Here’s Adam Curtis in the Guardian, explaining the through-line of his latest (very good) film series.

It shows us the moment — and a named individual in James Buchanan — when modern work as we know it was born.

It is also relevant to a comment left at this website professing that people want “to contribute to society in some positive way. Unfortunately, at some point it was decided that wage slavery was the best way to harness that.”

[The British Prime Minister of 1979-1990, Margaret Thatcher,] believed that if you liberated people from state control they would become better and more confident. But to do this, she turned to radical rightwing economic thinkers – some of whom were very odd. About 15 years ago, I went to see a US economist called James Buchanan. I had to drive for hours deep into the mountains of Virginia to his farm. He told me that you couldn’t trust anyone in any position of power. Everyone, he insisted, is driven by self-interest.

He called this “public choice theory,” and it had an enormous effect on the advisers around Thatcher. It explained to them why all the bureaucrats that ran Britain were so useless. The economists invented a system called New Public Management (NPM) to control them. NPM said it was dangerous to leave people to motivate themselves through fuzzy notions such as “doing good.” Instead, you created systems that monitored everyone through targets and incentives. Constantly watching and rewarding or punishing. It was the birth of modern HR.

There is a very good moment that was captured on a documentary about London Zoo in 1993 made by Molly Dineen. The zoo had brought in a new HR expert who explains to the mild-mannered zookeepers how incentives and targets work. “Once you do that,” he says, “you’ve got them in the Grinder.”