# People want to be loved and be lovely [[Adam SmithThe type of growth discussed by \[\[Adam Smith]]) is growth that happens via specialization and trade. See [[Comparative advantage model]].]] is a smart guy (see [[The Theory of Moral Sentiments]]). The more powerful assertion (and perhaps this should be in the note title) is that this is actually the core human motivation and that every other motivation (fame, power, money) is some projection of this core motivation into a different space. The widely-adopted fame, power, money framework runs into many [[Epicycles]]: what about stability? What about intrinsic motivation? What about the fact that many people seem to treat each of those three as an instrumental goal <[[Instrumental vs Intrinsic goals]]> that they can then convert into one of the others? Investors parlay money into fame or power; actors parlay fame into money and power; politicians parlay power into money and fame. You could perhaps argue that the F/P/M thing that someone is motivated by over the course of their life shifts or that they were always *really* seeking one but saw an easier way to it through the other. The biggest flaw in the F/P/M framework is that it doesn’t account for the fact that most people’s desires for each of those things has dramatically diminishing marginal utility beyond which additional F/P/M just becomes a point in a game or people go all in on intrinsic motivations and stability. [[People want to be able to live where they want and have a family]]. It also doesn’t account for the fact that people very much treat fame and power as vectors, not scalars (money is, almost by definition, a scalar). People can be extremely famous in one corner of the world (say, business) but desperately want to be more well known in another (say, the arts) — you could say that they “are fame motivated” but that wouldn’t actually predict their behavior. Similarly, many academics don’t actually care about power outside their particular field — they’re content to be the biggest fish in a non-global pond. Are they power motivated? Yes, but again that wouldn’t predict their behavior. Instead, I would suggest that we should ask: 1. Who does this person want to be loved by? 2. What do those people find lovely in another person? 3. What does this person find lovely in themselves? 4. How much does this person weight #1 vs #3? 5. What form does this person want the love to be in? (Here “love” is a very [[Nebulous]] mushy term that captures some combination of “respect” “adoration” “positive attention” that varies for each person.) In a large part these questions boil down to which game is this person playing? [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]. Noting the game that people are playing and why they are playing it is incredibly predictive of their behavior. It also suggests more fine-grained interventions than “help them get M/F/P”: you can help them get points in the game they’re playing, or create an alternate game that will more effectively get them love from the people they want it from and feel more lovely. It’s worth noting that like many “unified theories” this one could be operationally useless. I’ll try to poke that hard because my suspicion is that it is operationally very useful — and more so than the money/fame/power framework. One could argue that the real unifying theory is some hand wavy group-selection mediated thing around passing on genes. But *that* I think is operationally not very useful. I think this theory does well with money, fame, intrinsic motivations, and stability but struggles a bit with power. It might be that power is simply what people find lovely in themselves or an instrumental goal to achieve whatever the person finds intrinsically lovely. It’s hard to know the inner mind of people who seem to seek power intrinsically, but my hunch is that they do have at least a vague reason for it, if only to never be hurt again. [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/People+want+to+be+loved+and+be+lovely) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/People+want+to+be+loved+and+be+lovely)