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we'd love to live in a world where people pursue employment due to interest and/or a drive to make the world/economy better

We do, and in fact it is necessarily so. See "Invisible Hand": (the following is a quote from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand )

the invisible hand was created by the conjunction of the forces of self-interest, competition, and supply and demand, which he noted as being capable of allocating resources in society. This is the founding justification for the Austrian laissez-faire economic philosophy, but is also frequently seen in neoclassical and Keynesian economics. The central disagreement between economic ideologies is, in a sense, a disagreement about how powerful the "invisible hand" is.



That's an emergent property of the system as a whole, not the desire of the typical participant, and it is not based on any motivation for working beyond desire to collect a paycheck.


You're absolutely correct about that. But the end, aggregate effect is indistinguishable from the desired state.




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