Hard work has never led to success under capitalism.
Having capital leads to success. And pure luck.
Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
131–140 of 343 posts
Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.…
The parent is pointing out that the labor theory of value is nonsense. How much something is worth is totally unrelated to how hard or how long someone worked on it.
Rejecting the labor theory of value was a choice, not some eternal truth of economics.
There’s no reason a society couldn’t be organized around labor values—other than the fact that such societies (or the movements that would give rise to them) are routinely destroyed or destabilized by one pre-existing superpower or the other.
Capitalist realism, in other words.
Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
#133Wealth 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 tho…
If you're smart or lucky enough to to land that 6-figure job, then times are pretty good. There are tons of stories on subreddits, e.g. r/FIRE, r/investing, r/fatfire, etc., of people with large nest eggs and home ownership at an early age. But those are outliers. There are many opportunities to get rich if you are lucky and or smart enough to land them, like in tech or finance. But this is not much consolation for t…
Are they good? Sure you can go on vacation and drop some coin living lavishly,
but if the rest of your friends and family are struggling to pay rent while you've FIREd, wouldn't you, oh I dunno, feel guilty? Wouldn't you rather not watch the world burn? Wouldn't you rather live in a world where you want to have kids and they'll have a future?
Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about internships? Are those people at good universities not doing internships, or do internships not count as experience? Don't companies hire interns?
Companies ask for several years of experience, internships don't count even as one year...
Pro tip: do an internship and round to one year
Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
#135Wealth 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 tho…
Income taxes are higher than capital gains taxes. This isn't based on economic theory or anything, it's just a political choice we have made as a country. We've chosen to reward those who move money around and trade capital more than we reward those who labor. And this at a time when, supposedly, the country is trying to increase its ability to build things. I thought this specific fact worth mentioning.
1. Only long term capital gains are lower than income tax
2. Long term investors invest in things that great new jobs, it is not just moving capital around.
Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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The elites have put themselves in a position where the two main options are the sentiment above or Luigi Mangione. It honestly scares me a bit what's coming.
It no longer scares me, it gives me a lot of hope and I think most people my age and younger feel similarly.
Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
#137I 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.
Pretty much all of the good stuff I've done in my life have resulted from going off the beaten path. AP courses and SAT scores are the core of the beaten path, so everyone is competing for the same stuff. But the world is big, actually, and there's incredible opportunities for meaningful work once you start looking around more broadly. These sorts of jobs aren't necessarily "stable" employment, but I've never once fe…
Your CV indicates you graduated in 2006, so effectively into a different world. You should consider carefully how the world has changed for young people entering the workforce before dispensing advice, because they find themselves in a very different landscape to you and advice like "Plugging in and helping people solve their concrete problems is IMHO the best way to get started" is trite and frankly insulting.
Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.…
The parent is pointing out that the labor theory of value is nonsense. How much something is worth is totally unrelated to how hard or how long someone worked on it.
> working hard at creating value does, and that is still true today
This is the point that the parent was making. How you define "value" is the topic of discussion here, which in my opinion has become so abstract that it's impossible become successful around. Investors make money on failing businesses, software engineers make money on products that never monetize, top AI researchers make millions working for 2 weeks at one company doing training modules before moving to another.
In the modern economy, money is made by ideas, concepts, potentials. Not value.
Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
#139The meritocracy only exists at the broad market level. Within almost every organization there is a zero-sum game of mostly politics. The vast majority of Americans go to work in a zero-sum environment. It could be a job waiting tables, it's unlikely to scale with how good you are at it. Or it could be a middle management position. You might be able to play politics for a higher salary, but you aren't going to get it by actually being good at your job. Similarly you aren't going to lose your job by being bad at it, only by being politically inept.
It's setup this way because that's how mid-to-late career employees want it to be setup. People would rather find a niche and then coast than constantly worrying about being outperformed by people younger or smarter than them. If there's not competition, then there's no way for hard work to yield more than slacking off.
Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The 70's isn't really a fair comparison because PC's did not exist yet. Thus, it was very rare to find programmers with experience anywhere.
Why not? At any point in time since then there have been new technologies that don't exist. As a company, you can always make the call to hire people without that specific experience and train them, or you can punt and wait for a 3rd party to do the training for you. Clearly, companies have by and large settled on the latter, but IMO it's unclear there's actually a good argument for it.