When the leaders of the new economy say they're not in it for the money, that's not just b

ad for business. It's bad for everyone.

Some of the pioneers of the new economy are saying very strange things. These moguls of modern-day capitalism solemnly deny that they are engaged in business for the purpose of making money. What's going on here？ Adam Smith, the founding father of capitalism, presumed that people engage in commercial activity for the purpose of economic gain. Have capitalism's most successful practitioners evolved beyond such base intentions？ Are we to infer that the world's largest wealth-creation scheme is being driven largely by nonprofit motives？

Not really. New-economy tycoons still like to make money. They simply want to make clear that they are also driven by higher motives. And this trend in pursuit of higher things is spreading through the business world. A recent editorial in the Red Herring posited business as an expression of the highest human capacities: "Money comes to those who do it for love." Such talk has become so common that we have to remind ourselves that it is a fairly recent innovation. You probably don't have the time to review the immense sociological literature on the attitudes of workers in the early and middle part of the 20th century. A single book, Studs Terkel's Working, should be enough to make the point, or perhaps just a brief talk with some old guys about their work philosophy. You won't hear a lot of mush about saving the world or finding nirvana in the workplace. To these people, today's rhetoric about meaning in the workplace must sound absurd.

The attempt to find higher purpose and meaning in work is likely to fail. In the few cases where it does not, it will probably fall short of our expectations. Modem technological capitalism, for all its vitality and efficiency, cannot supply on its own a meaning to life. This isn't just a philosophical matter. When we seek meaning in work at the expense of the institutions society has built specifically to contain meaning—the arts, our families, the church and so on—we risk a great deal. We may not merely disappoint ourselves; we could disrupt the very prosperity the free market has provided us.

The traditional capitalist view is that people ______.

A．engage in commercial activity for the purpose of economic gain

B．are driven largely by non-profit motives

C．do the things that they do for love

D．tend to search for meaning in their lives