Gillard's Law of economics at a crass roots level

Frederick Taylor, the American inventor of "scientific management" a century ago, believed workers were dumb and lazy. So the tasks they were required to perform had to be broken down into the simplest of steps and they needed to be closely supervised. The only way to motivate them was by paying piece rates - what today we'd call "performance pay".

I'm sure Julia Gillard would never admit to regarding "hardworking Australians" as dumb and lazy. But she believes school teachers need to be spurred to greater effort by "a bonus payment under a new performance framework".

This is in addition to her plan for rewards of up to $100,000 to the 1000 schools that each year show the most improvement in attendance, literacy and numeracy or, in the case of high schools, year 12 results and the number of students going on to further education, training or work.

Top performers, about 10 per cent of teachers, would receive annual bonus payments of between $5400 and $8100, determined by the achievement of their students, their contribution to the school community and their participation in extracurricular activities.

I doubt the wisdom of this idea. I can understand why company boards feel they need to pay executives extra money to get off their backsides but teachers are meant to be professionals and it's a strange way to treat professionals.

Gillard professes to hold teachers in great respect (do I feel an election coming on?) but I suspect many of them would be amazed to hear it.

It's said the one thing economists agree on is: incentives matter. Trouble is, most economists assume the only incentives that matter are monetary. It wouldn't occur to them that offering teachers money for "contributing to the school community" contains a contradiction.

Teachers contribute to the school community and take part in extra-curricular activities because they want to. I've seen teachers putting extraordinary amounts of their time and effort into preparing kids for a school play, coaching debating teams and so forth. They do it because they regard the activity as worthwhile and of benefit to their kids, but also because they enjoy doing it.

It would be nice to think these intrinsic motivations - doing things for their own sake - could be pepped up by adding money (an extrinsic motivation, where you do things because of external benefits they bring). That's what economists assume can be done. Gillard, clearly, has started thinking like an economist.

But as I discuss in my new book, The Happy Economist (Allen & Unwin), psychologists have discovered it doesn't work that way. Economists have something called Gresham's Law: bad money drives out good. It turns out monetary motives drive out non-monetary motives.

Once you start paying people to do good works the selfish, materialist mentality takes hold and they stop doing those things unless they're paid. People who did good works because it made them feel good about themselves no longer feel that way. Those who contribute to the school community without winning a bonus may be discouraged in their well-doing.

So, should this scheme be implemented, don't expect a surge in School Spirit (as it was called at my school) and don't be surprised if it leads to a decline in teachers' second-mile contributions.

If I'm right, we will have discovered Gillard's Law.

This crass attempt to motivate teachers is symptomatic of the election campaign. More than ever it's been obsessed by money: budget deficits, public debt, wasteful spending. The only major non-monetary issue has been our intense objection to foreigners entering our territory without permission.

Both sides conduct their campaigns on the assumption we're quite selfish and mesmerised by money. For individuals, both sides have rolled out monetary bribes: cash for clunkers, higher family benefits for the parents of teenagers, incentives for age pensioners to do paid work, a more generous paid parental leave scheme. For marginal electorates, a new road or building.

Although it's been hidden by the negativity of this campaign and its obsession with budgeting, the underlying assumption of both sides is that the job of governments is to continually raise our material standard of living because this is what will make us happy.

They seem oblivious to the evidence, recounted in my book, that decades of rising living standards have done nothing to increase people's happiness or "subjective well-being".

It's time politicians reached a more enlightened view of what they could do to increase national happiness. They could start by rethinking their attitude to work.

The economists' model assumes we work only for the money it brings us. The rationale for Work Choices was: give employers more freedom to hire and fire, to call people in to work at times when it best suits the business without penalty payments, and the greater efficiency with which labour is deployed will raise our material standard of living to the benefit of all.

In truth, most people gain a lot of satisfaction from their work. That satisfaction can be diminished if people become less secure in their jobs and in the hours and days of the week they'll be required to work. An understanding of this seems implicit in Labor's opposition to Work Choices and in Tony Abbott's promise not to reintroduce it.

But why not make that understanding explicit? If work is a primary source of our happiness - as the evidence says it is - why not encourage employers to see the provision of secure, satisfying work as an end in itself, a primary reason for the existence of the business?

Why not help employers see that happy workers contribute more to the success of the business (or the school) - as the evidence increasingly says they do?