Do you agree that Adam Smith was wrong in saying that we work for money?

Please answers the following questions after reading the article, without using any sources

 Do you agree that Adam Smith was wrong in saying that we work for money?
 is it wrong to work for money?
 our drive for money come from our nature or nurtured through our culture?
 who is likely to be bored with life: hard working or idle person? why?
 if you do not find a job you like, how can you like what you have?

Rethinking of work
By BARRY SCHWARTZAUG. 28, 2015
HOW satisfied are we with our jobs?
Gallup regularly polls workers around the world to find out. Its survey last year found that almost 90
percent of workers were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Think
about that: Nine out of 10 workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don’t really want to
do in places they don’t particularly want to be.
Why? One possibility is that it’s just human nature to dislike work. This was the view of Adam Smith,
the father of industrial capitalism, who felt that people were naturally lazy and would work only for
pay. “It is the interest of every man,” he wrote in 1776 in “The Wealth of Nations,” “to live as much at
his ease as he can.”
This idea has been enormously influential. About a century later, it helped shape the scientific
management movement, which created systems of manufacture that minimized the need for skill
and close attention — things that lazy, pay-driven workers could not be expected to have.
Today, in factories, offices and other workplaces, the details may be different but the overall situation
is the same: Work is structured on the assumption that we do it only because we have to. The call
center employee is monitored to ensure that he ends each call quickly. The office worker’s
keystrokes are overseen to guarantee productivity.
I think that this cynical and pessimistic approach to work is entirely backward. It is making us
dissatisfied with our jobs — and it is also making us worse at them. For our sakes, and for the sakes
of those who employ us, things need to change.
To start with, I don’t think most people recognize themselves in Adam Smith’s description of wage-
driven idlers. Of course, we care about our wages, and we wouldn’t work without them. But we care
about more than money. We want work that is challenging and engaging, that enables us to exercise
some discretion and control over what we do, and that provides us opportunities to learn and grow.
We want to work with colleagues we respect and with supervisors who respect us. Most of all, we

want work that is meaningful — that makes a difference to other people and thus ennobles us in at
least some small way.
We want these things so much that we may even be willing to take home a thinner pay envelope to
get them. Lawyers leave white-shoe firms to work with the underclass and underserved. Doctors
abandon cushy practices to work in clinics that serve poorer areas. Wall Street analysts move to
Washington to work as economic advisers in government.
You might object that those are examples of professionals — people who have the financial security
to care about more than just their paychecks and the privilege of working in fields in which it is
possible to find meaning and personal satisfaction. What about the janitor? The phone solicitor? The
hairdresser? The fast-food worker?
I submit that they, too, are looking for something more than wages. About 15 years ago, the Yale
organizational behavior professor Amy Wrzesniewski and colleagues studied custodians in a major
academic hospital. Though the custodians’ official job duties never even mentioned other human
beings, many of them viewed their work as including doing whatever they could to comfort patients
and their families and to assist the professional staff members with patient care. They would joke
with patients, calm them down so that nurses could insert IVs, even dance for them. They would
help family members of patients find their way around the hospital.

The custodians received no financial compensation for this “extra” work. But this aspect of the job,
they said, was what got them out of bed every morning. “I enjoy entertaining the patients,” said one.
“That’s what I enjoy the most.”
Similarly, a few years ago the Wharton management professor Adam Grantstudied a group of
college students who worked as phone solicitors, calling alumni to ask for contributions to their
university. As an experiment, Professor Grant arranged for a recent graduate who had attended the
university on a scholarship funded by such solicitation efforts to meet the students. The graduate
gave a short talk about how the scholarship had affected his life and how grateful he was for their
solicitation efforts.
Professor Grant found that the money that the students raised increased 171 percent afterward.
Again, there was no added compensation for the harder work — just a deeper sense of purpose.
These are just two examples from a literature of cases demonstrating that when given the chance to
make their work meaningful and engaging, employees jump at it, even if it means that they have to
work harder. Such cases should serve to remind us there is a human cost to routinizing and
depersonalizing work. Too often, instead of being able to take pride in what they do, and derive
satisfaction from doing it well, workers have little to show for their efforts aside from their pay.
But perhaps there is an upside to monotonous, routinized work. Is it possible that what we lose in
work satisfaction, we gain in efficiency?
This, again, is what Adam Smith thought. In his famous example of the pin factory, he extolled the
virtues of the division of labor: “One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a

fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head.” Our work experience might be
poorer, but we — or at least our bosses — would be richer.
Yet more than 200 years later, there is still little evidence of this satisfaction-efficiency trade-off. In
fact, most evidence points in the opposite direction. In his 1998 book, “The Human Equation,” which
reviewed numerous studies across dozens of different industries, the Stanford organizational
behavior professor Jeffrey Pfeffer found that workplaces that offered employees work that was
challenging, engaging and meaningful, and over which they had some discretion, were more
profitable than workplaces that treated employees as cogs in a production machine.
For example, he cited a study of 136 companies across many different industries that had initial
public offerings in 1988. It found that companies that placed a high value on human resources were
almost 20 percent more likely to survive for at least five years than those that did not. Similar
differences in success were found in studies that compared the management practices of steel mills.
And a study of United States apparel manufacturers found that sales growth was more than 50
percent higher in companies with enlightened management practices than in those that did things
the old-fashioned way.
The findings were similar in studies of semiconductor manufacturing, oil refining and various service
industries. And comparable findings were documented more recently by the Harvard Business
School professor Michael Beer in his 2009 book “High Commitment High Performance.”
You get the distinct impression that if you’re trying to decide where to make an investment, the best
place to look is those annual lists of the 100 best places to work. When employees have work that
they want to do, they are happier. And when they are happier, their work is better, as is the
company’s bottom line.
This is admittedly not news. But that only raises a deeper question: In the face of longstanding
evidence that routinization and an overemphasis on pay lead to worse performance in the
workplace, why have we continued to tolerate and even embrace that approach to work?
CreditDavid Jien
The answer, I think, is that the ideas of Adam Smith have become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy:
They gave rise to a world of work in which his gloomy assumptions about human beings became
true. When you take all opportunities for meaning and engagement out of the work that people do,
why would they work, except for the wage? What Smith and his descendants failed to realize is that
rather than exploiting a fact about human nature, they were creating a fact about human nature.
The transformation I have in mind goes something like this: You enter an occupation with a variety of
aspirations aside from receiving your pay. But then you discover that your work is structured so that
most of those aspirations will be unmet. Maybe you’re a call center employee who wants to help
customers solve their problems — but you find out that all that matters is how quickly you terminate
each call. Or you’re a teacher who wants to educate kids — but you discover that only their test
scores matter. Or you’re a corporate lawyer who wants to serve his client with care and
professionalism — but you learn that racking up billable hours is all that really counts.