Generating income and the ability to acquire goods and services enables us to meet our basic needs, and when enhanced, allows for increasing comfort, choice and freedom. Enhanced earning allows us to provide for others, including our families, and affords us the ability to give to others to help improve their lives as well. Earning capacity is enhanced through effort, education, training, utilization of skills and abilities as well as valuable experience. Understanding our unique abilities, personal qualities, preferences and interests as well as an understanding of market economics, allows us to maximize our productive potential. Productivity and contribution to society enhances self worth, life satisfaction and general contentment.
Take the opportunity to perform paid work as soon as you can. Starting in your youth is a good way to start on the path of understanding value creation, commerce and economic activity. It is also a big step in taking responsibility for yourself as a citizen and productive member of society. Society cannot function without productive activity from its members. If society does not function, it devolves into chaos with increasing discord, hatred, and violence. We certainly see this type of behavior in society now, and all human societies have experienced discord throughout history. There are root causes of these problems, and lack of economic opportunity is a big one. The less opportunity to participate in productive activity with fair, sustainable reimbursement, the more discord there will be in a society. Obviously, certain forms of work and productive activity are more valued and hence better reimbursed. There will always be imbalance in the skills, knowledge and ability of people. However, part of the responsibility of economic leaders and governmental policy makers is assuring that people are not taken advantage of unfairly for the work that they do. There must also be strong incentive to be productive and responsible. This not only includes an expectation of productivity, but also a reasonable and realistic opportunity to increase your value, increase your income, and create better economic conditions for yourself and your family. These opportunities still exist today if you are willing to seek them and invest the time and effort to develop skills and knowledge in yourself that create value to society.
Generation of value, more and better goods or services for less cost, is the essence of the business cycle. Businesses will compete to continually provide the most value for their customers, as long as they do not have a monopoly on some desirable product or service. Governments and regulators are the means to prevent monopolization and unfairness in the marketplace and so serve an important function in maintaining societal balance. Economic policy is critical to fostering the productive potential of a society, but also to maintaining fairness and prevention of abuse of its members. Failure on the part of policy makers results in lack of fairness in the marketplace, decreased upward mobility of citizens, and ultimately loss of hope, increased despair, and increased unrest and uncivil behavior. A society must promote opportunity to its citizens to improve themselves through education, and opportunity for fairly compensated work with paths to higher achievement and economic success. The natural tendency of the business cycle will not be in favor of the labor force without intentional regard for this sense of fairness and upward mobility.
Grasp of these principles can help you succeed in the marketplace and help to improve the state of society by directing your productive efforts toward both value creation and fairness. Businesses and institutions that promote fairness for their employees as well as productive, efficient and effective work output will thrive by virtue of the intrinsic motivation and drive created in their workers and the value and loyalty they create for their customers. Understanding these concepts will help you to see the importance of maximizing your productive effort on behalf of your employer, which will in turn cause you to be valued and to ascend into higher levels of responsibility and remuneration. The experience you gain in employment may even prompt you to start your own venture with potentially more opportunity for decision control, self determination and value creation for yourself and others.