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

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

#331

Post by whitepaint »

nexus_dave wrote: post #103
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…

In 2019, immigrant entrepreneurs made up 21.7 percent of all business owners in the United States, despite making up just over 13.6 percent of the population and 17.1 percent of the U.S. labor force. As an immigrant I can assure you that my starting position was not that great. It is super sad to see the west being turned into an epicurean type world.

> epicurean type world

I am curious what exactly do you mean by this? Adopting philosophy of Epicurus, in my view, can be very beneficial to a person.

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

#332

Post by anotherman554 »

datapls wrote: post #128
52-6F-62 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you’re not counting, and what most people miss, is that not only are you at a disadvantage due to lack of resources, but there are many people in positions of authority, power, or just plain tenure who believe that accumulated wealth is a reflection of the wealth of soul. If you are below them in birth, and didn’t chance yourself to some higher strata by the time they grace your presence, they tend to believe yo…

Show me the data that supports this claim. Big claim, zero citations. As an American I've never met anyone who thinks wealth reflects "wealth of the soul." In my experience people here are Christian, in which case there's that verse about heaven and wealth and the eye of the needle (Google it) or they're atheist and don't believe in souls.

Regardless of what the bible says, American Christians do not believe "...it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

You might ask yourself what America would look like if american Christians believed this line. A billionaire like Donald Trump would be unelectable. The inheritance tax would be 90%. The social safety net would be larger than secular Europe. Health care would be free as a universal right.

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

#333

Post by lm28469 »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #206

I have noticed an increase in negative attitudes toward work, hard work, and generally the idea that one should sacrifice time/pleasure/etc. to reach a goal. I blame it on finance, crypto, and social media. When you can see millions of people casually get rich simply by holding an asset, the narrative of “working hard pays off” gets buried.

This is oversimplification.

My personal opinion is that we're still working as much as ever, productivity per hour/individual is through the roof, automation made a lot of processes much easier/productive, yet every few years the legal retirement age goes up, pensions go down, workers right are eroded, life gets expensive faster than wages are growing, &c.

Keep in mind most people here live in a bubble. We make 2-10x our country's min wage while sitting on expensive chairs in ventilated offices, most people don't live like that. The increase of negativity towards work comes from the majority of people who barely make ends meet and know for sure they'll never be able to afford the life their parents/grandparents had no matter how hard they'll work. The system is designed to have a majority of people doing shitty jobs

The "work hard pays off" propaganda is very convenient when you want to make people feel personal guilt and divert their focus from the broken system that make them feel miserable.

People have been shitting on work well before cryptos and social medias were a thing. I'm not particularly versed on the subject but even I read books from the 60s which were already predicting what's happening now, we're just at the visible end of a very long process and more and more people can't take it anymore.

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

#334

Post by driverdan »

esens wrote: post #37

Working hard but doing so for someone else can often not lead to significant gains. Many services like Uber or InstaCart or even McDonalds or Amazon Warehouse or Walmart or Retail Sales or call center, you can work hard but there is no where to progress to. Your rewards are capped. You need to find a way to work hard such that your rewards are not capped artificially. Startups were you get equity. Large companies whe…

You contradicted yourself. Many companies like McDonald's and Walmart promote from within. You can be successful at those companies by working hard and getting promotions.

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

#335

Post by chasebank »

jfrunyon wrote: post #130
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And everyone seems to think that the fact that all the billionaires came from a situation of decent familial wealth enabling them to make big bets refutes the fact that most people who don't screw up too bad end their career much better than they started and that most people's kids manage to start a rung up or so. Plumber sends his kids to community college and all that.

Why does the millionaire's kid deserve a better shot at success than the plumber's kid?

He doesn't. Nobody deserves anything.

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

#337

Post by throwaway_2d1fv »

dahart wrote: post #212
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> How much social mobility we talking? ([...] only talking about the US) My college US history course ~20 years ago very much drove home the fact that (at least at the time) social mobility in the US was the same as in India. The surprise, of course, was that India has a caste system, while the US narrative is freedom; if you work hard, you’ll get ahead. I don’t remember the sources, but the rate of social mobility (…

It's interesting how political ideology and religion has so much in common when it concerns social mobility.

There are many different religions in the world, but I don't think it is a coincidence that the major religions tends to be very convenient for the top 1%.

They often teach that your life situation is a result of your actions (either in this life or the previous life), and if you follow all the rules you will be rewarded in this life or the next. There's a natural order to things, and it is all part of $deity's plan

Maybe people are waking up and realising that there are more to life?

Edit: This is not a rant against religion as a personal choice. I don't care about what you believe, so long as you do not use your religion as a tool to control politics.

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

#338

Post by ewmiller »

laurent123456 wrote: post #220
fullstop wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting conditions help tremendously, and I'm not doubting that in the least. One other thing which helps, significantly, is how much the parents value education. Most of the people I know who grew up very poor but now have money had parents that valued education, and pushed their kids to learn. They didn't have shelves of books at home, but they did visit the library weekly. It has to be extremely difficult to focu…

I would think "starting conditions" includes the parents one has. Also what you say is not quite logic - you're saying that valuing education means people succeed. So why didn't the parents succeed then? I think that's the question, and usually that's because they were born in the wrong place, at the wrong time or under the wrong regime. When their kids are born, it's a different perhaps better time, so better starti…

> valuing education means people succeed. So why didn't the parents succeed then?

Picture a first-generation immigrant family in America where the parents are older, don't speak English very well, and spend almost all their time working multiple jobs to pay bills and provide food and shelter for their kids. They then push their kids to do well in school because they know it's practically too late for themselves, but that their kids will be much better off than they were if they succeed in school.

Anecdotally, I knew several such families growing up.

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

#339

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

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.

> I'd imagine ...

Yes, and imagining is what is actually happening here, because you clearly do not understand plumbing (or any of the trades).

The studies aspect of it are the least part overall. Good plumbers (and electricians and builders) get good primarily through a delightful combination of attitude and experience. The experience comes from apprenticing early, and accumulating lots of "stories" along the way as a result of having to work in a large number of different contexts.

You will get none of this while working on your STEM career, and you will likely find that most plumbers (and electricians and builders) will be reluctant to take you on as an apprentice later in life without overwhelming evidence that you'd be remarkably good at it.

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

#340

Post by bluetomcat »

foldr wrote: post #268
usaar333 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> n 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. Maybe aspirational, but it's not reasonable to expect this. More educated parents both earn more money and educate their children more (and not p…

> It's hard to compensate for that A good public education system goes a long way. At the moment in the US, rich kids benefit not just from the education their parents give them directly (which let’s face it is not necessarily that great just because they’re rich - how much has Ivanka benefited from Donald’s insights?) but also from the expensive schools that their parents can afford to send them too. Educational apa…

> Educational apartheid by wealth isn’t a necessary feature of a society.

It is a fundamental feature in class-based societies like USA, the UK and much of the rest of the Anglosphere. Maintaining the class structure and preserving the accrued intergenerational wealth from the upper strata of society means that the kids of those wealthier classes must acquire distinctive social manners and culture which sets them apart from the commoners.

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