10 ms·

I doubt anyone thinks all failure is a result of bad work ethic. Of course much is due to mental illness, disability, etc. But a huge proportion of poverty ste

I doubt anyone thinks all failure is a result of bad work ethic. Of course much is due to mental illness, disability, etc. But a huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic. Some of the places in the USA with the highest underemployment are also places where employers are offering decent unskilled jobs and can't find enough workers. The worker gets hired, shows up for a few days, and then starts just not coming to work, randomly. Or he comes in later and later each day, arriving hours late. Or he takes breaks that extend to hours long. Work ethic is a huge part of the problem, and the constant denial that many poor people (not all) do have everything they need to lift themselves up, and simply choose not to do so, is itself a denial of their human agency and ensures that the policy/cultural changes that could lead them out of poverty are not made. Ultimately, it's staggeringly harmful to them. In the end the wealthy and the poor both have to make changes to end poverty. It's a team effort. It's not up to a rich savior class to come and fix the dirty people from the outside. (I'm convinced that many wealthy people don't understand this because they really can't imagine what a true lack of worth ethic looks like; they've just never been at close range with it for an extended period of time and had to face up to the fact that it is a real thing and it is harmful. Ultimately that's a consequence of the closed social bubbles we live in now; we just don't know the other classes because we're so isolated from them.)

mjevans 9y ago
It would be interesting if social research looked in to /why/ that was the case. Is there some ongoing problem disrupting these people's lives? Other family or social obligations that interfere with the hours the employer desires? Maybe a different shift (working hours during the day/night) would be better aligned with their biorhythms; it might require placement in a different job. I for one, know that I don't function at all well in the mornings.
- Banthum 9y ago
  I'm sure there are extenuating circumstances in many cases, yes. Why is it so unacceptable to think that they are simply humans, like you and me, with agency and power over their own choices, with responsibility for the outcomes of their choices, who are simply choosing to do a thing that you and I believe to be a really bad choices? A pattern of such choices is labeled "bad work ethic" but at the end of the day, bad work ethic is just a long series of individual choices to do something besides working.
  - gnaritas 9y ago
    It's not unacceptable, it's just incorrect and frankly vile.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    Calling something a "choice" really does not capture the complexity of what it means to be human. "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do." Romans 7:15.
    - kamaal 9y ago
      Yet if you make a decision, its for all practical purposes a 'choice'. There is generally a misalignment between your value system and the output your are expecting. In simple terms its called 'Hypocrisy'.
  - Mz 9y ago
    bad work ethic is just a long series of individual choices to do something besides working. http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-wrong-metrics.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-wrong-me...
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
      - Mz 9y ago
        Based on karma. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14540236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14540236
  - kelnos 9y ago
    I'm sure for some small percentage of homeless/poor people, you're right in that they've made bad choices and that's how they've ended up there. But if you're suggesting that this phenomenon is somehow common, then you need to back that up, since it flies in the face of prevailing research on the subject.
- Mz 9y ago
  There is substantial research. Years ago, I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU. In a nutshell: 1. Most homeless people have one or more intractable personal problems, such as a medical problem, mental health issue or learning disability. 2. They end up homeless when their intractable personal problems finally cause them to run out of all resources and options and causes their social safety net to fray and come undone. When no one will let you sleep on their couch one more time while job hunting again, etc. 3. There is a huge and deepening affordable housing shortage in the U.S. This goes back decades. Homelessness is a growing trend nationwide because a growing percentage of the population simply cannot afford housing. It is too expensive. Addressing this piece would go a long way towards easing the burden on people with other unsolvable problems. But there is no real will to do so.
  - bbarn 9y ago
    I don't think it's reasonable to blame homelessness on housing costs. The people that can afford a 500 dollar a month rent are not the ones on the street because it went up to 600 dollars a month. It's the people that can't afford a 100 dollar a month rent that are homeless.
    - jononor 9y ago
      Most homeless people had a home at some point. They were scraping by for a while. But if there is nothing left after paying rent+food, then you incredibly vulnerable. Something will happen that you need some buffer cash for. An spare 100 a month can make all the difference in such situations.
    - Mz 9y ago
      With my student loan paid off, I could afford about $400 a month in rent for me and my two adult sons. Good luck finding decent housing (not a trailer) anywhere in the U.S. for that amount. And not because it can't be done, but because houses have grown to more than twice their average size compared to the 1950s and then the low end is basically just trailers. There is almost no middle class housing left. It is all either slum housing (I count trailers as slum housing) or housing for rich people. Many people on the street do have an income. They just don't have enough income to afford a middle class lifestyle. I have actually studied this space in school and everything.
- xhedley 9y ago
  Psychological research indicates that "stressors" associated with poverty impair executive decision function such as ability to prioritise medium term goals (get to work on time) versus short term desires (stay in bed). Stressors include not only practical items such as not having food for breakfast or not having clean clothes, but also "low social economic status" itself.
chillacy 9y ago
It's a shame this is getting downvoted because it's not really inflammatory or even untrue. I think it's fair to say that this topic is complex enough that both this comment and the parent comment are true (which is that poverty is a function of both factors that can be controlled and factors that cannot be controlled).
- tptacek 9y ago
  "A huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic" is an extraordinary claim, requiring extraordinary evidence.
  - enraged_camel 9y ago
    Yeah. Specifically, if someone is confident enough to attach a qualifier to a numeric descriptor (i.e. "proportion"), they should demonstrate that they also have the quantities to support that qualifier.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      It doesn't help that the unsupported extraordinary assertion here casts aspersions on people in poverty. It's one of those things you really want to be sure you're right about before saying. Hence: downvotes.
      - Frondo 9y ago
        Yeah, that too. Bad work ethic, or work ethic that isn't compatible with the system they're submerged in? If you want to frame it in terms of choices, what is it about the modern work world that is so intolerable that a person would willingly choose poverty, homelessness, etc., over work? If so many people are "bad," how can you say the system is good and it's the people...
  - kamaal 9y ago
    And yet if it actually was due to a bad work ethic, not acknowledging it means the bad work ethic continues. Sometimes these are good points to tick away when you are trying to identify what your problems are.
LMYahooTFY 9y ago
>I doubt anyone thinks all failure is a result of bad work ethic. Of course much is due to mental illness, disability, etc. I'd be interested in more quantified data in this point, as I know many people who hold this as a foundational principle in their life.
rayiner 9y ago
> But a huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic. Is there a morally relevant distinction between mental illness and bad work ethic? There is a lot of research to suggest that things we associate with "bad work ethic" (e.g. lack of impulse control) appear extremely early in childhood development and aren't things people necessarily have much control over. We need to stop moralizing things that people have no control over. We've realized this in a limited way--it is no longer acceptable to make fun of people with intellectual disabilities (IQ < 70). But there is still a weird doughnut hole were it is perfectly acceptable to make fun of people with 70 < IQ < 90. Your mental abilities are mostly an accident of birth, like having rich parents. There is no moral dimension to it. There is a kernel of something I agree with in your post, though: social structures can add a lot of value in helping people who might not be that bright or might have problems with impulse control to lead productive lives. That's a major shortcoming of our current approaches to fighting poverty, which emphasize individualism.
- Retric 9y ago
  Lead poisoning and 'bad work ethic/poor impulse control' can look very similar. However, poor work ethic as a mental shortcut plays into the just world viewpoint. Where lead poisoning contradicts it which is IMO why so many people think in terms of work ethic.
  - jdietrich 9y ago
    >Lead poisoning and 'bad work ethic/poor impulse control' can look very similar. As can the effects of traumatic brain injury and chronic abuse or neglect.
- harryh 9y ago
  The correlation between intelligence (IQ) and conscientiousness (work ethic) is not at all clear btw. Some studies have actually found a negative correlation.
  - alphonsegaston 9y ago
    The most intelligent people I've know have tended to be quite lazy. The most successful were often smart, but more commonly passionate and hard working.
plink 9y ago
So, there is an entire class of people identifiable by their poor work ethic? Your fourth paragraph makes a stab at Randian logic, but without her grammatical clarity.
gnaritas 9y ago
> But a huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic. Such thinking is the problem, it's juvenile, simplistic, and wrong.
- Imostlylurk 9y ago
  > Such thinking is the problem, it's juvenile, simplistic, and wrong. I have three questions: >Such thinking is the problem - What problem? >It's juvenile - What makes that idea juvenile? >and wrong - What does this mean? I hear religious people use wrong this way often, but do not understand what it means.
enraged_camel 9y ago
>>But a huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic. What proportion exactly? How do you know it's "huge"? I mean, what you describe definitely happens to some extent, but I'm curious as to how you reached the conclusion that it's really common. Because I have counter-anecdotes. The most common scenario I personally witness is that an unemployed person finally lands a job, and they work their asses off to make sure they don't lose it. They arrive early, leave late and generally jump at every opportunity to prove their worth. So I'm very skeptical that poor work ethic is a significant root cause of poverty. Of course, if you have actual numbers, I would be interested to read more.
- Banthum 9y ago
  There's a good statistical analysis of the declining work ethic in some classes of white Americans in Charles Murray's book Coming Apart. I recommend the book. It's not directly about this mainly, but the work ethic decline is statistically identifiable and localizable to a specific class of white American (who are also a class that people like you and I have essentially zero personal contact with).
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
djb_hackernews 9y ago
If we accept your "unreliable worker" theory, have you considered that there are outside factors besides a lack of "work ethic" (which is some real quality bs to begin with) that would make a person unreliable? If you have, what were they and why were they ruled out? I find that people that make the work ethic argument are the ones that don't want to acknowledge that they didn't exactly earn their place. They think they rose to their position purely by their own work ethic and that makes them intrinsically special and possessing traits that others are deficient in.
peterwwillis 9y ago
> a huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic Even if you had proof (you don't) that bad work ethic makes up a "huge" (not clearly defined) proportion of poverty (it doesn't), the symptom is not the stem. Poverty stems from poverty, and a lack of a support structure to help impoverished people become "upwardly mobile". This is easy to see, and easy to prove, as most people in poverty simply do not have access to enough resources to overcome poverty. Work ethic often doesn't even factor into it because simply being able to work is a big problem, not a lack of will. > the wealthy and the poor both have to make changes to end poverty. [..] It's not up to a rich savior class to come and fix the dirty people from the outside. It's up to the whole society. In the US, the issue is systemic. If the people willed it, their elected representatives could simply pass laws to put the support structures in place to end poverty as we know it in 10 years. Over half of our national budget is spent on a military that loses nonsense wars in broken countries. We imprison more people than the two other biggest imprisoning countries combined. We don't care for our poor. We don't care for our veterans. We don't care for our mentally ill or drug addicts. We don't care for black people, trans people, women, etc. We just don't care. We don't need a wealthy elite to fix our problems. We need to join the rest of the developed world in giving a shit about our people at all.
thex10 9y ago
> But a huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic. Been burned by your underpaid workers' flakiness much? Citation, please. > In the end the wealthy and the poor both have to make changes to end poverty. It's a team effort. It's not up to a rich savior class to come and fix the dirty people from the outside. Is anyone saying this? My impression is that most poor people want jobs, and are begging political figures to come Bring Jobs! How do you interpret that as poor work ethic? (Meanwhile, I'm eyerolling at the "the dirty people" comment. Are you trying to virtue signal your superiority over those people here?)
- rrauenza 9y ago
  I apologize for citing something without citing something, but perhaps it will help someone else find it - there was a study or work program that found paying high poverty people every two weeks was too long a gap. Many workers wouldn't return to the jobs. When they went to a daily pay, the workers were much more likely to stay on the job long term.
  - dx034 9y ago
    Yes but that's not bad work ethics. If you don't have any money and not even a bank account, two weeks between paychecks can be too long. If any unforeseen expense turns up, most of us can just pay by credit card and push it to the next pay check. If you can't do that, you have to find another job if the one you have only pays you in 10 days.
    - dazc 9y ago
      In the UK payments are often made monthly. This is bad enough if you are short of cash but factor in a lot of jobs are now bogus self-employed gigs or agency work where you can also find yourself extending credit to a business that has less cash than you do. Resulting in underpayment or , sometimes, no payment at all. A lot of folks in the UK have a view that if they lost their job they can just do 'any-job' until they find something else. These 'any-jobs' either are not available in the way people think they are or they fall into the category outlined above.
mongmong 9y ago
I don't necessarily agree with you but I find it frustrating you're being downvoted when you didn't say anything inflammatory.
- thephyber 9y ago
  HN Guidelines: > Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
phugoid 9y ago
This assumes that wealthy people have a better work ethic than the poor, to the extent that they might not even be able to imagine what a bad work ethic looks like. In my experience, that doesn't match reality at all. Manual labor jobs are generally unforgiving of slack. Workers are punished quite severely for minor offenses that are not even noticed in a techie or white-collar environment. Showing up five minutes late? A minor uniform violation? Not performing well for one day? Calling in sick a few too may times?
- vacri 9y ago
  In support of what you said: yesterday I took a couple of hours off to visit an art gallery with my mother, visiting from interstate. The permission I had was "hey folks, I'm going to do this", knowing that they could say "actually we need you here" if it wasn't okay. I've worked in retail, in warehouses, as a medical scientist, in call centres, in various forms of support, and in none of these lower-level jobs could I even dream of doing such a thing. I get my stuff done and have the same work ethic I always have, but I have a lot more flexibility as a white-collar worker.
amalcon 9y ago
A problem has three types of cause: - The event that precipitated the problem - The best place to intervene to correct or prevent the problem - The moralistic cause; the person to whom responsibility may be assigned Always be aware of which one you're using. If your goal is to actually solve the problem, make sure that it's the second.
michaelmrose 9y ago
People with the work ethic you describe are very very shortly found in tents on sleeping bags on the side of the road with signs that say "anything helps". While there is certainly a small minority of such folks around half a percent of the US population in fact the threadmill between not bothering to come to work and homelessness is so short that not many people are en route at any given time. On the other hand around 14% live in poverty in contrast. Looking at the houeshold income anyone in the bottom quarter is barely scraping by given the cost of health insurance and house costs. Your perception is an elaborate fiction informed by no actual data. Most of the people in poverty are working hard to stay in one place.
candu 9y ago
[citation needed]

mjevans 9y ago

It would be interesting if social research looked in to /why/ that was the case. Is there some ongoing problem disrupting these people's lives? Other family or social obligations that interfere with the hours the employer desires? Maybe a different shift (working hours during the day/night) would be better aligned with their biorhythms; it might require placement in a different job. I for one, know that I don't function at all well in the mornings.

Banthum 9y ago
I'm sure there are extenuating circumstances in many cases, yes. Why is it so unacceptable to think that they are simply humans, like you and me, with agency and power over their own choices, with responsibility for the outcomes of their choices, who are simply choosing to do a thing that you and I believe to be a really bad choices? A pattern of such choices is labeled "bad work ethic" but at the end of the day, bad work ethic is just a long series of individual choices to do something besides working.
- gnaritas 9y ago
  It's not unacceptable, it's just incorrect and frankly vile.
- rayiner 9y ago
  Calling something a "choice" really does not capture the complexity of what it means to be human. "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do." Romans 7:15.
  - kamaal 9y ago
    Yet if you make a decision, its for all practical purposes a 'choice'. There is generally a misalignment between your value system and the output your are expecting. In simple terms its called 'Hypocrisy'.
- Mz 9y ago
  bad work ethic is just a long series of individual choices to do something besides working. http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-wrong-metrics.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-wrong-me...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
    - Mz 9y ago
      Based on karma. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14540236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14540236
- kelnos 9y ago
  I'm sure for some small percentage of homeless/poor people, you're right in that they've made bad choices and that's how they've ended up there. But if you're suggesting that this phenomenon is somehow common, then you need to back that up, since it flies in the face of prevailing research on the subject.
Mz 9y ago
There is substantial research. Years ago, I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU. In a nutshell: 1. Most homeless people have one or more intractable personal problems, such as a medical problem, mental health issue or learning disability. 2. They end up homeless when their intractable personal problems finally cause them to run out of all resources and options and causes their social safety net to fray and come undone. When no one will let you sleep on their couch one more time while job hunting again, etc. 3. There is a huge and deepening affordable housing shortage in the U.S. This goes back decades. Homelessness is a growing trend nationwide because a growing percentage of the population simply cannot afford housing. It is too expensive. Addressing this piece would go a long way towards easing the burden on people with other unsolvable problems. But there is no real will to do so.
- bbarn 9y ago
  I don't think it's reasonable to blame homelessness on housing costs. The people that can afford a 500 dollar a month rent are not the ones on the street because it went up to 600 dollars a month. It's the people that can't afford a 100 dollar a month rent that are homeless.
  - jononor 9y ago
    Most homeless people had a home at some point. They were scraping by for a while. But if there is nothing left after paying rent+food, then you incredibly vulnerable. Something will happen that you need some buffer cash for. An spare 100 a month can make all the difference in such situations.
  - Mz 9y ago
    With my student loan paid off, I could afford about $400 a month in rent for me and my two adult sons. Good luck finding decent housing (not a trailer) anywhere in the U.S. for that amount. And not because it can't be done, but because houses have grown to more than twice their average size compared to the 1950s and then the low end is basically just trailers. There is almost no middle class housing left. It is all either slum housing (I count trailers as slum housing) or housing for rich people. Many people on the street do have an income. They just don't have enough income to afford a middle class lifestyle. I have actually studied this space in school and everything.
xhedley 9y ago
Psychological research indicates that "stressors" associated with poverty impair executive decision function such as ability to prioritise medium term goals (get to work on time) versus short term desires (stay in bed). Stressors include not only practical items such as not having food for breakfast or not having clean clothes, but also "low social economic status" itself.

chillacy 9y ago

It's a shame this is getting downvoted because it's not really inflammatory or even untrue. I think it's fair to say that this topic is complex enough that both this comment and the parent comment are true (which is that poverty is a function of both factors that can be controlled and factors that cannot be controlled).

tptacek 9y ago
"A huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic" is an extraordinary claim, requiring extraordinary evidence.
- enraged_camel 9y ago
  Yeah. Specifically, if someone is confident enough to attach a qualifier to a numeric descriptor (i.e. "proportion"), they should demonstrate that they also have the quantities to support that qualifier.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    It doesn't help that the unsupported extraordinary assertion here casts aspersions on people in poverty. It's one of those things you really want to be sure you're right about before saying. Hence: downvotes.
    - Frondo 9y ago
      Yeah, that too. Bad work ethic, or work ethic that isn't compatible with the system they're submerged in? If you want to frame it in terms of choices, what is it about the modern work world that is so intolerable that a person would willingly choose poverty, homelessness, etc., over work? If so many people are "bad," how can you say the system is good and it's the people...
- kamaal 9y ago
  And yet if it actually was due to a bad work ethic, not acknowledging it means the bad work ethic continues. Sometimes these are good points to tick away when you are trying to identify what your problems are.

LMYahooTFY 9y ago

>I doubt anyone thinks all failure is a result of bad work ethic. Of course much is due to mental illness, disability, etc. I'd be interested in more quantified data in this point, as I know many people who hold this as a foundational principle in their life.

rayiner 9y ago

> But a huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic. Is there a morally relevant distinction between mental illness and bad work ethic? There is a lot of research to suggest that things we associate with "bad work ethic" (e.g. lack of impulse control) appear extremely early in childhood development and aren't things people necessarily have much control over. We need to stop moralizing things that people have no control over. We've realized this in a limited way--it is no longer acceptable to make fun of people with intellectual disabilities (IQ < 70). But there is still a weird doughnut hole were it is perfectly acceptable to make fun of people with 70 < IQ < 90. Your mental abilities are mostly an accident of birth, like having rich parents. There is no moral dimension to it. There is a kernel of something I agree with in your post, though: social structures can add a lot of value in helping people who might not be that bright or might have problems with impulse control to lead productive lives. That's a major shortcoming of our current approaches to fighting poverty, which emphasize individualism.

Retric 9y ago
Lead poisoning and 'bad work ethic/poor impulse control' can look very similar. However, poor work ethic as a mental shortcut plays into the just world viewpoint. Where lead poisoning contradicts it which is IMO why so many people think in terms of work ethic.
- jdietrich 9y ago
  >Lead poisoning and 'bad work ethic/poor impulse control' can look very similar. As can the effects of traumatic brain injury and chronic abuse or neglect.
harryh 9y ago
The correlation between intelligence (IQ) and conscientiousness (work ethic) is not at all clear btw. Some studies have actually found a negative correlation.
- alphonsegaston 9y ago
  The most intelligent people I've know have tended to be quite lazy. The most successful were often smart, but more commonly passionate and hard working.

plink 9y ago

So, there is an entire class of people identifiable by their poor work ethic? Your fourth paragraph makes a stab at Randian logic, but without her grammatical clarity.

gnaritas 9y ago

> But a huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic. Such thinking is the problem, it's juvenile, simplistic, and wrong.

Imostlylurk 9y ago
> Such thinking is the problem, it's juvenile, simplistic, and wrong. I have three questions: >Such thinking is the problem - What problem? >It's juvenile - What makes that idea juvenile? >and wrong - What does this mean? I hear religious people use wrong this way often, but do not understand what it means.

enraged_camel 9y ago

>>But a huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic. What proportion exactly? How do you know it's "huge"? I mean, what you describe definitely happens to some extent, but I'm curious as to how you reached the conclusion that it's really common. Because I have counter-anecdotes. The most common scenario I personally witness is that an unemployed person finally lands a job, and they work their asses off to make sure they don't lose it. They arrive early, leave late and generally jump at every opportunity to prove their worth. So I'm very skeptical that poor work ethic is a significant root cause of poverty. Of course, if you have actual numbers, I would be interested to read more.

Banthum 9y ago
There's a good statistical analysis of the declining work ethic in some classes of white Americans in Charles Murray's book Coming Apart. I recommend the book. It's not directly about this mainly, but the work ethic decline is statistically identifiable and localizable to a specific class of white American (who are also a class that people like you and I have essentially zero personal contact with).

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

djb_hackernews 9y ago

If we accept your "unreliable worker" theory, have you considered that there are outside factors besides a lack of "work ethic" (which is some real quality bs to begin with) that would make a person unreliable? If you have, what were they and why were they ruled out? I find that people that make the work ethic argument are the ones that don't want to acknowledge that they didn't exactly earn their place. They think they rose to their position purely by their own work ethic and that makes them intrinsically special and possessing traits that others are deficient in.

peterwwillis 9y ago

> a huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic Even if you had proof (you don't) that bad work ethic makes up a "huge" (not clearly defined) proportion of poverty (it doesn't), the symptom is not the stem. Poverty stems from poverty, and a lack of a support structure to help impoverished people become "upwardly mobile". This is easy to see, and easy to prove, as most people in poverty simply do not have access to enough resources to overcome poverty. Work ethic often doesn't even factor into it because simply being able to work is a big problem, not a lack of will. > the wealthy and the poor both have to make changes to end poverty. [..] It's not up to a rich savior class to come and fix the dirty people from the outside. It's up to the whole society. In the US, the issue is systemic. If the people willed it, their elected representatives could simply pass laws to put the support structures in place to end poverty as we know it in 10 years. Over half of our national budget is spent on a military that loses nonsense wars in broken countries. We imprison more people than the two other biggest imprisoning countries combined. We don't care for our poor. We don't care for our veterans. We don't care for our mentally ill or drug addicts. We don't care for black people, trans people, women, etc. We just don't care. We don't need a wealthy elite to fix our problems. We need to join the rest of the developed world in giving a shit about our people at all.

thex10 9y ago

> But a huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic. Been burned by your underpaid workers' flakiness much? Citation, please. > In the end the wealthy and the poor both have to make changes to end poverty. It's a team effort. It's not up to a rich savior class to come and fix the dirty people from the outside. Is anyone saying this? My impression is that most poor people want jobs, and are begging political figures to come Bring Jobs! How do you interpret that as poor work ethic? (Meanwhile, I'm eyerolling at the "the dirty people" comment. Are you trying to virtue signal your superiority over those people here?)

rrauenza 9y ago
I apologize for citing something without citing something, but perhaps it will help someone else find it - there was a study or work program that found paying high poverty people every two weeks was too long a gap. Many workers wouldn't return to the jobs. When they went to a daily pay, the workers were much more likely to stay on the job long term.
- dx034 9y ago
  Yes but that's not bad work ethics. If you don't have any money and not even a bank account, two weeks between paychecks can be too long. If any unforeseen expense turns up, most of us can just pay by credit card and push it to the next pay check. If you can't do that, you have to find another job if the one you have only pays you in 10 days.
  - dazc 9y ago
    In the UK payments are often made monthly. This is bad enough if you are short of cash but factor in a lot of jobs are now bogus self-employed gigs or agency work where you can also find yourself extending credit to a business that has less cash than you do. Resulting in underpayment or , sometimes, no payment at all. A lot of folks in the UK have a view that if they lost their job they can just do 'any-job' until they find something else. These 'any-jobs' either are not available in the way people think they are or they fall into the category outlined above.

mongmong 9y ago

I don't necessarily agree with you but I find it frustrating you're being downvoted when you didn't say anything inflammatory.

thephyber 9y ago
HN Guidelines: > Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

phugoid 9y ago

This assumes that wealthy people have a better work ethic than the poor, to the extent that they might not even be able to imagine what a bad work ethic looks like. In my experience, that doesn't match reality at all. Manual labor jobs are generally unforgiving of slack. Workers are punished quite severely for minor offenses that are not even noticed in a techie or white-collar environment. Showing up five minutes late? A minor uniform violation? Not performing well for one day? Calling in sick a few too may times?

vacri 9y ago
In support of what you said: yesterday I took a couple of hours off to visit an art gallery with my mother, visiting from interstate. The permission I had was "hey folks, I'm going to do this", knowing that they could say "actually we need you here" if it wasn't okay. I've worked in retail, in warehouses, as a medical scientist, in call centres, in various forms of support, and in none of these lower-level jobs could I even dream of doing such a thing. I get my stuff done and have the same work ethic I always have, but I have a lot more flexibility as a white-collar worker.

amalcon 9y ago

A problem has three types of cause: - The event that precipitated the problem - The best place to intervene to correct or prevent the problem - The moralistic cause; the person to whom responsibility may be assigned Always be aware of which one you're using. If your goal is to actually solve the problem, make sure that it's the second.

michaelmrose 9y ago

People with the work ethic you describe are very very shortly found in tents on sleeping bags on the side of the road with signs that say "anything helps". While there is certainly a small minority of such folks around half a percent of the US population in fact the threadmill between not bothering to come to work and homelessness is so short that not many people are en route at any given time. On the other hand around 14% live in poverty in contrast. Looking at the houeshold income anyone in the bottom quarter is barely scraping by given the cost of health insurance and house costs. Your perception is an elaborate fiction informed by no actual data. Most of the people in poverty are working hard to stay in one place.

candu 9y ago

[citation needed]