is difficult. The costs of overthrowing the ruler are potentially life or death, making it hard for any single individual to oppose the autocrat.
 
 
But once you get past an autocrat, once enough people have joined together and once a country has democratized, peace can be more achievable. In a democracy, ousting bad leaders is easier and doesn’t have as many individual costs. The benefits are still there for everyone, but the individual costs have been reduced or eliminated, making peaceful transitions more likely. Violence within democracies comes at a cost to the individual, shifting dramatically from the arrangement in an autocracy. Ultimately, the risk and reward imbalance that individuals face is part of what helps keep autocrats in power, just as it keeps trash along the side of the road.

Giving and Success

Posted on by jabittan
Bob Berg wrote the book The Go Giver as a story that opens up the importance of relationships and having a positive focus while trying to reach our goals and find the level of success that we desire.  Berg focuses his story on business and sales, but what he writes can be applied to many areas of our life, including areas outside of business.  One of the cornerstones to Berg’s book is a focus on giving and providing value for others that helps one build, in an almost oblique path, toward the success  they want to see.  In one section a character in Berg’s book states, “You can’t go in two directions at once.  Trying to be successful with making  money as your goal is like trying to travel a superhighway at seventy miles an hour with your eyes glued to the rearview mirror.”  Through this quote, Berg is addressing the idea that our goals are not always best served by simply diving in one direction after one idea.

 

For Berg, being a complete human being and thinking of others is of greater importance than anything else, especially when it comes to business. He argues throughout the book that those who reach the greatest level of financial success don’t just wake up and think how can I become super wealthy? Instead, they wake up thinking about how they can solve problems for others and provide greater value for others. By focusing outside of themselves they find solutions to help people, and they do so with the idea of assisting others and doing things that benefit them first, knowing that they will be able to find rewards afterwards.  Often times we seem to think it is impure to want to assist others for our own personal gain. I think, and I suspect that Berg would agree, it is ok if we have a motive related to ourselves in helping others. If we decide to spend the time clearing trash from a street because we don’t want to see it and we know that others will appreciate it, we are still doing a good thing for the community even if we were primarily motivated by our own gain in the end. Where Berg would say this mindset needs to end is when we are setting something up that benefits us far more than it benefits others.  Taking actions and presenting them as though they help all when truly they only marginally benefit anyone other than yourself misses the point, especially if you create an atmosphere around yourself in which your act as though your behaviors truly assist everyone.

 

Ultimately, the idea Berg shares in The Go Giver is the idea that we can drive toward huge successes and still be good people if we focus more on providing value to those around us as opposed to looking at the world for the value it can provide to us. When we focus first and foremost on others and helping them, we find ways in which we can grow, and we build relationships that will return something positive to us.  Through these relationships, and through an idea of giving, we find a path toward success that is well rounded and more enjoyable.