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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

#611

Post by pc86 »

pope_meat wrote: post #594
j_walter wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If parents value education they don't need to pay for tutors or summer school. I grew up in district with shitty schools, but I saw some kids succeed only because they learned stuff on their own. Those schools aren't necessarily shittier...they are filled with kids that don't want to learn (and their parents increasingly blame the teachers for their failure).

So, it's just a statistical reality that kids in poor areas don't want to learn, and that's why the results show poorer people doing worse in education that rich people? Interesting hill to die on, but you do you.

It's a statistical reality that if your parents don't value education, and don't impress upon their children its importance, that those children are incredibly unlikely to decide completely on their own that education is the way out of their impoverished lives.

But that's a little too nuanced for your straw man.

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

#612

Post by 52-6F-62 »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #608
52-6F-62 wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure it's ultimately an amalgam of who you are, your hard work, and good fortune that got you where you are. I do believe you have to work to prepare yourself to make the most of whatever comes your way. If it all was so simple, and so easily digestible then we wouldn't be having a discussion at all! I can see where you're coming from when you mention a media narrative, but I disagree. But I think that's just a m…

It seems like you switched from bemoaning how difficult it is to make money to "why bother making money anyway?". If you don't value money and you prefer to take it easy, then I don't see what the problem is?

No not at all. I wasn't bemoaning anything, myself.

I'm saying that is a part of the question of what the articles are discussing, not something as singular as poo-pooing hard work or making money. But questioning whether hard work with the goal being money really being a path worth its while on its own. Especially if you can get 90% of the life you want without all of the strife.

The article is illustrating people asking: "Will years of hard work accomplish what people claim it will for me?"

That was not a reasonable question in most peoples' minds pre-pandemic, and "no" wasn't a reasonable answer. I think it's a big question for the times, and it's a good one. It always has been, but it is now, too.

You kind of just said it. What's the problem? But there's a giant argument about it going on throughout the entire thread, and people are asking others to back up their personal intuitions and experiences with data—like asking the wind why it blows in one direction versus the other.

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

#613

Post by foldr »

everdrive wrote: post #469
simiones wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wealth and influence can compound over time and groups of people would gain influence, power, and money. And this is the expected outcome of a perfectly meritocratic system. It is not. In a meritocratic system, children wouldn't inherit resources, access to education would be conditioned purely by merit, and so would access to jobs, finance opportunities etc. The nepotism rampant (edit: was "inherent") in corporati…

This is interesting, and I've never heard this definition of egalitarian. It certainly does solve the philosophical problem I've raised. I'm curious (genuinely) if large numbers of people are seriously suggesting such a system. How would it even be implemented? Well-off parents cannot buy their children clothing or food? They cannot give their used car to their children? Etc? That rich parents could not pay extra for…

I'm surprised that you mention food, clothing and healthcare. It's absolutely possible to ensure that every child has access to these things, so that the children of rich parents do not have a large advantage in these respects.

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

#614

Post by bluGill »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #586
bluGill wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their standard of living is going up.

I'm not so sure about this. Ask a random lower or middle class American if their quality of life has gone up in the last 20 years, I'm willing to bet most will say no. The world is far more competitive, has undergone a large amount of cultural decay and fragmentation, and certain important things like housing, education, and healthcare have gotten far more expensive.

>Ask a random lower or middle class American if their quality of life has gone up in the last 20 years

What people say is often very different from the truth. It is hard to measure make an objective measure of quality of life, but that doesn't mean the subjective measure is actually correct.

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

#615

Post by bluGill »

ewmiller wrote: post #602
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure about this. Ask a random lower or middle class American if their quality of life has gone up in the last 20 years, I'm willing to bet most will say no. The world is far more competitive, has undergone a large amount of cultural decay and fragmentation, and certain important things like housing, education, and healthcare have gotten far more expensive.

> certain important things like housing, education, and healthcare have gotten far more expensive This is what classist "but they have refrigerators" arguments love to obfuscate. Yes, a poorer person might still have a roof over their head and a smartphone. But they're spending a huge chunk of their income on rent. They want to move somewhere cheaper, but there are fewer opportunities, or their pay would go down too.…

Adam Smith observed many years ago that if you give people more money they tend to spend it on better dwelling places.

Medical care has always been expensive. We have made a lot of progress: 200 years ago those ER bills would be zero: because everyone just died from what we consider solvable today.

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

#616

Post by raydev »

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…

> So why didn't the parents succeed then?

Because they're busy trying to pay the bills? That hard work pays off in allowing their kids to focus on growing their brains.

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

#617

Post by sokoloff »

dahart wrote: post #607
sokoloff wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any research you can point me to? I'd like to learn more about this proof of causality in doubling (genuinely).

One is the St Louis Fed study, which I found you and I have discussed briefly in the past. ;) https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/files/pdfs/hfs/is-college... I’m only skimming quickly, this doesn’t fully back me up, but section III talks about some causal analysis, for example: “mediation tests causal relationships between variables. While the SCF is not longitudinal and thus a pure causal effect cannot be tested, we…

Thanks. I will take a deeper look at the aspects of the Fed data which tend to indicate causality. There's zero question and I'm in complete agreement that the correlation between degree and income is extremely high.

For me, the key question here is where does "lots more people should attend four-year university" fall on the spectrum between "people should eat healthy food, exercise more, and refrain from smoking because the data shows that people who do that are healthier and live longer" (IMO causal for health) and "people should fly first-class because the data shows that people who do that are wealthier"? I suspect that college is at least 75% in the latter category. If it's 75% in the former, we should push for it. If it's 75% in the latter, maybe we shouldn't.

(I also could be unduly influenced by the SWE field wherein the same intelligent, qualified person who did or didn't attend college would still have very similar [excellent] career prospects with or without a framed piece of paper. In medicine and law, it's more causal.)

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

#618

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

bluGill wrote: post #614
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure about this. Ask a random lower or middle class American if their quality of life has gone up in the last 20 years, I'm willing to bet most will say no. The world is far more competitive, has undergone a large amount of cultural decay and fragmentation, and certain important things like housing, education, and healthcare have gotten far more expensive.

>Ask a random lower or middle class American if their quality of life has gone up in the last 20 years What people say is often very different from the truth. It is hard to measure make an objective measure of quality of life, but that doesn't mean the subjective measure is actually correct.

Subjective measures are everything when considering quality of life.

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

#619

Post by only_as_i_fall »

j_walter wrote: post #486
ewmiller wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very true. Widespread, high quality public education is a must.

It's not necessarily that the educators aren't high quality, but that the majority of students are there as a babysitting service and take up more time being disciplined than actually getting taught. We always say inner city schools have worse education...but I suspect it's more that the kids that attend those schools are disruptors and the system won't allow them to be disciplined in the way they should be (not that…

In my city it's hard to separate the multitude of interrelated issues to say it's any one thing, but something I didn't realize until I moved here is that magnet schools pull out virtually all the competent and interested kids by the time they reach highschool.

Given that, it's less surprising to me that the bottom tier public schools in these areas wind up so much shittier than the average public school.

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

#620

Post by geggam »

caconym_ wrote: post #574
geggam wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of curious, What lifestyle are people entitled to ? What effort are they responsible for putting forth to better their life ? Who is responsible for ensuring they have a good life ?

As a matter of physical reality, the universe owes us nothing. It was quite content to allow such things as the Atlantic slave trade and the Holocaust, which took people’s lives completely out of their own hands and utterly destroyed them. Were those people “entitled” to better? The question is, I think, utterly meaningless. Were these morally abhorrent events that should never be repeated? From my own moral point of…

What is moral about teaching people they dont need to work to survive ?
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