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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

#391

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

BingoAhoy wrote: post #326
esens wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It never actually seems to come though. I wouldn't count on it. I believe that getting something for nothing is usually not sustainable. Just because you serve no purpose to those giving the things away for free. Something will give (some type of resource constraint will arise, even if it is just competitive/alternatives) and it will fail if you are not providing value.

It's only been, what a few hundred years since the industrial revolution began? We haven't given it enough time for the innovators to figure out how to manufacture the needs of society in an overflowing plentiful way that's also automated & low effort. Some things never will be of course.

On the other hand, here in the US we throw out something like 60% of the food we produce and have an obesity problem. One could argue that we've kinda already reached post-scarcity for feeding people, yet people still go hungry.

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

#392

Post by adkadskhj »

dahart wrote: post #365
fullstop wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Working as a plumber, an electrician, or a carpenter can be quite lucrative This narrative about wealthy trades people like plumbers and welders is not well supported by any data. The ones who do well are the ones who start businesses and hire people, so they become business owners, but most trades people don’t end up there and they obviously can’t all do it. You should know that the U.S. Fed (St. Louis) published…

Have you seen any studies on it being a causal relationship between the education and the income doubling? Ie i'm curious if the people who complete a graduate are also inherently more likely to have higher earnings.

I'm in full support of education, so this isn't a backhanded reason to argue against education. The disclaimer seems necessary these days :(

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

#393

Post by JKCalhoun »

rantwasp wrote: post #344
nr2x wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people live paycheck to paycheck just to barely cover food and shelter for their children. I don’t think the problem is influencers, it’s actual, old fashioned, poverty.

I think there’s multiple buckets here. One is the old fashioned poverty you bring up. It exists, it sucks. A lot of people are struggling. Another one is people that technically have all they need but spend money they don’t have on things that they don’t really need. This leads to being stuck “working hard” and for working longer than you would normally do (since you don’t really have a choice - you’ve gotta pay that…

I suspect the latter is a minority.

Those people are, at the least, one layoff away from a reset that puts them in the former category.

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

#394

Post by lotsofpulp »

bstar77 wrote: post #363
fullstop wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting conditions help tremendously, and I'm not doubting that in the least. One other thing which helps, significantly, is how much the parents value education. Most of the people I know who grew up very poor but now have money had parents that valued education, and pushed their kids to learn. They didn't have shelves of books at home, but they did visit the library weekly. It has to be extremely difficult to focu…

This is pretty much what I came to say. Both of my parents came from very poor families, but they both valued education very highly. My brother and I may as well been born into a wealthy family since we both got every educational resource we needed, but up until I was 10 years old my parents had to make huge sacrifices to achieve that. In these poor communities I'm seeing a tendency to stigmatize education... that's…

> You don't need to be an elite to have access to the critical material, you just need the desire to pursue it.

For most children and teenagers, this desire is at least partly a function of one’s peers. Hence the premium placed on houses in certain school districts or neighborhoods.

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

#395

Post by randomopining »

CraneWorm wrote: post #143
esens wrote: post #37

Working hard but doing so for someone else can often not lead to significant gains. Many services like Uber or InstaCart or even McDonalds or Amazon Warehouse or Walmart or Retail Sales or call center, you can work hard but there is no where to progress to. Your rewards are capped. You need to find a way to work hard such that your rewards are not capped artificially. Startups were you get equity. Large companies whe…

Post-scarcity cannot come fast enough; the (external) need to work hard should just die in a fire.

That external need is the force that spurs on evolution lol. Literally you would not be here if not for that force.

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

#396

Post by ceilingcorner »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #350
ceilingcorner wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of things that are social “musts” today were “wants” 30 years ago. Smart phones, unlimited data, eating out 3-4 times a week, Uber Eats delivery. None of this is necessary in order to survive, but not indulging is seen as odd or socially awkward.

I'd disagree about "not necessary". Cellphones are a necessity now because payphones have gone the way of the dinosaur, there go 100 dollars for a family plan, internet is a necessity, there go 50 dollars more, and especially the expenses for the second car because no one can make do on one income, especially at the lower end of the income scale. And childcare expenses, of course. Especially childcare.

Big difference between a 5 year old $50 Android smartphone and the latest $800 iPhone. I know a lot of people who own the latter yet claim to struggle financially.

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

#397

Post by s1artibartfast »

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…

>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.

Starting conditions are a factor, but a terrible predictor. If you look at income by the quintile you are born into, it is closer to random than 1:1 predictive.

It is most true for the poor, where those born into the bottom 20% have about 45% chance of ending up in the same quintile. This means most people born into the bottom 20% improve their economic status, and most people currently in the bottom 20% started above it. On the opposite end, a majority of people born into the top 20% end up in a lower quintile. [1, table 2]

https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/70266/...

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

#398

Post by jonathankoren »

merpnderp wrote: post #270
stelcodes wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> 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.

True, but smallpox blankets did happen. Not often. Perhaps only once, but it was documented at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Fort_Pitt

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

#399

Post by colanderman »

h2odragon wrote: post #168
colanderman wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first I've heard of tipping trash collectors. Apparently it's a thing? How, logistically, does one even accomplish that?

Tape an envelope prominently to the top of your trash cans; or go out and catch them for a face to face chat.

I live in a relatively safe neighborhood and have no confidence $20 left taped to a trash can on the curb would survive the night. I guess one could tape it inside the lid? Even that wouldn't survive the night in grittier neighborhoods.

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

#400

Post by Bukhmanizer »

fullstop wrote: post #91
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…

Starting conditions help tremendously, and I'm not doubting that in the least. One other thing which helps, significantly, is how much the parents value education. Most of the people I know who grew up very poor but now have money had parents that valued education, and pushed their kids to learn. They didn't have shelves of books at home, but they did visit the library weekly. It has to be extremely difficult to focu…

It’s not just education, but a specific type of education. The final path to a good career is pretty winding and complicated.

As someone who had to figure it out on their own, and is now a bit older, I can say I knew basically nothing when I started choosing my career path.

I used to think that the best route was the trade schools, because you can make a lot of money fast. But then I saw a lot of my friend’s salaries peak at ~$70000, and every year their jobs got harder and harder as they got older.

Then I used to think the most successful would be my friends in the hard sciences, like physics or chemistry, because they usually were extremely intelligent. But then after their PHDs, many just seemed lost and didn’t really know what kind of jobs to go to.

Of my cohort, it seems like the only successful people were:

1. The biology people who became doctors 2. The liberal arts people who became lawyers 3. Certain engineers (not civil) 4. Techies

That’s it. The 4 good career paths available to most of my high school/college cohort.

Everything else didn’t seem to matter. The business majors, and psych majors, and sociology majors who didn’t have parents to give them cushy jobs got stuck in entry-level hell.

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