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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

#561

Post by apercu »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #396
HarryHirsch wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd disagree about "not necessary". Cellphones are a necessity now because payphones have gone the way of the dinosaur, there go 100 dollars for a family plan, internet is a necessity, there go 50 dollars more, and especially the expenses for the second car because no one can make do on one income, especially at the lower end of the income scale. And childcare expenses, of course. Especially childcare.

Big difference between a 5 year old $50 Android smartphone and the latest $800 iPhone. I know a lot of people who own the latter yet claim to struggle financially.

If you are struggling financially who cares if you are paying an extra $10 a month to rent-to-own an $800 phone? That sort of shit is just more judgemental dog whistling.

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

#562

Post by fullstop »

clipradiowallet wrote: post #553
fullstop wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Remember when you wanted what you currently have?"

When I was a kid... I wanted a cabin in the mountains. I would imagine living there (forever), and being more or less away from society. Fast forward... I own a house in a rural area and have a family. I'll likely never have that cabin in the mountains, and I'll never be free of having to support my family. That's my fault though..I took the path of least resistance and ended up where I'm at - I didn't take the path…

Do you regret your decision?

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

#563

Post by dougmwne »

ryandrake wrote: post #498
mdorazio wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think there's a Luck component separate from Opportunity that needs to be factored as well. You can start with a great opportunity and get absolutely destroyed or outlandishly rewarded by bad or good luck separate from anything you do (ex. COVID destroys one kind of business while pushing another through the roof). Something like... Success = Hard Work * Opportunity^2 * Luck

This equation's better but you need to factor in "starting point" as another poster put it. Consider person A and B, with the same hard work, opportunity, and luck. If person A starts out with a $10M trust fund, he will have more success. Success = (Hard Work + Head Start) * Opportunity^2 * Luck

I would personally lump both head start and luck into opportunity. Opportunity can come from many things. It basically just means an open door instead of a locked door. I think it encompass all environmental factors such as class, education, upbringing, genetic lottery, connections, support network, citizenship, gender, ethnicity, economy, unsolved problems, unaddressed needs and on and on.

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

#565

Post by reedjosh »

CraneWorm wrote: post #143
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…

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

I don't like what I'm going to say, but post scarcity can't come without either a worldwide culture change or an exploding population that would lead back to scarcity.

We are still animals, and evolution is still a thing. We're clearly a k-selected species, but in post scarcity, what's to stop a portion of us from becoming r-selected?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

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

#566

Post by lordnacho »

Why would you think that working hard leads to a better life?

Look at people you know. Is there any connection between how hard they work and how good their life is? By good life, you can take that to mean "material wealth" or "subjective happiness".

I've never seen a connection. I know poor people who are happy. Rich people who are stressed all the time. Poor people who are stressed. Rich people who are happy.

I've read it a few times now that the connection between income and happiness is tenuous, according to studies. The connection between working hard and getting either of those, I haven't seen so much about. My guess is it's just as tenuous.

If you look at how people landed in their jobs, what do you see? Is it really the people who work hardest who got furthest? I get this feeling it's the other way around: people who got the best opportunities often feel they need to do something to deserve them.

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

#568

Post by fullstop »

g9yuayon wrote: post #558
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 was wondering if the effect of valuing education is subject to survivorship bias. Take China for example, on average 50% of the grade-9 students have to enter vocational training schools instead of high schools (grade-10 to grade 12). The odds of getting into the top 33 universities in China is less than 2%, and the odds of getting into the next best 100 universities is less than 4%. I'm sure more than 6% of parent…

China might be a different sort of beast, though, given the sheer number of people and because of the level of control the government has on their citizens. I looked into how many Chinese students there are in America, and it (was) about 370,000 students in 2018, but surely that number has decreased because of COVID restrictions.

Keep in mind that valuing education does not mean having a college education, it means that you value education and are more likely to keep learning throughout your life.

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

#569

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

simiones wrote: post #443
IQunder130 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society That might be what we expect from a perfectly egalitarian society, but expecting any free, democratic society to come even close to perfect egalitarianism is completely delusional.

That is not egalitarianism (which would mean something closer to everyone owning the exact same amounts), it is the standard definition of "equality of opportunity".

There is no standard definition of "equality of opportunity"; and many definitions that are regularly-used focus primarily on an absence of unreasonable discrimination in application processes rather than fairness in the Rawlsian sense.

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

#570

Post by reedjosh »

BingoAhoy wrote: post #366
nr2x wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

> I think it's capitalism.

That's funny. I think it's government interference artificially supporting monopolies and bad incentive structures.

The 2008 bailouts as an example of propping up companies that deserved to fail and corn/wheat subsidies that generate junk food as an example of bad incentives.

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