Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life • Hacker News Board

Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life

#321

Post by anovikov » Tue, Jun 15, 2021, 2:12 PM UTC

I think trust in general is overrated as a concept. Even after 20 years of working in software business, it is shocking to me how gullible many Westerners are because they are ready to trust people by default. No surprise they are getting duped more often than not. In fact, i believe decline of trust is mainly due to globalisation: when Westerners get to meet and work with people from low-trust countries, their trust level naturally decreases.

I would go on to say is that levels of trust, for the mutual economic and social benefit, need to be dramatically decreased across the board. No credit card chargebacks, no ACH, use of escrow for all non-trivial transactions, improved methods for identity verification, and overall teaching people that they should not try to "build reputation" or rely too much on someone's reputation: reputation is just a metric, and every metric is a hackable metric. Relying on it only makes you a victim of someone who is better at gaming the system.

Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life

#322

Post by Sharlin » Tue, Jun 15, 2021, 2:12 PM UTC

jacob2484 wrote: post #148

jfrunyon wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The immigrants who come to the US are, by and large, already relatively wealthy. Especially if they come here with the capital to start a small business, or to send their children to medical school.

Can you provide stats to back this up? Many come here as refugees or cross the border illegally from very poor countries.

Are those the immigrants whose kids have a good chance of becoming doctors and lawyers?

Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life

#323

Post by ajsnigrutin » Tue, Jun 15, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

As I have said many times before... I blame the government.

I have a small company, dealing with high tech stuff, and yeah...

If i got thaxed at the same rate as eg. Amazon is, i'd be totally rich... like really really reach... currently i make about as much as an engineer in a 'better' startup here.

We have large companies that don't pay taxes at all, and owe the government millions, and nothing... we hear about them on the news, there are talks... If I don't pay taxes one month, I get a reminder, the next day, they take away their money from my bank account, and if they can't, they leave my accounts closed, so I can't do business.

Covid help? Good luck.

...

There are many many cases, where hard workers and small business owners (i'm talking about mom-and-pop businesses, not 100+ people) would have a better life, if they were treated the same as facebook/amazon/... are. But the governments let the "big players" get away with murder, and then bother the small businesses, because their automatic hand sanitizer dispenser has a too-small label with sanitizer specifications/contents, even though the label was literally ripped off the hand-pump bottle, which would be ok if it was still on the bottle instead of the automatic one.

Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life

#324

Post by artificialLimbs » Tue, Jun 15, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #210

themihai wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> What would you tell this to someone who wasn't born into wealth or opportunity? You're pretty much screwed, don't bother? I think it's better to be realistic about your chances and it may help to drive the political discourse into the right direction as well. After all this is a political issue. In the end as others have said here it's more important to have a balanced, happy life and good health than to chase the…

> After all this is a political issue. It's really not. Hard work does lead to a better life. It's fulfilling in its own right, at least for me. That's why I go to the gym and push myself regularly. If I loaf around all day, I don't feel well. I find meaning and satisfaction from being productive or putting in effort. It's not only societal but biological. Things are harder for some people, sure. But for children, th…

Taking personal responsibility for my life has completely revolutionized it, even being > 40 years of age. The idea of working as hard as one can and as much as possible is game changing. Optimizing for effort and learning and health (mental/physical/emotional) creates meaning in one's life and enables an entirely different mindset from 'the normal drudgery' that I see so much of on my social feeds.

Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life

#325

Post by oivey » Tue, Jun 15, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #294

caf wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working as a plumber, an electrician, or a carpenter can be quite lucrative, and they are certainly things that society needs. I hear this kind of thing, but I have to say it is less than convincing when most of the people saying it don't seem to be sending their kids to trade school.

Well, my logic is: if you go to university (ideally STEM) and have a modicum of practical skills, how hard really is it to become a plumber later in life? I'd imagine plumbing studies are shorter, some stuff you can probably transfer over from your university studies and you can probably apprentice reasonably easily somewhere.

Working with your hands is a practical skill that takes significant time and effort to become good at. I, personally, am terrible at it. I am highly educated, though. There are what, maybe 2.5 school years of degree related work in a STEM degree? That’s pretty comparable to an apprenticeship.

Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life

#326

Post by BingoAhoy » Tue, Jun 15, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

esens wrote: post #231

CraneWorm wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Post-scarcity cannot come fast enough; the (external) need to work hard should just die in a fire.

It never actually seems to come though. I wouldn't count on it. I believe that getting something for nothing is usually not sustainable. Just because you serve no purpose to those giving the things away for free. Something will give (some type of resource constraint will arise, even if it is just competitive/alternatives) and it will fail if you are not providing value.

It's only been, what a few hundred years since the industrial revolution began? We haven't given it enough time for the innovators to figure out how to manufacture the needs of society in an overflowing plentiful way that's also automated & low effort. Some things never will be of course.

Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life

#327

Post by cascom » Tue, Jun 15, 2021, 2:14 PM UTC

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #69

wishigotitfree wrote: post #25

Starting conditions (where one was born, levels of wealth and opportunity there, one's parents' education and jobs) are shockingly predictive about an individual's future. Hard work leading to social mobility has always been the exception, not the rule. Most will not beat the odds since if they did, those wouldn't BE the odds. A lot of us are just so deluded by survivorship bias borne of listening only to success sto…

How much social mobility we talking? Statistically nobody goes from trailer park to billionare by working hard. You have very, very, good odds of doing better than your parents if you manage to get to age 25 without incurring a felony record, addiction to something that will likely kill you or too many child support payments. edit: I'm only talking about the US

I think this is the essential question.

My hypothesis is that working hard can move you a few deciles on the income ladder (and position your children to start from higher up the ladder than yourself).

I also think though that people misestimate the slope of the income curve at various points, and that it becomes exponentially harder to get up the curve in the top quartile (I.e. going from a ~$30k (~25th percentile) to ~$60k (~50th percentile) to ~$120k (~75th percentile) to ~$500k (~99th percentile))

Lastly, I generally don’t see people that are not hard workers advancing (perhaps they might not advance as much as they should or would like) but I definitely see them make marginal progress vs people who haven’t worked as hard

Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life

#328

Post by Tarucho » Tue, Jun 15, 2021, 2:14 PM UTC

Hard work + opportunities leads to a better life. Hard work alone? nope. Go to a construction site and do the work the low graded workers do for a day. Tell me if this is not hard work. Tell me where are they going to be in 10 years?

At the same time opportunities are getting more and more scarce as wealth is getting distributed between a smaller set of people.

People can be fooled, but not all the time.

Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life

#329

Post by pram » Tue, Jun 15, 2021, 2:14 PM UTC

api wrote: post #64

yathern wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has been built upon slavery, colonialism and/or cheap imported labour As far as I understand, this is actually a myth - at least the first two. It's a common cynical refrain that the current level of abundance would be impossible without slavery. There are many many places where there has been slavery throughout the years, and they have not ended up richer for it. The American South, where slavery was more prevalen…

Slavery engenders a culture of self-righteous laziness and entitlement in the slave owners and cynicism and internalized oppression (a “chip on their shoulder”) in the slaves. Both of these persist for many generations post slavery. We are still dealing with them in the form of everything from police violence to far right and far left performative extremist ideologies re-enacting the drama. I disagree with the people…

The industrial revolution started a century before 'end' of slavery. I mean, cotton was pretty much the basis of most early industry. Where do you think it came from.

Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life

#330

Post by mitchdoogle » Tue, Jun 15, 2021, 2:14 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #193

simiones wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have very, very, good odds of doing better than your parents if you manage to get to age 25 without incurring a felony record, addiction to something that will likely kill you or too many child support payments. That is a laughably low bar, and it is unlikely for the trend you are describing to continue past the move from poor to lower middle class. In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be…

>>In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society with no class structure. We are so laughably far off from this everywhere in the world... Every time I make this argument on HN I'm met with two responses 1) I worked my…

People completely take for granted all the good luck, good fortune, opportunities, advantages, etc. (whatever you want to call the things that give them an upper hand as they go through life). We start and go through the first few years of life with zero input about where we are, where we go, what we eat, etc. As we get older, our choices don't increase all that much until we get to adulthood. Even when we do have choices, our choices have already been narrowed by someone else. Nearly every piece of information a person consumes was produced by someone else. Nearly everything that happens to a person is a result of something outside of their own mind. If you're doing well for yourself, then you can thank everyone around you because the world is more responsible for your accomplishments than you are. You may have worked incredibly hard, studying, reading, networking, and all that was probably necessary, but it accounts for a very small part of what got you there. If we're assigning percentages, it's in the single digits. For every person like you, there are 20, 30, 100 others who were just as willing and just as able to do the things you did, but maybe they didn't have the right information at the right time, maybe they didn't have the same networking opportunities, maybe they had to take care of their ailing brother, maybe they had more pressing issues.

Hardly anyone who has done well wants to accept this reality. They would have to change their perception not just of the world, but of themselves. They might feel very guilty, and people don't like that feeling.