In Schwartz’s ideal world, every worker would feel important and listened to, and would feel that they are doing meaningful work that betters the lives of others. But getting to that point would require a series of radical revisions to the way we think about work and consumption. I recently talked to Schwartz about what work would be like if those revisions were to take hold, as well as some limitations of his ideas. The interview that follows has been edited and condensed for the sake of clarity.

Joe Pinsker: In your book, you argue that human nature really isn't natural at all, that in any given era, people have certain beliefs about what motivates humans, and those beliefs go on to shape the way everything in society is designed. Can you lay out what the assumptions about human nature are that are built into the labor economy and where they came from?

Barry Schwartz: Sure. I’ll start with Adam Smith, just because he’s sort of the father of modern industrial capitalism in a way, and the father of economics. He had this view that people are lazy, that they’d rather be doing nothing than doing something, so if you want to get them to work you have to make it worth their while. The way you made it worth their while was by paying them. He’s certainly not as reductive about human beings as what I just said would imply. But he certainly has this view, and he talks about the virtues of division of labor.

Under this model, it doesn’t matter if people dislike the work they do or if they’re doing the same operation over and over again, a thousand times a day, because they wouldn’t like whatever they were doing. So we have a 250-year history of constructing workplaces on the assumption that people are only doing work for the pay.

Pinsker: How does this assumption affect the way we think about work?

Schwartz: If it’s false that the only reason that people work is for pay, then these factories won’t work—you won’t get people to work in them. When people work in institutions like the factory, they become the very creatures that the factory was designed on the assumption they already were. The factory can change people, and Smith even says this in The Wealth of Nations: People who do this type of repetitive work become as stupid as is possible for a human creature to become. But the key word is “become.” They don’t start out that way, they become that way. I’m trying to suggest in the book that, in general, our theories about human nature are much more inventions about who people are, than they are discoveries of what people are.

Pinsker: So if that’s the way that things stand now, what would you rather see instead?

Schwartz: When it comes to working “just for pay,” there’s us and there’s them. There’s the white-collar workers, the professionals, the knowledge class, and they want engagement, meaning, the opportunity to learn and grow, and autonomy. They don’t work just for pay. And then there’s everybody else, and everybody else is just about the paycheck.