Telling children 'hard work gets you to the top' is simply a lie

I think the more important insight is that what you work on is as important as how hard you work. This is especially true in today's world of automation, where things that took one person literally a year can now be done by machines in a few hours.

Inculcating a culture of work ethic into the majority of the population produces a surplus that may then be extracted and utilized by a specific class of people who do not wish to work hard.

Arbeit macht frei.

As far as I am aware, every human culture has always demanded more work than strictly necessary from the working class in order to support a relatively small proportion of non-workers or light workers. At the band/tribe level, that is generally very young children and very old elders. Larger organization units tended to reserve some of the light work and non-work for administrators and enforcers. For a while, we have had concepts such as "education" and "retirement" that take the place of child labor and dying at your workstation, made possible by improvements in productivity in the working class.

So for those whose hands never acquired a callus, it has long been necessary that other people do harder work. Indeed, we even had more odious lies, such as "you must work hard, because you are my property," or "work hard, or you will be removed, and your family will starve."

Sometimes, the promise of promotion was not a lie. The very best of the hard workers were elevated to encourage the others, but never quite far enough that they might question what is really done with all that hard work.

We have robots and power generators now. None of us can work harder, faster, or more cheaply than a fully automated factory running on raw materials and electricity. The former economic necessities are no longer required. But no one is prepared to come out and say "no one really needs to work hard any more, and you will only be able to reach the top by owning the most productive capital" because there are so many people out there who have been toeing that line their whole lives, working hard without reaching even a local maximum. The economy isn't entirely automated--not yet--and we still collectively need some people to work. No one wants to be the one chump in ten that has to bust their ass every day while everyone else just lies around goofing off.

So we have the "bullshit job" phenomenon, to distribute and obfuscate who is doing all the actual work, making the other 9 put up the appearance of work for the sake of the one still actually doing the critical labor, or dividing up the work so that 10 people each do 10% of a real job and 90% flimflammery.

What we should be telling the kids is "own something now, before it is too late."

The title doesn't match the content ("gets you to the top" versus "get on in life") and makes the mistake that the only way to consider yourself a success is to become upper-middle class. It is wrong to teach all underprivileged youth that the only thing standing between them and their own professional practice is working hard, but it's not wrong to teach them that a good work ethic will make other things in their life easier.

I think a better way to frame this is "Hard work barely matters when you work for someone else."

I've been in too many situations and witnessed too many friends and family members that shoot for the moon but are never able to leave Earth as all their extra efforts are usurped by their managers and business owners.

Sure hard work "matters", it can help you get places, but how much does it matter is the question? Does it make 1% difference? 5% difference? 50% difference? I'd bet the difference is I think kids would go furthest of all if we told them "treat yourself as an autonomous being, work hard when you are in a position to realize the benefits of your hard work, otherwise do just enough and save your energy for better days."

What I tell my kids is that among the behaviors that contribute to success, the one the makes the most impact is working hard.

Luck matters, intelligence matters, natural skill matters, social circumstances matter, but hard work matters more.

You can be blessed with all of those behaviors and still fail, but hard work moves the odds in your favor more than the others.