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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

#691

Post by mbg721 »

banannaise wrote: post #690
everdrive wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's an embedded cultural assumption in all of this: children are the property of their parents, rather than members of a community raised by the community as a whole.

The latter rings dystopian to the modern US ear, because our civic society has so thoroughly broken down. It's not just the ultra-wealthy who distrust their local public schools or wouldn't have a random neighbor keep an eye on the kids for a couple hours.

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

#692

Post by s1artibartfast »

gjulianm wrote: post #680
s1artibartfast wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Random would mean 20% of ending in the same quintile, perfect predictor would mean 100%, so 40% is much closer to random. >you can rephrase the statistic in another way, such as saying that 13% of the people at the lowest quintile should be in the highest income bracket, but they're not there because they started poor. You say "should" but it seems like this is only true if you expect (and want) completely random res…

> Random would mean 20% of ending in the same quintile, perfect predictor would mean 100%, so 40% is much closer to random. Something that doubles or reduces by 10x the random probability is not "closer to random". I doubt that if you tell something that a factor is "closer to random than to a perfect predictor" they'd expect something like that. > You say "should" but it seems like this is only true if you expect (a…

>Something that doubles or reduces by 10x the random probability is not "closer to random". I doubt that if you tell something that a factor is "closer to random than to a perfect predictor" they'd expect something like that.

This shouldn't be a matter of what the layman thinks, it is a question of statistics. If someone said or thought that the class you were born into has a bigger impact on outcomes than other factors, they would be wrong.

Can you check your link, as it has no text.

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

#693

Post by dahart »

nec4b wrote: post #683
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 (…

A milion of immigrants that come to US every year disagree with your "fact".

So do hundreds of millions of Americans, which is why the statistics are surprising. But having hope doesn’t make it happen. This is partly why it’s important to understand the reality of US social mobility.

US immigrants are, statistically speaking, at an even worse disadvantage than the American born lower class. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...

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

#694

Post by banannaise »

Zababa wrote: post #377
dougmwne wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> the difference is that I can do the minimum wage job and they couldn't do mine

[citation needed]

A lot of low-wage work is skilled physical labor. I for one would need months to years of physical training before I would be strong enough to perform many of those jobs, and then it would take me months to years of practice before I could do them efficiently and effectively.

If you were to give a day laborer the same amount of time to learn to code, they might be a pretty competent developer.

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

#695

Post by nr2x »

imtringued wrote: post #652
armagon wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my goodness! That's appalling. How is our system so broken?

People want to pretend that it is all about "financial skills". Mostly because they want to blame poorer people who are bad at something because they are good at it and thus get to show off their superiority. It's not about useful skills, it's about the relative difference in skill to support a mental model/world view.

No skill can turn $7.25 into a living wage.

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

#696

Post by CountDrewku »

gjulianm wrote: post #679
CountDrewku wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be confusing illegal immigrants with legal ones.

Last time I checked there are temporary work visas and immigrants are not citizens, so I don't think I am confusing them.

You want non-citizens to be given the same or more benefits than actual citizens? Exactly why would that be a long term benefit for a country?

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

#697

Post by mkr-hn »

simonsarris wrote: post #605
ttz wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> far above even surgeons or lawyers or engineers, who work very hard and are just as smart as the ultra-rich I've been seeing this assumption float around quite a bit around HN. Where is this coming from? Where is this belief that "ultra-rich" or "having interest in money" implies intelligence? Not saying one way or the other. Just genuinely curious.

Oh I was going to question the other two assumptions, that surgeons, lawyers, and engineers work very hard, and that they (as an averaged group) are just as smart as the ultra-rich (as an averaged group)

People who are highly skilled in one area run the same range as anyone else in other areas. Sometimes it even seems like people who focus hard in one area are the least balanced in depth and accuracy of general knowledge. I want to see the experiments testing the wisdom of the crowd done on experts in one field.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd

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

#698

Post by ewmiller »

bluGill wrote: post #669
ewmiller wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Have you observed that almost every other developed, first-world nation on earth has some kind of nationalized health care service for its citizens, rather than leaving them to fend for themselves? 2. Have you considered that Adam Smith's anecdata from 200 years ago may not be accurate anymore? Having made progress since 200 years ago is no excuse for piss-poor progress compared to where we could be .

I've seen lots of people follow what I think are stupid things. You think national healthcare is a good idea, I don't. (I think we went wrong by making health insurance come from your job, and all the things you hate about our system are a result ofthe current system being good for the employers)

You don't need to get insurance through your employer anymore. That's what the ACA did. You can buy it on a marketplace and choose from dozens of plans, employed or not. It costs hundreds a month for an individual - thousands for families - for barebones insurance that covers almost nothing.

I'll restate my earlier point. The vast majority of Americans would suffer huge financial setbacks (to put it lightly) from one visit to the emergency room. Health insurance historically being tied to your employer isn't the problem, health insurance itself is the problem. It's a predatory industry which has successfully lobbied to make healthcare immensely lucrative for themselves and financially ruinous for average people.

It's interesting to me that you still think nationalized healthcare is "stupid" even though dozens of countries [1] have successfully implemented it. And yet you can look at the system we have here in the US, and say "oh it's just that it's tied to your employer. Otherwise it'd be fine." Healthcare isn't a commodity and shouldn't be marketed as such. The evidence that nationalized health systems can work well is everywhere. I also refused to see it for a while because of internalized fear of the "socialism" boogeyman, but turns out you can just do it and still have a capitalist market for other things. Go figure.

1. https://www.health.ny.gov/regulations/hcra/univ_hlth_care.ht...

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

#699

Post by HarryHirsch »

tekknik wrote: post #688
HarryHirsch wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between the $800 phone and the $150 phone amortized over 3 years is 18 dollars/month. That's not what breaks the bank.

It’s a bit higher than $18/mo, and your average american changes their phone every 2 years, and further phones are not $800 anymore. But let’s assume they are, over 2 years that’s $34/mo and let’s say 4 people in the plan. Over the same period you’ve doubled your phone bill. If $100/mo is expensive then so should the $134/mo or so to upgrade phones every 2 years.

The penniless American will keep their phone for longer than the average 2 years. You'd actually predict that the parents hand down the old phone to the child when they get a new one, and now we know why Apple recently extended the time they keep their phones in support.

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

#700

Post by nec4b »

dahart wrote: post #693
nec4b wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A milion of immigrants that come to US every year disagree with your "fact".

So do hundreds of millions of Americans, which is why the statistics are surprising. But having hope doesn’t make it happen. This is partly why it’s important to understand the reality of US social mobility. US immigrants are, statistically speaking, at an even worse disadvantage than the American born lower class. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...

And yet they come and succeed. Their educated children move up to the middle class. The article you linked is an opinion piece of a single economist, who is critical of immigration.

If human ability follows normal distribution, there is a hard physical limit of how many people can move up the ladder each year. It physically impossible for every one to be at the same highest level. The good news is all level are getting higher year by year. The pie is growing for everybody.

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