Can iGoogle allow mere mortals to parent global corporations? A question from the Motherlode.

The New York Times Magazine's parenting blog has a piece on why rewarding and punishing children doesn't teach them to be good people in the long run. Referencing Alfie Kohn, it says, "research shows that the more you reward people, the less interest they come to have in whatever they had to do to get the reward. The more you offer extrinsic motivators, the more intrinsic motivation tends to decline."

So first off, of course, we have to wonder about capitalism. We ask, "Have we just given up on adults becoming good people?" And then we get sick of asking the same depressing questions about the dehumanization of capitalism, and we ponder instead the recent shift to a carrot and stick model of government.

An NGO wants private companies and nonprofits to build start-ups in Africa; they'll incentivize it. A local government wants developers to stop putting gates around neighborhoods; they'll punish it (assume a nexus). Like bribing children, this approach works wonders. But is there really no way to make companies, organizations, and agencies learn to do the right thing on their own?

It does seem that the success of shareholder accountability and grantee evaluatory approaches have paled in comparison, at least since the tables the players sit at have reached orbitable circumferences.

I like to believe that the information revolution's greatest gift will be to deliver local transparency to a world dependent on global accountability, such that the intervals of reward and punishment become infinitesimally small, turning its extrinsic nature intrinsic. Suddenly, the fairy tale goes, groups start being good because they want to.

Psychologically, I'm not sure this is really what happens, but it seems a pretty mathematical model, doesn't it?

The interesting bit of this, I think, is to try to understand how individuals the world over can possibly review sufficient amounts of data to allow for this global accountability, thereby, essentially, eliminating the middle man, or at least shrinking him. I'd always assumed it wasn't possible, but if you combine the upcoming interfaces of iGoogle (or, surprisingly, the present interfaces of Windows Live) and the trainable and socially networked Digging processes with humankind's Matrix-scrolling ability, it seems both potentially feasible and potentially very, very good.