ABSTRACT
It is clear enough that material incentives are required if the peasants are to work, or at least to work with reasonable competence. However, incentives are needed also to stimulate and direct the work of management and, indeed, also of the party and state officials who issue orders to management. Effective decentralization of decision-making requires criteria related to the material advantage of choosing this or that course of action. Some stimuli can be not material but ‘moral’: the approval of one’s superiors, prospects of promotion, the avoidance of demotion. But some criteria there must be. If incentives are confused, misleading, or non-existent, they must be replaced by detailed orders from above, and this is why the whole question is intimately linked with that of administrative organization. One should add that agriculture, with its endless variety of soil, climate and other circumstances, not only requires decentralized decision-making but gets it in practice in some degree, whatever the rules may be. If the pattern of incentives stimulates irrational behaviour or fails to stimulate desired effort, interference from above must try to correct undesirable actions; but it is impossible to envisage a situation in which a set of clear and enforceable central orders cover every contingency.
