If we're talking about incentives, I don't think we need capitalism to provide sufficient incentives. Humans are weird creatures. We don't care about absolute wealth so much as we care about relative wealth (processing in relative terms is deeply ingrained into the human thought process at every level). I bet a society with no more than 10 different income levels, set based on productivity, would provide sufficient incentive to get nearly everyone to contribute at near peak capacity.
In the US, we have more than 10 different income levels and a basic consumption guarantee of about 20k/year (i.e., even people earning $0/year tend to consume about $20k/year).
Does that mean, on average, the minimum anual pay to get someone off the couch in the U.S. is $20K+? My wife is from Colombia, and she tells me people there are motivated to go work and hustle each day for a few bucks. Of course that's off the books. I wonder how off the books work, if counted, would change those U.S. statistics?
