英语PK台 第258期:TED头脑风暴:被制造的工作与被设计的人性

 　　Section 1:

　　Today I'm going to talk about work. And the question I want to ask and answer is this: "Why do we work?" Why do we drag ourselves out of bed every morning instead of living our lives just filled with bouncing from one TED-like adventure to another?
　　Now, I know of course, we have to make a living so we wouldn't work if we didn't get paid, but that's not why we do what we do. And in general, I think we think that material rewards are a pretty bad reason for doing the work that we do. When we say of somebody that he's "in it for the money," we are not just being descriptive.
　　Now, I think this is totally obvious, but the very obviousness of it raises what is for me an incredibly profound question. Why, if this is so obvious, why is it that for the overwhelming majority of people on the planet, the work they do has none of the characteristics that get us up and out of bed and off to the office every morning? How is it that we allow the majority of people on the planet to do work that is monotonous 1, meaningless and soul-deadening? Why is it that as capitalism 2 developed, it created a mode of production, of goods and services, in which all the nonmaterial satisfactions that might come from work were eliminated? Workers who do this kind of work, whether they do it in factories, in call centers, or in fulfillment warehouses 3, do it for pay. There is certainly no other earthly reason to do what they do except for pay.
　　Vocabulary：
　　Descriptive, monotonous, soul-deadening, eliminate, no earthly reason
　　Section 2:
　　So the question is, "Why?" And here's the answer: the answer is technology. I'm talking about the technology of ideas. In addition to creating things, science creates ideas. Science creates ways of understanding. And in the social sciences, the ways of understanding that get created are ways of understanding ourselves. And they have an enormous influence on how we think, what we aspire 4 to, and how we act.
　　The father -- one of the fathers of the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith -- was convinced that human beings were by their very natures lazy, and wouldn't do anything unless you made it worth their while, and the way you made it worth their while was by incentivizing, by giving them rewards. That was the only reason anyone ever did anything. So we created a factory system consistent with that false view of human nature.
　　Whether he intended it or not, what Adam Smith was telling us there, is that the very shape of the institution within which people work creates people who are fitted to the demands of that institution and deprives people of the opportunity to derive 5 the kinds of satisfactions from their work that we take for granted. The distinguished 6 anthropologist 7, Clifford Geertz, said, years ago, that human nature is much more created than it is discovered. We design human nature by designing the institutions within which people live and work.
　　And so you people -- pretty much the closest I ever get to being with masters of the universe -- you people should be asking yourself a question, as you go back home to run your organizations. Just what kind of human nature do you want to help design? Thank you.
　　Vocabulary：
　　Aspire to, Incentivize, consistent with, deprive of, derive from