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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

#51

Post by orochimaaru »

Isn’t this a bit obvious? I mean I’ve known this since I started working in 1997. The first job you have generally shatters this illusion that job security and economic gains are tied to “hard work”.

In the sense hard work is needed but only if you see if adding to what you consider a quality of life (which could be economic gain, generational wealth, bragging rights to a promotion, etc.). Each person has their criteria.

If you work in corporate America, hard work isn’t going to save you from layoffs or get you a bigger bonus unless that work is tied to making someone high up in your reporting chain look really good.

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

#53

Post by MangoToupe »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #34
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.

You could just as easily argue that we simply aren't creating enough jobs to make use of the labor force, which traditionally has been a very dangerous place for an empire—especially the core—to be in.

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

#54

Post by komali2 »

slt2021 wrote: post #20

Welcome to the late-stage capitalism. Unless capitalists start paying the same tax rate as W2 workers, the inequality will continue to favor capitalist class and exploit the worker class. This will not happen until the working class wakes up and demands to lower W2 wages massively and simultaneously tax everything and everyone who has been evading and decreasing their corporate/ultra high net worth taxes thus far. Ev…

> Unless capitalists start paying the same tax rate as W2 workers, the inequality will continue to favor capitalist class and exploit the worker class.

I wanted to do a snarky "fixed that" comment where I crossed out everything before "the inequality will continue," but actually I'm curious now: capitalism fans (which includes liberals), do you genuinely believe you can have capitalism in a way where the inequality doesn't continue to favor the capitalist class? So long as power can be purchased with capital, how could this ever not be the case?

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

#55

Post by Izikiel43 »

dfxm12 wrote: post #35

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 givi…

Didn’t all the Covid money printing lead to decades high inflation? Which screwed hard working Americans as well?

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

#56

Post by umvi »

dfxm12 wrote: post #35

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 givi…

> plenty capable of giving Americans what they need to thrive

You mean by going increasingly deeply into debt?

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

#57

Post by [deleted] »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #13

Hard work never lead to economic gains, working hard at creating value does, and that is still true today. If the adage was true, dragging rocks up a hill 18 hrs a day would make you billionaire. The knife in the side of the economy is housing costs. If that were to drop by 50% tomorrow, you would find that suddenly tons of people are happy with the pay the receive for the value they create. People forget (or are sim…

[deleted]

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

#58

Post by solardev »

the_snooze wrote: post #47
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.

For any current students reading this, it's entirely doable to finish your program with real experience and connections under your belt. Not just with internships, but TA, research, and student org leadership experience absolutely count too. There are tons of overlooked low-stakes zero-experience opportunities available only to university students, and it's really useful to develop the habit of identifying and pursui…

Who's hiring even those people?

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

#59

Post by elevatortrim »

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]

I think the gap between what the companies looking for and what the individuals has to offer is increasing.

When a company advertises a role, they are increasingly looking for someone who either has done the same exact job in the exact specific niche with proven success for a number of years, or an absolute super star who would excel at anything thrown at them.

Most people are neither, so matches are exceedingly rare.

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

#60

Post by stetrain »

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…

Even without corruption, "hard work" doesn't correlate to success. I do good work with a specialized skillset, but I don't work particularly hard.

People who replace roofs on houses work very very hard and make much less money than I do, and those income levels aren't likely to change too much throughout our lives.

Income is generally much more correlated to the market value of your skills and experience than with effort, and gaining those skills and experiences has a lot to do with your background and ability to do things like attend college, work on relevant side projects / hobbies, take low pay / unpaid internships, etc.

Ability to invest capital into things like business ownership, investment, real estate, etc. is another factor.

As cost of living increases relative to wages, that leaves less room for savings to pull yourself up from being a wage worker to an owner or investor.

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