Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

insidermag.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 715 posts

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

#621

Post by j_walter »

crispyambulance wrote: post #535
j_walter wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the surface it might look like it's just about "discipline" but in the kinds of school districts you're talking about the problems are very deep-rooted and multi-faceted. Discipline alone is not nearly enough to address what's going on.

Agreed...but at the school level what can they do? If the parents aren't engaged in their kids getting an education and behaving (for whatever reason)...it's not really the school's job to fill that gap.

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

#622

Post by pnutjam »

missedthecue wrote: post #245
faitswulff wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wall Street Journal has a great infographic here comparing how many hours of worth it would take to pay median rent today versus in 1968: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-much-does-the-federal-minim... Spoiler: it’s not pretty.

worthless graph because it compares minimum wage to the price of goods, not median wage. The minimum wage today is $7.25 but essentially no one makes that. Target, Chipotle, Amazon, and other start out at $15, others aren't far behind.

You're wrong. Sorry, you don't get to handwave away the many places that are paying $9 an hour and were paying $7.25 last year. Some are still trying to around here.

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

#623

Post by j_walter »

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.

Yes it is. Kids in poor areas don't see education as they way out of being poor...how could they. They see drugs and gangs as a way to do that though. I went to a shitty school and did well and went to college (thanks to my parents pushing me to do so)...so many people couldn't fathom why I was doing that and why I wasn't going to just go get a job right away. Many of those people are still living in that same area and are just as poor as their parents were.

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

#624

Post by jcims »

brundolf wrote: post #500
jcims wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a fridge of meat go bad. Triple bagged it then tipped them $60 (maximal divvy potential) for dealing with it. Just tape an envelope to the can with a little note, they'll figure it out.

Maybe this is an American thing, but the trucks in my neighborhood have a big mechanical arm that grabs the trash can and dumps it. The guys only get manually involved if there's extra, or a loose bag, or something else unusual. I'm worried they wouldn't notice an envelope taped to the top under normal conditions

I think it’s setting as well. I’m in a rural (US) location and they generally have to drag the can/tote to the truck and then can use a lift from there if they need to.

They left me a thank you note at least so i had some confirmation.

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

#625

Post by j_walter »

only_as_i_fall wrote: post #619
j_walter wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you really blame them? Why wouldn't you want to pull the good kids out so they can succeed? Seems like having tryouts for basketball...you take the best of the best to make the team strong.

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

#626

Post by fatbird »

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.

Any teacher in a school considered "inner city" (i.e., poor, relatively high crime) will tell you that there is often an anti-achievement culture present (and it's not correlated with race or ethnic background). My wife teaches in such a school. Many kids consciously try to avoid appearing smart or like they don't hold school in contempt because if they don't, their peers or their parents will shame them or abuse them. It's considered a very serious problem in the field of education.

At the same school, several of her students have received large scholarships, including full four year rides to university. This is rare, of course, but does correlate very clearly with parents being involved in their children's education, encouraging them, and not having an anti-achievement peer group.

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

#627

Post by missedthecue »

pnutjam wrote: post #622
missedthecue wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

worthless graph because it compares minimum wage to the price of goods, not median wage. The minimum wage today is $7.25 but essentially no one makes that. Target, Chipotle, Amazon, and other start out at $15, others aren't far behind.

You're wrong. Sorry, you don't get to handwave away the many places that are paying $9 an hour and were paying $7.25 last year. Some are still trying to around here.

You can look at the BLS stats. Less than 0.2% of the workforce is making minimum wage.

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

#628

Post by caconym_ »

geggam wrote: post #620
caconym_ wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

In the context of this thread, and in particular the top level comment you initially replied to, who do you imagine is suggesting we teach people that?

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

#629

Post by geggam »

caconym_ wrote: post #628
geggam wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In the context of this thread, and in particular the top level comment you initially replied to, who do you imagine is suggesting we teach people that?

Well, lets look at society.

We have the rich who use the govt to oppress the people and preserve their wealth.

We have the poor who think the govt will help them

We have a large group of people who just want to work to survive

What rules would you put in place and how would you go about doing that to ensure the rich / powerful didnt corrupt the system ?

The US was designed with a constitution defining the rules a govt could work within and the bill of rights was added to ensure the govt didnt enroach on the peoples rights so they could control the govt

This design failed as did all the rest... why ?

Because people are inherently lazy and dont want to be bothered. So you think its better to simply feed these folks and ensure they are ok will somehow motivate them to work ?

Capitalism works better than most systems and in fact many of the so called socialist countries arent. They are capitalist countries that have strong social programs funded by said capitalism

Perhaps instead of letting the govt get away with violating the rules it was bound by we start enforcing the rules ?

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

#630

Post by dahart »

sokoloff wrote: post #617
dahart wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bec…

Yeah, totally, it’s a reasonable question and not necessarily clear, especially when there are political voices in this arena distributing some degree of misinformation.

Even though that older Fed article is warning that for some people the “wealth premium” of a college degree is waning, it does talk about the stability and causation of the “income premium” that people with degrees enjoy, and since some of the reasons identified for the income premium have to do with social signaling and employer selection bias (as in, many high paying jobs require a degree in the first place), I believe it lands much more closely to the causal eat healthy for a longer life correlation. The more recent Fed link I posted above agrees in the sense that they’ve concluded after many studies on this subject that taking loans in order to go to school is absolutely worth the cost, that the financial returns are very very likely to pay off. At least for now...

Post reply on HN