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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

#261

Post by nexus_dave »

ferrumfist wrote: post #131
nexus_dave wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2019, immigrant entrepreneurs made up 21.7 percent of all business owners in the United States, despite making up just over 13.6 percent of the population and 17.1 percent of the U.S. labor force. As an immigrant I can assure you that my starting position was not that great. It is super sad to see the west being turned into an epicurean type world.

It's because immigrants proactively make their lives better while average Americans reactively complain about why their lives aren't perfect

Yeah, it's real simple, there is no stuff unless you make stuff.

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

#262

Post by tjs8rj »

hawk_ wrote: post #19
lr4444lr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it has been built upon slavery, colonialism and/or cheap imported labour You're undermining your own argument. Those things, collectively, were the norm for most of human history, not that "short window of time", so something else must have happened that made people optimistic about hard work yielding the fruits of a better life (however you want to define that).

If you were living in the west at that time it was true for you, not for the slaves toiling it away in the colonies. America's trading partners wealth was all built upon that. Plenty of America's own wealth was built upon slavery, even after slavery was technically outlawed.

Slavery was a blip compared to industrialization.

Slavery was frequent but led to minor growth in gdp (as evidenced by Columbus living at only twice the average standard of living of Jesus-times in 0 AD). Cheap labor perhaps even stalled industrialization, which lead to living standards doubling every 5-10 years during the fastest periods. Slavery was a better wealth generator for the slaveholders than nothing, but the idea that it’s some great wealth generator compared so what came after is ridiculous. Maybe 1% of the wealth of the US came from slavery, steam power is a much much larger chunk, and computing thereafter.

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

#263

Post by nr2x »

wishigotitfree wrote: post #25

Starting conditions (where one was born, levels of wealth and opportunity there, one's parents' education and jobs) are shockingly predictive about an individual's future. Hard work leading to social mobility has always been the exception, not the rule. Most will not beat the odds since if they did, those wouldn't BE the odds. A lot of us are just so deluded by survivorship bias borne of listening only to success sto…

“False consciousness is a term used by some to describe ways in which material, ideological, and institutional processes are said to mislead members of the proletariat and other class actors within capitalist societies, concealing the exploitation intrinsic to the social relations between classes.”

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

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

#264

Post by drran »

nexus_dave wrote: post #103
wishigotitfree wrote: post #25

Starting conditions (where one was born, levels of wealth and opportunity there, one's parents' education and jobs) are shockingly predictive about an individual's future. Hard work leading to social mobility has always been the exception, not the rule. Most will not beat the odds since if they did, those wouldn't BE the odds. A lot of us are just so deluded by survivorship bias borne of listening only to success sto…

In 2019, immigrant entrepreneurs made up 21.7 percent of all business owners in the United States, despite making up just over 13.6 percent of the population and 17.1 percent of the U.S. labor force. As an immigrant I can assure you that my starting position was not that great. It is super sad to see the west being turned into an epicurean type world.

It's a steady decline from 100% to just 21.7% over hundreds of years.

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

#265

Post by joejohnson »

nextstep wrote: post #241

Empirical data shows this as well, so I guess this just means there’s a gap in propaganda convincing workers to accept less and less each year while productivity increases. I’m sure the media will correct this misperception quickly.

Looking at the data more closely, it seems this (international) survey is not representative of the average views among Americans. So there is a large propaganda gap between Americans and others in the western world.

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

#266

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

nexus_dave wrote: post #103
wishigotitfree wrote: post #25

Starting conditions (where one was born, levels of wealth and opportunity there, one's parents' education and jobs) are shockingly predictive about an individual's future. Hard work leading to social mobility has always been the exception, not the rule. Most will not beat the odds since if they did, those wouldn't BE the odds. A lot of us are just so deluded by survivorship bias borne of listening only to success sto…

In 2019, immigrant entrepreneurs made up 21.7 percent of all business owners in the United States, despite making up just over 13.6 percent of the population and 17.1 percent of the U.S. labor force. As an immigrant I can assure you that my starting position was not that great. It is super sad to see the west being turned into an epicurean type world.

Agreed, some of these posts are appalling. Hard work may not pay off but not working hard is guaranteed not to pay off.

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

#267

Post by Frondo »

datapls wrote: post #128
52-6F-62 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you’re not counting, and what most people miss, is that not only are you at a disadvantage due to lack of resources, but there are many people in positions of authority, power, or just plain tenure who believe that accumulated wealth is a reflection of the wealth of soul. If you are below them in birth, and didn’t chance yourself to some higher strata by the time they grace your presence, they tend to believe yo…

Show me the data that supports this claim. Big claim, zero citations. As an American I've never met anyone who thinks wealth reflects "wealth of the soul." In my experience people here are Christian, in which case there's that verse about heaven and wealth and the eye of the needle (Google it) or they're atheist and don't believe in souls.

It's a somewhat clumsy restatement of the just world hypothesis, which seems like it's built into much of the discourse and attitudes of American society and has almost always been dominant.

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

#268

Post by foldr »

usaar333 wrote: post #202
simiones wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have very, very, good odds of doing better than your parents if you manage to get to age 25 without incurring a felony record, addiction to something that will likely kill you or too many child support payments. That is a laughably low bar, and it is unlikely for the trend you are describing to continue past the move from poor to lower middle class. In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be…

> n a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society with no class structure. Maybe aspirational, but it's not reasonable to expect this. More educated parents both earn more money and educate their children more (and not p…

> It's hard to compensate for that

A good public education system goes a long way. At the moment in the US, rich kids benefit not just from the education their parents give them directly (which let’s face it is not necessarily that great just because they’re rich - how much has Ivanka benefited from Donald’s insights?) but also from the expensive schools that their parents can afford to send them too. Educational apartheid by wealth isn’t a necessary feature of a society. It can largely be legislated away given the social and political will to do so.

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

#269

Post by zepto »

fullstop wrote: post #221
jasonkester wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I have a friend whos whole extended family kept telling her that she should stop with this fancy expensive state college education and go to a trade school or something that would get her a job. Even when she was working at an engineering firm and starting to see the payoff, her family kept trying to drag her down. Fortunately, she had a particularly strong will, so she spent just as much time telling them wh…

On the flip side there are plenty of examples of kids being pushed into higher education who would have been much better off going to a trade school. Working as a plumber, an electrician, or a carpenter can be quite lucrative, and they are certainly things that society needs. Being pushed into higher ed is so much different than having an internal drive to do it. I'm glad that she's doing well and hopefully they can…

> "that's their problem, not mine."

It’s worth noting that this attitude makes sense for someone who themselves found school to be a degrading and unsupportive experience, and dealing with a teacher complaining about their child is just more of the same dynamic.

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

#270

Post by merpnderp »

stelcodes wrote: post #132
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't the technicians that maintain remote oil-rigs make $200k+/yr though?

I mean sure, there are some people who (sacrifice their whole lives for their oil bosses and) make high salaries, but these corporations will pay the absolute minimum they can and unless you are unionized you have no chance of a fair negotiation. And every time the pipes break plants/animals/ecological systems die. And it poisons our water, the single most important shared resource we have. And when we burn that oil…

Do you realize that most native Americans were killed by European disease decades or centuries before a European ever showed up to their area? And since no one even understood the concept of disease or how it was spread, it was really hard to imagine the Spanish purposefully showing up in Mexico with the explicit purpose of killing people in S. America via smallpox.

And paying someone a high salary to do a job they can leave at any time, isn't causing them to sacrifice their life, it's called free trade is generally considered 'winning'.

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