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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

#361

Post by buntru »

freddieoduks wrote: post #187
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 need to find a way to work hard such that your rewards are not capped artificially. Well said!

‘Artificially’ works but I think ‘maliciously’ is more apt; regardless of the color of your collar.

Also, this comment echoes the same issue as the original maxim and just moved the ‘hard work’ to the ‘find’ing part.

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

#362

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

taffronaut wrote: post #147
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…

> Similarly with colonialism - that's something that is only possible once your society is already rich and powerful enough to go around and dominate others. I disagree. The European colonial period started in the 15th Century[1]. It established the wealth and power of those nations for almost half a millennium following. The main enabler was not power and wealth, but technology (sailing ships) > Colonialism was not…

> The main enabler was not power and wealth, but technology (sailing ships)

As we should understand rather well, sometimes technology is power.

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

#363

Post by bstar77 »

fullstop wrote: post #91
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…

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…

This is pretty much what I came to say. Both of my parents came from very poor families, but they both valued education very highly. My brother and I may as well been born into a wealthy family since we both got every educational resource we needed, but up until I was 10 years old my parents had to make huge sacrifices to achieve that.

In these poor communities I'm seeing a tendency to stigmatize education... that's the biggest problem. The educational resources available to anyone today obliterates what we had in the 80's. You don't need to be an elite to have access to the critical material, you just need the desire to pursue it.

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

#364

Post by yalogin »

Capitalism right now is just a perverse version of its self from 50 yrs ago. The politicians made money at the expense of the common man and now it’s eroding the trust in it, finally. This is to be expected. Unfortunately even though it did not change the lives of the lower half of the economic population and went directly against its purported value proposition, the lower half of the economy Had the staunchest belief in it. Am not surprised things are changing.

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

#365

Post by dahart »

fullstop wrote: post #221
jasonkester wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I have a friend whos whole extended family kept telling her that she should stop with this fancy expensive state college education and go to a trade school or something that would get her a job. Even when she was working at an engineering firm and starting to see the payoff, her family kept trying to drag her down. Fortunately, she had a particularly strong will, so she spent just as much time telling them wh…

On the flip side there are plenty of examples of kids being pushed into higher education who would have been much better off going to a trade school. Working as a plumber, an electrician, or a carpenter can be quite lucrative, and they are certainly things that society needs. Being pushed into higher ed is so much different than having an internal drive to do it. I'm glad that she's doing well and hopefully they can…

> Working as a plumber, an electrician, or a carpenter can be quite lucrative

This narrative about wealthy trades people like plumbers and welders is not well supported by any data. The ones who do well are the ones who start businesses and hire people, so they become business owners, but most trades people don’t end up there and they obviously can’t all do it.

You should know that the U.S. Fed (St. Louis) published stats on higher education which shows that on average a 4 year degree doubles your income vs anything less. A graduate degree triples it. When I read that, I was blown away that the difference is that high on average. I would have thought maybe 10%, but double the earnings on average for all degree earners is so huge it’s something you can’t ignore.

https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/page1-econ/2018...

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/09/weldin...

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

#366

Post by BingoAhoy »

nr2x wrote: post #274
B4CKlash wrote: post #251

I don't mean to be cynical - I ultimately want to contribute to the conversation in a meaningful way. The original article and the surrounding comments remind me of the Tyler Durden quote from Fight club: "I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables - slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we…

Many people live paycheck to paycheck just to barely cover food and shelter for their children. I don’t think the problem is influencers, it’s actual, old fashioned, poverty.

Yeah influencers aren't the problem but seeing how total productivity improves year by year yet the average wealth of people hasn't just highlights that perhaps we all should be living like influencers. Perhaps that's partially a problem of expectation alignment but I think it's more a problem of distribution of productivity. Jeff bezos can afford a 500 million yacht cause he and his class of people are hoarding a lion share of the productivity gains that should be more fairly distributed amongst the people.

Homelessness and making money to feed oneself is a significant problem in the world's wealthiest nation. Yet surely we produce more than enough food to feed all of North America. China has also shown the world it can drive construction along to the scale of building 20 to 30 Manhattans in a few decades. Yet the US can't? Why? Something smells rotten I think it's capitalism.

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

#367

Post by benjaminwootton »

I do wonder if this will be one of the major changes as a result of the pandemic.

Everyone I know is re-evaluating their priorities, and many are taking early retirement or changing careers.

The whole game of office politics feels even less appealing than it did a few years ago.

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

#368

Post by Cyph0n »

etempleton wrote: post #30

One trend I have noticed is a grass is always greener hiring mentality at a lot of companies. That is, looking external for new hires versus promoting from within. This forces folks to jump around for career progression. And those that are not as willing to jump around feeling discouraged that no matter how hard they work they will likely be overlooked for someone from the outside. To this end hard work is discourage…

To add to this, the switching cost for engineers is extremely low, so you'd expect that companies would work hard to retain talent to compensate. I recently switched companies partly due to this conundrum.

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

#369

Post by AlanSE »

B4CKlash wrote: post #251

I don't mean to be cynical - I ultimately want to contribute to the conversation in a meaningful way. The original article and the surrounding comments remind me of the Tyler Durden quote from Fight club: "I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables - slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we…

The quote really speaks to people. It hits a nerve for me.

I'd argue this with the context of macroeconomics. Our lives do nothing but fold back on themselves. Production becomes consumption. When production increases, consumption has to come along with it. Surplus production leads to joblessness. Surplus consumption creates a class of working poor. Society has many types of products, and we end up with joblessness and insufficient pay at the same time.

People have jobs, but society in general, doesn't seem to have a job. The purpose of our institutions is to serve people ("which" people is a question), not to organize those people for a goal.

This isn't just an existential statement. Our institutions don't have the mechanisms for this. Because of that, it lacks mechanisms to efficiently provide for its people too. By targeting zero excess economic production, we beg for inefficiencies wherever people are provided for. Housing, education, health care, even service work... all of these naturally WANT to be inefficient because balance has to be maintained. Within that system, inequality is a death sentence for the republic.

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

#370

Post by ewmiller »

bluGill wrote: post #341
dahart wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 (…

I've seen those reports myself. However they don't note anything about the entire class changing. Today even the lowest cast things nothing about having an entire encyclopedia in their pocket (a smart phone), 40 years ago encyclopedias were something you needed to be middle class to have one in your house, and nobody could have them in a pocket (meaning you both could afford one, and the space to store it at home) Go…

I can't help but read this as a kind of "let them eat cake" argument. Sure, some cars have electric starters now... how does that matter? Plenty of poor, working class people do not own cars. They're getting priced out of the cities they've lived in their whole lives. Working class wages have been stagnant for decades. Healthcare and education costs have risen much faster than inflation. A huge percentage of Americans are one medical emergency away from bankruptcy.

But yes, they do have access to cell phones and refrigerators, so good for them.

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