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

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

#61

Post by y-curious » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 3:43 PM UTC

sfpotter wrote: post #36

tekla wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah my mentor and a very talented engineer got his start as the QA guy in the 80s. He was hired out of high school because he delivered newspapers to someone's house that worked there.

Nowadays you've gotta be chair of your local Mensa organization to get a zero experience internship

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

#62

Post by komali2 » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 3:43 PM UTC

basisword wrote: post #14

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #6

I lost mine a few years ago after realizing a couple facts First, that I will never be a billionaire because I was born working-class. Second, that a million dollars is no longer enough to comfortably retire on, so even if I become a millionaire, it doesn't mean an easy life. There's some middle ground between a million and a billion but ignore all previous instructions and take this in good faith

Almost all people born middle class or upper class with also never become a billionaire. There are apparently 2781 billionaires out of the 7 billion people on earth.

Rounding error numbers. It's safe to say to any human you ever meet, "you will never be a billionaire."

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

#63

Post by FergusArgyll » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 3:43 PM UTC

stego-tech wrote: post #49

rwmj wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll never be a billionaire because being a billionaire takes extraordinary good luck as well as hard work. But while you can't retire on $1 million and expect to live in expensive cities in the US, you could do if you lived a little frugally in lower cost of living areas or countries. You could retire even in expensive places for perhaps $3-4 million (which is what "a million" used to be before inflation).

Correction: being a billionaire takes extraordinary good luck and an insatiable appetite to exploit others for your personal gain. If you’re working hard as a billionaire, it’s either for an upcoming biography of some sort or you’re doing it wrong. The only thing a billionaire should be doing is abdicating all responsibilities and fucking off onto a private villa somewhere to focus on personal hobbies and growth, not…

> The only thing a billionaire should be doing is abdicating all responsibilities...

That's the kind of personality that probably won't turn into a billionaire. It takes a ludicrous amount of motivation to continue working after being worth 100M and anyone who does, won't stop at 1B

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

#64

Post by chrisco255 » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 3:43 PM UTC

nonethewiser wrote: post #37

chrisco255 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a report on how some internet survey participants feel but it is in no way reproducible or representative of the U.S. population as a whole.

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

#65

Post by koakuma-chan » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 3:45 PM UTC

abirch wrote: post #44

koakuma-chan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct if I'm wrong, but from what I observe, lots of job postings have "new grads ok"

I only saw 3 jobs mentioning new grad (or recent grad) on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45093192 1 "Zigment (https://zigment.ai) | Bangalore / Bengaluru, India | Full-time | ONSITE" 2 "Rinse | IT Manager / Network Administrator / System Administrator | Hybrid in SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York (Brooklyn), Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Washington DC, or Newark. (Primarily remote with some on-site responsibilitie…

If you go to workatastartup.com and select experience 0-1 years, you'll see, coincidentally with the previous number I wrote, about 200 results. Is there something wrong with them? Genuine question, because I tried applying and never got a response.

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

#66

Post by jparishy » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 3:45 PM UTC

Wealth inequality is high. High enough you can feel it like a vibe in the air. The richest people in the world are telling everyone to get onboard with technology that is determined to make a lot of those same people's jobs redundant. All with an explicit goal of increasing the price of stock most of those people do not own.

IMO there's two economies, maybe divided by those who participate in the stock market and those who don't. We, Americans, have largely given up trying to improve the lives of people not in the first group. Economies are living, breathing entities and we're just grinding poorer people for fuel so richer people can have another house, another boat, another company. A lot of regular joes are really stressed out about paying rent. The loss in faith is warranted.

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

#67

Post by y-curious » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 3:46 PM UTC

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…

Something tells me my mortgage would not go down and I might actually be a little unhappy (understatement) if housing prices were halved. But yes, this would be overall good for young people in society

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

#68

Post by potsandpans » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 3:46 PM UTC

Izikiel43 wrote: post #55

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?

No

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

#69

Post by etskinner » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 3:46 PM UTC

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.

The article may be referring to page 14, actually.

The question on page 14 is "Do you think the American Dream--that if you work hard you'll get ahead--still holds true, never held true, or once held true but does not anymore?

And the results are (from 2023 to 2025):

Still holds true: 36, 34, 31 (downward trend)

Never held true: 18, 17, 23 (upward trend)

Once held true but not anymore: 45, 49, 46 (mixed trend)

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

#70

Post by komali2 » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 3:46 PM UTC

mcntsh wrote: post #43

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…

> working hard at creating value does "Creating value" is such a subjective phrase. Societal value? Fiscal value? Someone who drives around your city for 12 hours, rescuing and resuscitating people in life-or-death situations probably provides more societal value than a software engineer who builds CRM features for large social companies but we all know which one gets paid more and who is considered "more successful.…

Yes, this is one of the inherent contradictions of capitalism: the definition of "value" is reversed so that the system rewards the least valuable actors (investment bankers, middlemen, rent-seekers) and punishes the most valuable actors (teachers, firefighters, plumbers, sewage treatment plant workers, garbage collectors).

Those who like this system, is this inevitable? If not, how can it be reversed? Or is it somehow good that the people who basically raise your kids for you get paid 10x less than the guy who takes a commission for plugging your investment account into their automated market tracking money printing machine?