Mostly because no other country managed to first plunge the country into such abject poverty by disastrous ideologically-driven policies. See, for instance, https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28370/w28370.pdf.

I'm aware of some of the educational literature on motivation, but it's not relevant because we typically don't pay students for good grades.

If instead you try to measure the labor supply elasticity, you get broadly positive numbers, including at high income levels (see, for instance, https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/112th-congress-2011-2012/workingpaper/10-25-2012-recentresearchonlaborsupplyelasticities.pdf, though the estimates are broad enough to be consistent with a lack of elasticity in some cases).

Futhermore, if people fail to stay in the job they have, the reason they work on the next thing is almost entirely because of who they go to work with. And even among highly-paid workers (e.g. tech workers), salary and benefits are extremely highly rated (e.g. https://resources.workable.com/stories-and-insights/invest-in-your-tech-workers-or-theyll-move-on-survey--note that despite not being an academic paper, the methodology is quite similar to Bassett-Jones & Lloyd: it's just a survey asking people what's important to them).

So I don't think the evidence you've presented is nearly compelling enough. In particular, that 4x is anywhere close to maximizing the labor supply curve (and could be accomplished without economic devastation) is poorly supported.