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Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds

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Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds

#31

Post by stetrain »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #18
TuringNYC wrote: post #7

I live in a community full of high-achieving GenZ who did 4-7 AP courses, studied their butts off for the SAT, got into good universities....only to not find any jobs when they graduate with STEM degrees. A dozen neighbors' kids have been asking me for zero-salary jobs just to get experience.

[flagged]

How many of those are true entry level (degree but no relevant job experience yet) and either remote or local to these people?

Even with experience I have found applying to full remote jobs to be difficult these days, they are generally voids that thousands of resumes get submitted to and you'll never even know if yours was looked at.

I've had better luck via networking and recruiters with jobs that are asking for at least occasional in-person visits which means that the city / metro area you live in remains very important to your ability to land a job.

Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds

#32

Post by tomrod »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #18
TuringNYC wrote: post #7

I live in a community full of high-achieving GenZ who did 4-7 AP courses, studied their butts off for the SAT, got into good universities....only to not find any jobs when they graduate with STEM degrees. A dozen neighbors' kids have been asking me for zero-salary jobs just to get experience.

[flagged]

While the Who's Hiring thread does indeed have ~200 roles, the vast majority of individuals face hiring requirements like:

- Must have 10 years experience with ChatGPT and 20 years experience in PyTorch.

- Entry level

- Must be willing to relocate to a red state in the US and work under the table

- Must be willing to take the fall for our mishandling of data

Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds

#33

Post by illegalsmile »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #18
TuringNYC wrote: post #7

I live in a community full of high-achieving GenZ who did 4-7 AP courses, studied their butts off for the SAT, got into good universities....only to not find any jobs when they graduate with STEM degrees. A dozen neighbors' kids have been asking me for zero-salary jobs just to get experience.

[flagged]

Search for senior vs junior and you'll see 126 vs 7. Experience.

Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds

#34

Post by Consultant32452 »

TuringNYC wrote: post #7

I live in a community full of high-achieving GenZ who did 4-7 AP courses, studied their butts off for the SAT, got into good universities....only to not find any jobs when they graduate with STEM degrees. A dozen neighbors' kids have been asking me for zero-salary jobs just to get experience.

We have flooded the STEM market with foreign workers. Sometimes we don't even give the foreign workers real jobs, we pretend they are "grad students" and pay them a pittance doing high level science at the universities. I generally like all the foreign folks I've worked with, but they are definitely suppressing the wages of natives to an insane degree.

Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds

#35

Post by dfxm12 »

We've had a decades long assault on the idea that hard work leads to economic gains for normal Americans. This poll goes back to the mid 80s. Since then, working class Americans have gotten less and less support from the government while the billionaires have gotten more and more.

It's not surprising that COVID made this realization come to a head. The American Rescue Plan showed that the US is plenty capable of giving Americans what they need to thrive, but simply won't unless there's maybe a worldwide catastrophe...

Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds

#36

Post by sfpotter »

tekla wrote: post #12
TuringNYC wrote: post #7

I live in a community full of high-achieving GenZ who did 4-7 AP courses, studied their butts off for the SAT, got into good universities....only to not find any jobs when they graduate with STEM degrees. A dozen neighbors' kids have been asking me for zero-salary jobs just to get experience.

That seems normal. My friends and I did the exact same thing w. top grades and top schools 2 decades ago, turns out life is not a easy ride.

On the flip side, back in the 70's Boeing used to do things like hire up people with no immediate experience, teach them C for three months, and then hire them into roles as programmers. I'm not sure you can decide what's "normal" based on what was happening two decades ago. Two decades ago, we were smack between two big economic crashes. And all this depends so, so much on geographic locale.

Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds

#37

Post by nonethewiser »

chrisco255 wrote: post #25
djoldman wrote: post #8

Details on page 10 here: https://prod-i.a.dj.com/public/resources/documents/WSJNORCJu... Including previous values: 25% July 2025 29% July 2024 28% March 2023 27% May 2022 Interesting other measurement: Neither agree nor disagree: 32% 24% 28% 27% So... not really much change over the past 3 years.

This is all unreproducible and non scientific internet adbased polling. It's worth dismissing.

Its a report on how people feel. It measures how people say they feel. It's limited in usefulness but not worthless. Id just hazard against reading too much into it.

Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds

#38

Post by anovikov »

yunwal wrote: post #16
anovikov wrote: post #4

Naturally it was always a false hope. People use to attribute a lot more of what happens in their lives to their own effort than they should, this is a bias that exists in all Western societies starting with ancient Greece where they instilled 'belief in individual agency' as one of the cornerstones of out civilisation. This is by the way, the reason inflation is perceived so negatively in the West but not in the Eas…

I think the correlation between good work and payoff genuinely has dropped off. This kind of makes sense. As systems get more complex/complicated, it becomes easier to hide corruption, and harder to identify positive contributions with respect to the system. This goes for society as a whole as well as companies, organizations, communities, etc. As corruption becomes more and more profitable, culture also switches to…

Isn't it also the effort of entire society to compress the pay scale with exactly that effect? And societies that are furthest on that path (Nordic ones) are used as example to follow (and indeed appear quite comfortable and nice).

Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds

#39

Post by stego-tech »

throwawaybob420 wrote: post #9

It’s been obvious to people who didn’t view certain jobs as “unskilled labor”.

This doesn’t get enough attention. For those of us who have had to climb every rung of the ladder by hand, rather than leapfrogging entire segments through social networks from family members and universities or who otherwise come from wealth and privilege, it’s been grueling for decades. Ask any service worker, and they’ll almost certainly agree that shit’s fucked ten ways to Sunday.

Hard work in America consistently only ever nets you further hardship, and has for decades. What we need is more of the essentials, and for said essentials to be affordable when they can’t be effectively socialized. In America, with its naked hostility towards organized labor, this was briefly achievable with a college degree alone; now that credentials don’t guarantee basic necessities, our options are either higher wages (which Capital won’t pay so long as they’re high on AI) or an economic crash that deflates asset values in months, not decades - and which will exacerbate the underlying employment problems to the point of riots.

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