Sure it will, just not for the people doing the work.
If a consultant push themselves harder to squeeze out that last percent, their company makes more money.
Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life
371–380 of 715 posts
Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you were living in the west at that time it was true for you, not for the slaves toiling it away in the colonies. America's trading partners wealth was all built upon that. Plenty of America's own wealth was built upon slavery, even after slavery was technically outlawed.
You realize that humanity is several hundred thousand years old, and most of that was brutal slavery, of the strong imposing their will on the weak, of kings and chieftains using their gangs to take from the rest? If you think American slavery was unique, you need to get your money back for you education. The Romans had a special tool to knock out the teeth of slaves so they could be better abused sexually. The N. Af…
> Just like it is in the norm in nature for the strong to take from the weak.
This is tautological. Why? Because I'm 99% certain that the only definition you have of "the strong" and "the weak" is based on who takes from whom.
Ecologies don't tend to work the way human societies do, and should probably not be used as analogies or metaphors for them.
Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life
#373Starting 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…
You're right. If you're lucky enough to be born in the US, you're going to have a better life than 90% of people in the world and 90% of people who have ever existed.
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Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life
#374Starting 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 are not orthogonal to hard work. Educated parents are more likely to teach their kids work ethics, and once you are hired your parents are not helping you with your job.
It's not enough to be lucky. Most people still need to work hard to get ahead.
Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It has to be extremely difficult to focus on school and education when you don't know when your next meal is going to be This is true, but which is the bigger factor in America: parent(s) who are uneducated themselves and do not take an active role in their childrens' education OR food insecurity? I would argue the former. I remember a recent story about Baltimore single mom Tiffany France being shocked that her ki…
I would encourage you to look into food insecurity a little bit more. I live in a fairly nice area and there are kids in my school district who often don't eat when there are snow days and in the summer. It is significantly more prevalent than you think. A lot of the food that lower class families have available, stuff which is non-perishable, tend to have empty calories and less fiber. Soft drinks are a problem, and…
Having grown up around it, I can tell you that, if you had to pick one, a parents attitude has a much bigger impact on success in school than food insecurity.
That isnt to say that we cant or shouldnt do more about food insecurity, but wrt the GP post, it isnt the biggest factor.
Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life
#376Earlier 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…
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…
> should stop with this fancy expensive state college education and go to a trade school
> Even when she was working at an engineering firm
Did she then get a STEM degree? Then, of course, it is better.
What is argued about I believe is the worthlessness of liberal arts degrees for a livelihood.
Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life
#377As trite as it sounds, "Success = Hard Work + Opportunity" is still the default equation that makes the most sense to me. And while people from all strata of life work very hard, opportunities are obviously and incredibly unequally distributed (and perhaps becoming more so?). If you were born middle-class in US/Canada 20 - 40 years ago, your access to opportunities to improve your station were/are immense. Layer on y…
I propose Success = Hard Work * Opportunity^2. That is to say that hard work without opportunity equals nothing and opportunity without work equals nothing. But work and opportunity do not have a linear relationship, a bit more opportunity can greatly leverage a bit of extra work. Big opportunities practically become self-fulfilling. Just look at all the poor students who became president. Their lack of work in schoo…
Having done both tech and minimum wage, the difference is that I can do the minimum wage job and they couldn't do mine. Minimum wage jobs often use humans as robots, and most humans can move around in relatively complex ways all days - that's what our brain evolved to do. I can do it, the minimum wage workers can do it. On the other hand most people can't write code. I'm not confident that most of the people that I worked with could be taught to.
I don't know if this is thanks to my genes, my brain, my education, my parents, or something else; and that's certainly not something I hold against them. I don't consider myself better than them because of that. But the reality is that most tech workers could hold minimum wage jobs, while the opposite isn't true.
I guess that it's a really good illustration of your "Success = Hard Work * Opportunity^2". Even if my ex-collegues work harder than me, by having more opportunities than them I can easily earn more/have better jobs.
Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life
#378> The informed public – wealthier, more educated, and frequent consumers of news – remain far more trusting of every institution than the mass population. Is “informed public” an accepted term of art in social science research? Because if not, that seems like an incredibly (and gratuitously) biased label.
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Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life
#379Earlier 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…
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Re: Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, 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.
Based on my only social contact working in trades, the income follows a bathtub distribution - a lot of people taking below average, and a sizable minority getting upper middle class incomes, with almost nothing in between. This is the reason why we get the contradictory narratives of great fortunes in trades on one hand, and the statistics telling the opposite on the other hand.
Allegedly, the talent pool is really shallow - with a modicum of intelligence, passion and human skills, it's not that hard to make it. But most of the guys who end up studying trades are the bottom of the barrel who would do badly in any endeavor (or so I was told).