What drives us in a 10x world?
Chapter 5
Radically Normal, part 5 of 7 · Series overview · Dieses Kapitel auf Deutsch
As lovely and comfortable as the idea of a fairer world may sound to some, many questions remain. The most important one, in my view: what does it do to the incentives that drive people to do things, or not to do them? Because without a doubt, it’s the sum of individual effort that drives our species forward.
So the concern is legitimate that a 10x world might destroy the incentives of those who contribute the most to that progress. The people typically named here are entrepreneurs, who take on personal risk to bring about innovation and extraordinary gains in performance.
But let me counter right away: the claim that extraordinary financial incentives automatically produce extraordinary innovation and productivity is by no means as clear-cut as it is often portrayed. Studies suggest that differences in the pay of CEOs are only weakly explained by improvements in company performance – high executive pay mostly just reflects a strong bargaining position.
In public debate, reward and incentive are often treated as the variable factors, while risk is treated as a kind of constant.
But that isn’t true: risk differs from person to person. People feel losses twice as strongly as gains of the same size. So when risk falls, the willingness to step into the unknown rises – even when the reward turns out smaller.
This discrepancy also shows up in the end result. In the U.S., the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay has risen from 31:1 in 1978 to 281:1 in 2024. Over that period, CEO pay rose by more than 1,000% and productivity by 80% – but worker pay rose by just 26%. The question is fair: when compensation at the very top has multiplied, productivity couldn’t keep pace, and workers’ wages least of all – what exactly are we rewarding?
But for many people, founding or investing means high risk. Someone living at subsistence level literally puts their existence on the line with a venture. Successful founders like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos had a safety net and would have led comfortable lives even if their first projects had genuinely failed. The myth of the entrepreneur who risks everything is therefore often overblown. I know this from my own experience too: taking professional risks has always come fairly easily to me, because my family background gives me relative material security.
Shouldn’t we promote innovation less by lavishly rewarding the risk-taking of a few, and more by lowering that risk for the many? If the worst that can happen to you when you fail is a life at an acceptable standard of living, wouldn’t you be more willing to take a risk? That is exactly what a 10x distribution would make possible.
Reality shows we’d be right to focus less on a handful of star performers. Many groundbreaking innovations of recent decades – microchips, the internet, GPS, mRNA vaccines – were made possible by state funding, for which the economist Mariana Mazzucato coined the term the entrepreneurial state. Organizations like DARPA or the NIH invest deliberately in projects with uncertain outcomes, because spreading the bets widely eventually produces the big breakthroughs. How many entrepreneurs could celebrate their successes only because the taxpayer had laid the groundwork first?
But state funding is not the only example. Crowdfunding, too, has long shown that many small contributions can enable great innovation – whether in the video-game industry or among hardware startups. Why shouldn’t this principle carry over to the venture-capital space as well? If more people had financial leeway, they could take small risks and provide capital together. Fund managers would still differentiate themselves through performance, but the risk would be spread across many shoulders.
I have respect for the changes a new incentive system brings. But there are several stabilizing factors suggesting that people would remain productive and innovative even in a 10x world:
1. Relative differences remain – people compare themselves relatively rather than absolutely. The urge to compare yourself with unreachable billionaires would fall away, but differentiation within the 10x society would remain possible. Studies also show that the additional gain in quality of life shrinks with every additional euro – even if it remains contested whether there is an absolute satiation level.
2. Intrinsic motivation – many people are driven by self-efficacy, meaning, and the desire to learn something. Millions volunteer, invest time and money in clubs and associations, or keep working even after a lottery win. Artificial intelligence could reinforce this trend further by taking over monotonous tasks and focusing people on creative or social work.
3. Alternative reward systems – recognition, prestige, or playful elements (“gamification”) already motivate people today. Open-source communities like Linux and Wikipedia, and science itself, show that honor, recognition, and the feeling of winning a game can drive people – often more strongly than money. In a society where basic needs are secured, these intangible factors should matter more.
Now I’ve written a lot about how people might be motivated to peak performance. But what about those who may never want to, or be able to, deliver peak performance? Won’t these people grow lazy once they’re no longer threatened with starvation?
The experiments with unconditional basic income so far are encouraging – even if they still need more research over longer time horizons. The findings suggest that working hours barely decrease, while mental health improves. And those who work a little less often use the freed-up time for further education or to start a business or other projects. It is not basic income that destroys motivation, but fear. Security gives people the freedom to dare.
In sum, I am optimistic that a 10x society would not stifle innovation but, at best, multiply it. Through lower risk, a stronger focus on intrinsic motivation and alternative reward systems, and a basic income for all, a robust new innovation ecosystem could emerge – one that rests on the shoulders of many rather than on a billionaire lottery.
In the next chapter, we will explore how we might move toward such a utopia. The good news: there are plenty of approaches — some already tried, some only proposed.