23 ms·

Stop the “Hard Work” Obsession

101 points by 0x142857 6y ago

demifiend 6y ago
I'm already there and don't need this article. If hard work was enough, single parents with jobs would be billionaires.
robert_foss 6y ago
Hard Work and the American Dream are some of most often repeated falsehoods about the US. The US is one the worst Western countries when looking the actual metric of Social mobility. As of 2020 the US is 27 after Lithuania in Social mobility[1]. [1] https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index-2020-why-economies-benefit-from-fixing-inequality https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index...
- atemerev 6y ago
  WEF is using strange definitions of “social mobility”, to say the least. How many newly made millionaires from originally poor families are there each year? Now _that’s_ social mobility, and nobody can beat America in that regard. Speaking as a European.
  - robert_foss 6y ago
    People becoming millionaires just isn't a common outcome anywhere. But moving from poverty to middle class is maybe the more important one. America is objectively bad at both.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - bserge 6y ago
    Looks like, once again, the USA is a country of extremes. Homeless to millionaire, no healthcare and best healthcare, least freedom and most freedom. Europe is more moderate, you can get help if you're really poor and you can become middle class; you can't medicate properly but they will save your life for free; you've got basic freedoms but the ceiling is lower, etc.
    - atemerev 6y ago
      I like extremes.
Proven 6y ago
Very whiney. > They work their ass of, but don’t have all that much to show for. Labor theory of value has been long discredited. If you're tirelessly doing the wrong thing all day long, how prosperous should you be? But most importantly, what's supposed to be guaranteed is the equality in opportunities, not in outcomes. If you are trying to become a programmer while you could make a better living as an electrician, why should someone ("society", aka people who chose wisely and now pay tax) fund your career aspirations? Complete nonsense! "Hard work" isn't guaranteed to make you well off, it's just an ingredient that merely increases your chances. Everything else being equal, a harder Bangladeshi fisherman will usually be better off than a lazy one. That has nothing to do with how much Norway invests in its fleet, or Bangladesh in education. No one owes you anything. Lose that entitlement attitude.
cheschire 6y ago
Okay, so stepping even further back, why is social mobility considered an important metric? Why can’t I just walk away from social strata to begin with, and live my life happily as a “lower class” citizen living in the woods if I want? What if the goal of changing social strata is actually just a larger scale version of the Peter Principle? Last year I saw a chart posted on imgur with habits and traits of lower, middle, and upper class people. I’m sure many saw that and thought “oh I need to act like X so I can stop being Y.” What I saw was contentment that I am in the social tier that feels right to me. I don’t need “more,” I would struggle with “less.”
- yrimaxi 6y ago
  We see research all the time about how poor people are more likely to have bad life outcomes. Not in the circular sense of “continually becoming lower class”, but in terms of things like health. You could go live in the woods in which case you might not suffer from the same fates. Until civilization starts to encroach on your cabin (I think that’s what happened to the Unabomber).
- roenxi 6y ago
  And the sister observation - we can't all be in charge. High mobility is good because at least the people in charge aren't chosen by heritage, but regardless there are going to be people who don't have a lot and are perfectly respectable. And entitled to feel satisfied. May as well work hard and feel proud about it, what is the alternative? Work lazy and feel good about it? Hard work isn't path to riches, but it is a path to respectability.
- orange_tee 6y ago
  Because if you are weak (and being poor is a form of weakness), then you are at the mercy of those who are strong. Now there are to ways for the weak/poor to combat this. The first is to join forces and act as one. The problem with this is that to do so one must give away some of their freedom (because they need to act as one). The other option is to climb the ladder and become richer and therefore stronger. And that is why social mobility matters. Wealth and power are intrinsically linked. You could try to just mind your own business and live your simple life, but it is not up to you. It is up to those stronger than you to let you live your simple life. Maybe you get lucky and maybe not.
p0d 6y ago
It is good for individuals to work hard and invest in learning. I like the comment by John Wesley that you should make all you can, save all you can and give all you can. I think we often experience disappointment in life when we seek much wealth. I don't want to be mega-wealthy and I don't to be poor. I hope my government try to do their best for my society. On a personal level I also try to help those less fortunate than myself.
snicky 6y ago
The author kinda lost me when he claimed the social mobility in USA is "shockingly low" pointing to the article showing it's just 13 percent points behind Norway. That is not a shocking difference.
- atemerev 6y ago
  European social mobility is quite low in general. European countries are optimized for welfare, not social mobility. These are wildly different things.
  - drchickensalad 6y ago
    I can't find any facts except the opposite http://reports.weforum.org/social-mobility-report-2020/social-mobility-rankings/ http://reports.weforum.org/social-mobility-report-2020/socia...
    - inglor_cz 6y ago
      I wonder how this is measured. Especially the Roma population in Central Europe seems to be stuck in endless circle of crime and misery, regardless of money and effort poured into the ghettos. Roma who escape those conditions are rare, and they almost always marry someone "white" and move as far from their original community as possible.
  - orange_tee 6y ago
    Yep. I would say it is even harder (and also the popular opinion here) to not be rich and become rich, in Europe. Social mobility here means that if you are born destitute you have a chance to become part of the middle-income class, where the middle-income class is significantly poorer than the American middle class.
    - atemerev 6y ago
      My point exactly.
    - 6y ago
loopz 6y ago
Hard Work is great when it benefits the person doing the work. Expecting "Free Work" however, is exploitation passing the costs to society and the workers.
aritztg 6y ago
Interesting thing to think about, yes. Who knows if people from Bangladesh had found oil in the 50s, maybe today some Bangladeshi would have written a post about hard work and good quality of life, ignoring this particular ingredient.
- bojan 6y ago
  While it is a point, the fact is that other Nordic countries, Benelux, and France all have similar attitudes to the work-life balance, and not all of them have access to infinite money like Norway does.
  - the-dude 6y ago
    The Netherlands is infamous for the Dutch disease, courtesy of our natural gas resources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
    - bojan 6y ago
      Correct me if I am wrong, but I think a vast majority of that money went to building bicycle and traffic infrastructure. We did not put it in the savings like Norway did. We'll see soon how we will manage without that income - if they do actually shut down the fields.
  - deleted 6y ago
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- cfrs 6y ago
  That is questionable, people from Russia and Saudi Arabia had found way more oil in mid XX
  - aritztg 6y ago
    Nobody said it was the only ingredient. Culture helps, as the wealth.
- 6y ago
marvin 6y ago
The Nordics have taken a special role in the global economic system: Almost all of the large companies are in some sense high tech. The economies are also quite heterogenous. Norway is probably the least good example example, due to the relative dominance of the oil & gas sector, but if you look at the stock market index of Denmark or Finland, for example, you'll find that the top companies are in different industries, exporting globally and world leaders in their respective niche. I've included a Nordics fund in my global stock market portfolio, since this small part of the world economy is disproportionately diversified in high tech. I'm sure this can be duplicated elsewhere, through education and increasing the reliability of institutions. It's the kind of non-zero-sum development that would leave the world better off as a whole. In fact, I'm a bit frustrated that Norway lags behind the other Nordics in this respect. There's something about our country that slows us down when it comes to building profitable export industries.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  "The economies are also quite heterogenous." Collapse of Nokia was very traumatic for Finland, it was a classical case of having your eggs in one basket. I think you never came close to such an earthquake in Norway.
  - IkmoIkmo 6y ago
    Well, Oil is 18% of Norwegian GDP, Nokia topped out at 4%. Of course I'm comparing a sector vs a company but, in a way, Nokia was a sector of itself, and the Oil industry in Norway is dominated by a few companies like Equinor. So, not sure if its that much more heterogenous than Finland, but yes no such earthquake has happened yet.
    - MrDresden 6y ago
      As a tangental note Iceland is still trying to diversify its portfolio having started with only fishing, then adding aluminum, then (catastrophically!) finance with the latest being tourism. There are some interesting tech companies around (for instance one involed in the pfizer's covid supplychain, genetics, mmorpgs, ai, bionics and food processing machinery) but the lack of funding is making it real difficult for new startups to take flight.
AussieWog93 6y ago
I've noticed that, on a personal level, people seem to perceive the value of others' work not in terms of how much was created, but how much they sacrificed in the process. ie, we seem to care more about our colleagues'/employees' blood, sweat and tears than the achievement of our (joint) goals. The economy, on the other hand, doesn't give a damn about anything except hard results. I think this is more of a problem with our evolved social instincts not being well adapted to modern industrial capitalism than a quirk of American culture.
- Bakary 6y ago
  >I think this is more of a problem with our evolved social instincts not being well adapted to modern industrial capitalism than a quirk of American culture. Perhaps we should work towards a society that offers better incentives in that case? I don't see what the point was of inventing technology if we still have to fight like crabs in an individualistic bucket.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
White collar worker here from a background of poverty (collecting change at McDonald’s parking lots as a child). I feel that my hard work happened during school. I remember studying for multiple 16 hour days over the years while others partied hoping for a C+. I have to remind myself of this sometimes when it feels like my job is ‘too easy’ compared to my past jobs of washing dishes or moving inventory by hand.
bluGill 6y ago
Hard work on the right thing is key to social mobility. CEOs work hard, and hard to work hard to get there. Long hours are common. In one "work life balance" class we finished the section on personal goals and everyone was ready for the break when the instructor said something like "I can tell you are low level employees, when I give this section to executives they get mad as they realize that their personal goals are to spend more time with family and they are instead preparing for another long international trip" I'd love their pay, but I'm not willing to give up that much family time. I have worked construction jobs. The body is exhausted at the end of the day, but it is always satisfing at the end of the day to look back on what you have done. However because anyone can do it there isn't as much value in it and so it doesn't pay as well. What hard work you do is more important than how hard you work. However once you have picked the area to work hard work is a second key to getting more. Of course eventually you need to decide how much is enough. This is a personal question and there is no right answer. What doesn't work is for zero people in society to work (at least not at out current automation technology level). Someone needs to grow food and make shelter. Someone needs to act in the latest TV shows (even though there are enough reruns to fill a lifetime so this work could be eliminated, and it has always been possible to live without TV).
- enma 6y ago
  "It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do." Elbert Hubbard
- jk20 6y ago
  So the reason why a CEO earns 100 times more than a rank and file employee is that he pulls 100 times more hours... Working excessively long hours is just showing off, productivity inevitably drops after a certain amount of time. Also much of the "work" of CEOs is just running meetings.
tomhoward 6y ago
Does it really need to be pointed out that the notion of an "average" economic producer, while tenuous in any sizeable population, is especially meaningless in a country like China, where you're averaging "very hard working" tech workers in Shanghai with "also-very-hard-working" subsistence farmers and unskilled labourers? I accept the notion that simplistic glorification of "hard work" is unhelpful and often counterproductive, but most people understand that "hard work" doesn't just mean physical exertion, but also good decision-making, sensible investing, scaling your impact, etc. Any concept is easy to write a disparaging essay about if you just focus on the most reductive interpretation. A far more useful essay on the topic would focus on what ability an "ordinary" person (particularly one without substantial inherited wealth) has to influence their life outcomes, and what kinds of things can be done at the individual and societal levels to improve the present situation.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  I agree with the first sentence, but I don't think that ,,most people understand that "hard work" doesn't just mean physical exertion, but also good decision-making, sensible investing, scaling your impact, etc.'' I made a great investment 8 years ago that made me retire quite early. I'm still just sitting on the investment although many people told me to sell it, and also some people want me to ,,work again''. For me not selling it is the ,,hard work'', as doing anything, like buying houses from the money, or ,,investing it to something sensible'', or ,,diversifying'' would be damaging to my impact. I don't see that people are understanding it.
- chii 6y ago
  > ability an "ordinary" person (particularly one without substantial inherited wealth) has to influence their life outcomes, and what kinds of things can be done at the individual and societal levels to improve the present situation. what can be done, as of today, is education, and applied effort to learn useful skills. That's what hard work is! That's why there's such a huge fuss every year in china regarding the national college entrance examination - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_College_Entrance_Examination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_College_Entrance_Exam... - entire towns are run silent and distraction free to allow students to study and take the exam.
thinkingemote 6y ago
Protestant work ethic. Work hard is Good. It's deep in the US culture. There's even a quote from Wesley about work in another comment here! So deep that in the recent "i was fired from X" articles, the subject points out that their colleagues were lazy and they worked hard. Whereas a southern (or culturally Catholic) European would see that this shows their colleagues also hated the place, and that there's no shame in being lazy. It's not an obsession and not something that can be stopped. It's utterly integral in all of American society even the left wing radical side. Progressivism is basically the belief that doing hard good work brings Good things. (A non protestant culture would emphasise belief and being a better person more than doing good works)
- logicchains 6y ago
  >(A non protestant culture would emphasise belief and being a better person more than doing good works) This sounds kind of odd, given protestants generally believe in salvation by faith (Jesus saves those who believe), and catholics believe in salvation by works.
  - webdev93 6y ago
    It's the opposite, actually.
    - rgblambda 6y ago
      Not true. Although it's an oversimplification to say that Catholics/Eastern Rite believe in faith and works while Protestants believe in faith alone. https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/faith-and-works-0 https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/faith-and-wo...
    - thinkingemote 6y ago
      Sorry I did over simplify things a bit...
  - rjtobin 6y ago
    I think the idea is that early Protestants like Calvinists believed in predestination - that it was already decided who would was going to heaven. One would think this would make the predestined not care about their actions, but the trick is that no one was sure who the predestined were. Since it was believed that the predestined would be exemplars of the faith, people would act like they thought the predestined would act. I’m not a psychologist or a theologian, but it sounds related to that concept in child psychology: when a child misbehaves, it’s better to say “you did a bad thing” than “you are bad”. The latter leads to the child labeling themselves as bad, suggesting that’s the natural way they should act.
christiansakai 6y ago
Agreeing with the article. Hard work works, especially in 1st world countries. I know that hard work alone would not make anyone successful. Luck plays a lot of factor as well, but the harder you work in general you increase the chance of you encountering turning point(s) that lead you to living a comfortable middle class life in 1st world country. Be rich (i.e, billionaire)? Maybe not, but not everyone can and should be rich. Of course no system is perfect, and you can't save everyone. There will be some people who fall through the cracks. But to setup a system such that no one will ever fall through the cracks is giving diminishing returns while taxing to the whole system. Rich people will always be with us, so does poor people. So does ignorant people who thinks pandemic is a hoax, so does lazy people. I grew up in a 3rd world country. Competition and social mobility in the USA is relatively way easier compared to my home country. Or I should say, a piece of cake, really. I'm not obsessed with hard work, but I'm not lazy either. I'm willing to Leetcode for 3 years, failed many interviews to finally got into a high paying tech company. Leetcode for 3 years non stop is way way way way easier than hauling bricks all day. I know what a hard work is, and I also know what useless futile hard work looks like. I worked through low paying jobs such as cleaning service, deli worker, laundry worker. My most back breaking work was cleaning an entire restaurant who got shutdown by a health department by myself. I only lasted 5 days. I had to scrub rat poop of walls and floors kneeling down with bleach everywhere by myself (yes that was minimum wage). The next back breaking work was an 18 hour shift non stop working at a deli during Christmas/New Year in a really busy touristy location. And like the author. My single mother was the one that pushes me through many educations. She said "I can't give you anything other than education, the rest is up to you".
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  I completely agree. I think it's hard for people living in countries that allow for social mobility like the USA to appreciate how good they have it. In the country I was born, if you start working by yourself you'll have to pay 50-60% in various taxes, making it really hard to become rich. People who care more about career than friends and family just leave. I also think it's amazing how access to information was democratised by internet. Your last phrase in the last year can be summed up to "I can just give you a computer, the rest is up to you" which is pretty much what my parents did before I started working online.
TrackerFF 6y ago
Work ethics and culture differs wildly around the world - and can obviously result in different levels of productivity. What I like about the Nordic countries, is that workers there are productive. When they're at work, they work - but at the same time, they have a healthy relationship to their workplace, due to strong workers rights / laws. Another thing to keep in mind, is that social conformity there, is on par with countries like Japan. In some countries, you're almost applauded if you manage to screw over your boss / company, by simply getting paid without doing much at all. For many, it's the dream situation - to just clock in at work, do nothing, get paid, and go home. That's not at all the case in the Nordic countries, where you're expected to work hard and produce. Strong sense of work ethic, labor laws, balanced with expectations of healthy work/life balance. (But with that said, there are some serious drawbacks. If your only goal is to accumulate as much wealth as possible, at all costs, and as quickly as possible - Nordic countries is not the right place, IMO).
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  >That's not at all the case in the Nordic countries, where you're expected to work hard and produce. After working in both Germany and The Netherlands I found this to be false as it depends more by company size rather than the country. In SMEs or family owned businesses people were busting their asses, often longer than 40h/week. In giant megacorps I saw plenty of incompetent clockwatchers, mostly in management positions, where the business could function the same without them but they were inexplicably kept around, at least as long as the business was booming. Often times they would just have their teams switch offices so they would have something to put in their annual performance review ("I optimized personell location, fostering a culture of synergy and creativity leading to future improvements in productivity and innovation").
  - distances 6y ago
    Neither Germany nor Netherlands belongs to the Nordic countries though?
    - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
hoppla 6y ago
I am not sure why I can’t read the article. Even if I request the desktop site, it still wants me to read it using an app...
jkingsbery 6y ago
As someone from the US, my experience is different from what this article portrays. When it's come up, everyone I've heard from acknowledges the role that their parents, schools, community and even luck play. A lot of the political dialog is also about how more people can have access to quality education. In my own state, we spend around $20k per student per year in the poorest school districts, so I don't think the story that the US just ignores poor communities and tells them to work harder is quite so simple.
deleted 6y ago
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emrah 6y ago
It all comes down to the definition of "hard", doesn't it. Seth Godin has a riff on how to think about hard work to get the most out of it: https://seths.blog/2019/02/hard-work/ https://seths.blog/2019/02/hard-work/
MrDresden 6y ago
This article only slightly dips its toe into the discussion of human capital. There isn't something inherently different about people in the nordic countries that makes them work well. It is the social systems and contracts we live in/with. I can be secure in the knowledge that I can not be laid off if I am doing good work, unless my employer can truly justify it (the myth of employers not being able to lay of employees is just that. There has to be a justifiable reason though). I know my healthcare is taken care of by the state, I get financial support if I want to start a family, get paid leave to be with my new born child, get most of my education for free, have high trust in the capabilities and fairness of the justice system and on and on. All of this creates a relaxed environment where most of the base needs in Maslow's pyramid are taken care of, and I don't need to worry about them. Similar to the Harvard study that showed that there was a sweet spot for the ratio of performance to salary increase, having these social norms & contracts in place leaves most of us free to get on with the work with a focus of doing the best we can each time without financial/health/education worries. And, ofcourse there are plenty of problems in the nordics! Let no one ever sell you a utopian fairytale telling you otherwise.
bassman9000 6y ago
So why are Norwegians so much richer than the Chinese if success is all about hard work? Oil. Stopped there.
Bakary 6y ago
What bothers me is just how much luck factors into absolutely everything. The family and region you are born in determines so much about your life that individual contributions seem laughable in comparison. Even then, your individual characteristics are heavily based on the former as well, in the form of nature and nurture. Even the ideas you might cultivate are the result of happening on the right resource at the right time. Lastly, it becomes harder and harder to explain the successes of outliers without it being mostly about luck and the environment. The notion of free will is under assault from all corners. Not to mention that apparently the brain makes decisions before the thought comes to your conscious awareness... Talking about luck is often instinctively interpreted as a method to avoid responsibility and cultivate laziness, but try as I might, ignoring this aspect of the world feels like a type of wishful religious thinking that is torn apart after even the most cursory investigation and thought. Generally, people will tend to attribute the bad things to luck and the good things to their own efforts, but in reality both seem to fall under the same purview.
- deleted 6y ago
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- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  The internship I got for my job was posted on our statewide college job board. My employer posted the position in a city 120 miles away from me. I still applied because I figured I could suck it up and do that for a summer. Turns out they needed someone in the exact city I was in because they also operated near my school as well. Also they wanted to extend it year round as well even though the posting just said "Summer." When you say it comes down to luck, it pretty much does. I'm fairly certain, if not 100% sure I was chosen simply because I was the only one in my area that applied. All the other positions in the location 120 miles away were filled and nobody wanted to move to my city. So to make things simple, they just chose me, a fresh OOP learned programmer with little to no skills except for writing a basic linked list in java.
  - rticesterp 6y ago
    I have a similar story. My first year of college I worked two 40 hour/week jobs during the summer and a 30 hour a week job during the school year. I was determined to get a well paying internship so I could reduce my work hours and still pay for school. There was a snow storm during the day of the spring career fair. Classes were cancelled but the career fair still happened. I was one of the only ones that showed up and passed along my resume to all of the tech companies that attended the career fair. Had it not been for the snow storm I would not have received an internship which led to my first time job. I was a college freshman, B student due to having to work and I had zero practical coding skills outside of one semester of C++. The snow storm was certainly luck but showing up at the career fair was not. However, much of my classmates in the dorm chose to play in the snow and I chose to go to the career fair. Luck does play a role but luck is really putting yourself in a position to take advantage of opportunity. If everyone that lived on campus showed up at that career fair I don't know if I would be in the position I am today (25 years later).
jrjarrett 6y ago
I work in the US for a “startup” company. They’ve gotten a big round of funding and are hiring like crazy. There’s constantly this exhortation to “work hard” and “overcome the obstacles”. People work ALL THE TIME. There’s an underlying pressure to be on constantly. And I’m asking “why?” I’m an IC. I am by no means invested in the company. If some big event happens, the C-levels and investors may pay out. I might be lucky and keep my job. I’ll bet money that the good health insurance we have and “unlimited” PTO goes away when that happens. So again, why should I put in extra to make someone else rich? I have no problem with working within reasonable bounds and trading my skills for a salary. I don’t want to start my own business.
- mbrodersen 6y ago
  I recommend always calculating your hour rate when comparing your salary with others. And yes you are 99.999% likely to not benefit at all from the extra hours you put in. If management can screw you over they will. The rare occasions where that doesn’t happen is rare enough to be headline news.
aipri 6y ago
as an engineer: base must be same for comparison. we've to keep all other resources same then hard work comes as major.
jk20 6y ago
The author has probably never heard the phrase "work is the last, desperate way how to get money". With the advent of the modern technology it was believed that people would spend three or so days per week doing "work" in the usual sense of the word, with leisure taking up the rest. Still, most people are denied any such benefits. Work is now more of a means of a social regulation: people are supposed to spend most of their waking hours transfixed to a computer screen in exchange for the minimum amount of money that will keep them alive to repeat the cycle the next day, so as not to endanger those who distribute said money.

101 points by 0x142857 6y ago

I'm already there and don't need this article. If hard work was enough, single parents with jobs would be billionaires.

Hard Work and the American Dream are some of most often repeated falsehoods about the US. The US is one the worst Western countries when looking the actual metric of Social mobility. As of 2020 the US is 27 after Lithuania in Social mobility[1]. [1] https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index-2020-why-economies-benefit-from-fixing-inequality https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index...

atemerev 6y ago
WEF is using strange definitions of “social mobility”, to say the least. How many newly made millionaires from originally poor families are there each year? Now _that’s_ social mobility, and nobody can beat America in that regard. Speaking as a European.
- robert_foss 6y ago
  People becoming millionaires just isn't a common outcome anywhere. But moving from poverty to middle class is maybe the more important one. America is objectively bad at both.
- deleted 6y ago
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- bserge 6y ago
  Looks like, once again, the USA is a country of extremes. Homeless to millionaire, no healthcare and best healthcare, least freedom and most freedom. Europe is more moderate, you can get help if you're really poor and you can become middle class; you can't medicate properly but they will save your life for free; you've got basic freedoms but the ceiling is lower, etc.
  - atemerev 6y ago
    I like extremes.

Proven 6y ago

Very whiney. > They work their ass of, but don’t have all that much to show for. Labor theory of value has been long discredited. If you're tirelessly doing the wrong thing all day long, how prosperous should you be? But most importantly, what's supposed to be guaranteed is the equality in opportunities, not in outcomes. If you are trying to become a programmer while you could make a better living as an electrician, why should someone ("society", aka people who chose wisely and now pay tax) fund your career aspirations? Complete nonsense! "Hard work" isn't guaranteed to make you well off, it's just an ingredient that merely increases your chances. Everything else being equal, a harder Bangladeshi fisherman will usually be better off than a lazy one. That has nothing to do with how much Norway invests in its fleet, or Bangladesh in education. No one owes you anything. Lose that entitlement attitude.

cheschire 6y ago

Okay, so stepping even further back, why is social mobility considered an important metric? Why can’t I just walk away from social strata to begin with, and live my life happily as a “lower class” citizen living in the woods if I want? What if the goal of changing social strata is actually just a larger scale version of the Peter Principle? Last year I saw a chart posted on imgur with habits and traits of lower, middle, and upper class people. I’m sure many saw that and thought “oh I need to act like X so I can stop being Y.” What I saw was contentment that I am in the social tier that feels right to me. I don’t need “more,” I would struggle with “less.”

yrimaxi 6y ago
We see research all the time about how poor people are more likely to have bad life outcomes. Not in the circular sense of “continually becoming lower class”, but in terms of things like health. You could go live in the woods in which case you might not suffer from the same fates. Until civilization starts to encroach on your cabin (I think that’s what happened to the Unabomber).
roenxi 6y ago
And the sister observation - we can't all be in charge. High mobility is good because at least the people in charge aren't chosen by heritage, but regardless there are going to be people who don't have a lot and are perfectly respectable. And entitled to feel satisfied. May as well work hard and feel proud about it, what is the alternative? Work lazy and feel good about it? Hard work isn't path to riches, but it is a path to respectability.
orange_tee 6y ago
Because if you are weak (and being poor is a form of weakness), then you are at the mercy of those who are strong. Now there are to ways for the weak/poor to combat this. The first is to join forces and act as one. The problem with this is that to do so one must give away some of their freedom (because they need to act as one). The other option is to climb the ladder and become richer and therefore stronger. And that is why social mobility matters. Wealth and power are intrinsically linked. You could try to just mind your own business and live your simple life, but it is not up to you. It is up to those stronger than you to let you live your simple life. Maybe you get lucky and maybe not.

p0d 6y ago

It is good for individuals to work hard and invest in learning. I like the comment by John Wesley that you should make all you can, save all you can and give all you can. I think we often experience disappointment in life when we seek much wealth. I don't want to be mega-wealthy and I don't to be poor. I hope my government try to do their best for my society. On a personal level I also try to help those less fortunate than myself.

snicky 6y ago

The author kinda lost me when he claimed the social mobility in USA is "shockingly low" pointing to the article showing it's just 13 percent points behind Norway. That is not a shocking difference.

atemerev 6y ago
European social mobility is quite low in general. European countries are optimized for welfare, not social mobility. These are wildly different things.
- drchickensalad 6y ago
  I can't find any facts except the opposite http://reports.weforum.org/social-mobility-report-2020/social-mobility-rankings/ http://reports.weforum.org/social-mobility-report-2020/socia...
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    I wonder how this is measured. Especially the Roma population in Central Europe seems to be stuck in endless circle of crime and misery, regardless of money and effort poured into the ghettos. Roma who escape those conditions are rare, and they almost always marry someone "white" and move as far from their original community as possible.
- orange_tee 6y ago
  Yep. I would say it is even harder (and also the popular opinion here) to not be rich and become rich, in Europe. Social mobility here means that if you are born destitute you have a chance to become part of the middle-income class, where the middle-income class is significantly poorer than the American middle class.
  - atemerev 6y ago
    My point exactly.
  - 6y ago

loopz 6y ago

Hard Work is great when it benefits the person doing the work. Expecting "Free Work" however, is exploitation passing the costs to society and the workers.

aritztg 6y ago

Interesting thing to think about, yes. Who knows if people from Bangladesh had found oil in the 50s, maybe today some Bangladeshi would have written a post about hard work and good quality of life, ignoring this particular ingredient.

bojan 6y ago
While it is a point, the fact is that other Nordic countries, Benelux, and France all have similar attitudes to the work-life balance, and not all of them have access to infinite money like Norway does.
- the-dude 6y ago
  The Netherlands is infamous for the Dutch disease, courtesy of our natural gas resources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
  - bojan 6y ago
    Correct me if I am wrong, but I think a vast majority of that money went to building bicycle and traffic infrastructure. We did not put it in the savings like Norway did. We'll see soon how we will manage without that income - if they do actually shut down the fields.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
cfrs 6y ago
That is questionable, people from Russia and Saudi Arabia had found way more oil in mid XX
- aritztg 6y ago
  Nobody said it was the only ingredient. Culture helps, as the wealth.
6y ago

marvin 6y ago

The Nordics have taken a special role in the global economic system: Almost all of the large companies are in some sense high tech. The economies are also quite heterogenous. Norway is probably the least good example example, due to the relative dominance of the oil & gas sector, but if you look at the stock market index of Denmark or Finland, for example, you'll find that the top companies are in different industries, exporting globally and world leaders in their respective niche. I've included a Nordics fund in my global stock market portfolio, since this small part of the world economy is disproportionately diversified in high tech. I'm sure this can be duplicated elsewhere, through education and increasing the reliability of institutions. It's the kind of non-zero-sum development that would leave the world better off as a whole. In fact, I'm a bit frustrated that Norway lags behind the other Nordics in this respect. There's something about our country that slows us down when it comes to building profitable export industries.

inglor_cz 6y ago
"The economies are also quite heterogenous." Collapse of Nokia was very traumatic for Finland, it was a classical case of having your eggs in one basket. I think you never came close to such an earthquake in Norway.
- IkmoIkmo 6y ago
  Well, Oil is 18% of Norwegian GDP, Nokia topped out at 4%. Of course I'm comparing a sector vs a company but, in a way, Nokia was a sector of itself, and the Oil industry in Norway is dominated by a few companies like Equinor. So, not sure if its that much more heterogenous than Finland, but yes no such earthquake has happened yet.
  - MrDresden 6y ago
    As a tangental note Iceland is still trying to diversify its portfolio having started with only fishing, then adding aluminum, then (catastrophically!) finance with the latest being tourism. There are some interesting tech companies around (for instance one involed in the pfizer's covid supplychain, genetics, mmorpgs, ai, bionics and food processing machinery) but the lack of funding is making it real difficult for new startups to take flight.

AussieWog93 6y ago

I've noticed that, on a personal level, people seem to perceive the value of others' work not in terms of how much was created, but how much they sacrificed in the process. ie, we seem to care more about our colleagues'/employees' blood, sweat and tears than the achievement of our (joint) goals. The economy, on the other hand, doesn't give a damn about anything except hard results. I think this is more of a problem with our evolved social instincts not being well adapted to modern industrial capitalism than a quirk of American culture.

Bakary 6y ago
>I think this is more of a problem with our evolved social instincts not being well adapted to modern industrial capitalism than a quirk of American culture. Perhaps we should work towards a society that offers better incentives in that case? I don't see what the point was of inventing technology if we still have to fight like crabs in an individualistic bucket.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

White collar worker here from a background of poverty (collecting change at McDonald’s parking lots as a child). I feel that my hard work happened during school. I remember studying for multiple 16 hour days over the years while others partied hoping for a C+. I have to remind myself of this sometimes when it feels like my job is ‘too easy’ compared to my past jobs of washing dishes or moving inventory by hand.

bluGill 6y ago

Hard work on the right thing is key to social mobility. CEOs work hard, and hard to work hard to get there. Long hours are common. In one "work life balance" class we finished the section on personal goals and everyone was ready for the break when the instructor said something like "I can tell you are low level employees, when I give this section to executives they get mad as they realize that their personal goals are to spend more time with family and they are instead preparing for another long international trip" I'd love their pay, but I'm not willing to give up that much family time. I have worked construction jobs. The body is exhausted at the end of the day, but it is always satisfing at the end of the day to look back on what you have done. However because anyone can do it there isn't as much value in it and so it doesn't pay as well. What hard work you do is more important than how hard you work. However once you have picked the area to work hard work is a second key to getting more. Of course eventually you need to decide how much is enough. This is a personal question and there is no right answer. What doesn't work is for zero people in society to work (at least not at out current automation technology level). Someone needs to grow food and make shelter. Someone needs to act in the latest TV shows (even though there are enough reruns to fill a lifetime so this work could be eliminated, and it has always been possible to live without TV).

enma 6y ago
"It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do." Elbert Hubbard
jk20 6y ago
So the reason why a CEO earns 100 times more than a rank and file employee is that he pulls 100 times more hours... Working excessively long hours is just showing off, productivity inevitably drops after a certain amount of time. Also much of the "work" of CEOs is just running meetings.

tomhoward 6y ago

Does it really need to be pointed out that the notion of an "average" economic producer, while tenuous in any sizeable population, is especially meaningless in a country like China, where you're averaging "very hard working" tech workers in Shanghai with "also-very-hard-working" subsistence farmers and unskilled labourers? I accept the notion that simplistic glorification of "hard work" is unhelpful and often counterproductive, but most people understand that "hard work" doesn't just mean physical exertion, but also good decision-making, sensible investing, scaling your impact, etc. Any concept is easy to write a disparaging essay about if you just focus on the most reductive interpretation. A far more useful essay on the topic would focus on what ability an "ordinary" person (particularly one without substantial inherited wealth) has to influence their life outcomes, and what kinds of things can be done at the individual and societal levels to improve the present situation.

xiphias2 6y ago
I agree with the first sentence, but I don't think that ,,most people understand that "hard work" doesn't just mean physical exertion, but also good decision-making, sensible investing, scaling your impact, etc.'' I made a great investment 8 years ago that made me retire quite early. I'm still just sitting on the investment although many people told me to sell it, and also some people want me to ,,work again''. For me not selling it is the ,,hard work'', as doing anything, like buying houses from the money, or ,,investing it to something sensible'', or ,,diversifying'' would be damaging to my impact. I don't see that people are understanding it.
chii 6y ago
> ability an "ordinary" person (particularly one without substantial inherited wealth) has to influence their life outcomes, and what kinds of things can be done at the individual and societal levels to improve the present situation. what can be done, as of today, is education, and applied effort to learn useful skills. That's what hard work is! That's why there's such a huge fuss every year in china regarding the national college entrance examination - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_College_Entrance_Examination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_College_Entrance_Exam... - entire towns are run silent and distraction free to allow students to study and take the exam.

thinkingemote 6y ago

Protestant work ethic. Work hard is Good. It's deep in the US culture. There's even a quote from Wesley about work in another comment here! So deep that in the recent "i was fired from X" articles, the subject points out that their colleagues were lazy and they worked hard. Whereas a southern (or culturally Catholic) European would see that this shows their colleagues also hated the place, and that there's no shame in being lazy. It's not an obsession and not something that can be stopped. It's utterly integral in all of American society even the left wing radical side. Progressivism is basically the belief that doing hard good work brings Good things. (A non protestant culture would emphasise belief and being a better person more than doing good works)

logicchains 6y ago
>(A non protestant culture would emphasise belief and being a better person more than doing good works) This sounds kind of odd, given protestants generally believe in salvation by faith (Jesus saves those who believe), and catholics believe in salvation by works.
- webdev93 6y ago
  It's the opposite, actually.
  - rgblambda 6y ago
    Not true. Although it's an oversimplification to say that Catholics/Eastern Rite believe in faith and works while Protestants believe in faith alone. https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/faith-and-works-0 https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/faith-and-wo...
  - thinkingemote 6y ago
    Sorry I did over simplify things a bit...
- rjtobin 6y ago
  I think the idea is that early Protestants like Calvinists believed in predestination - that it was already decided who would was going to heaven. One would think this would make the predestined not care about their actions, but the trick is that no one was sure who the predestined were. Since it was believed that the predestined would be exemplars of the faith, people would act like they thought the predestined would act. I’m not a psychologist or a theologian, but it sounds related to that concept in child psychology: when a child misbehaves, it’s better to say “you did a bad thing” than “you are bad”. The latter leads to the child labeling themselves as bad, suggesting that’s the natural way they should act.

christiansakai 6y ago

Agreeing with the article. Hard work works, especially in 1st world countries. I know that hard work alone would not make anyone successful. Luck plays a lot of factor as well, but the harder you work in general you increase the chance of you encountering turning point(s) that lead you to living a comfortable middle class life in 1st world country. Be rich (i.e, billionaire)? Maybe not, but not everyone can and should be rich. Of course no system is perfect, and you can't save everyone. There will be some people who fall through the cracks. But to setup a system such that no one will ever fall through the cracks is giving diminishing returns while taxing to the whole system. Rich people will always be with us, so does poor people. So does ignorant people who thinks pandemic is a hoax, so does lazy people. I grew up in a 3rd world country. Competition and social mobility in the USA is relatively way easier compared to my home country. Or I should say, a piece of cake, really. I'm not obsessed with hard work, but I'm not lazy either. I'm willing to Leetcode for 3 years, failed many interviews to finally got into a high paying tech company. Leetcode for 3 years non stop is way way way way easier than hauling bricks all day. I know what a hard work is, and I also know what useless futile hard work looks like. I worked through low paying jobs such as cleaning service, deli worker, laundry worker. My most back breaking work was cleaning an entire restaurant who got shutdown by a health department by myself. I only lasted 5 days. I had to scrub rat poop of walls and floors kneeling down with bleach everywhere by myself (yes that was minimum wage). The next back breaking work was an 18 hour shift non stop working at a deli during Christmas/New Year in a really busy touristy location. And like the author. My single mother was the one that pushes me through many educations. She said "I can't give you anything other than education, the rest is up to you".

jokethrowaway 6y ago
I completely agree. I think it's hard for people living in countries that allow for social mobility like the USA to appreciate how good they have it. In the country I was born, if you start working by yourself you'll have to pay 50-60% in various taxes, making it really hard to become rich. People who care more about career than friends and family just leave. I also think it's amazing how access to information was democratised by internet. Your last phrase in the last year can be summed up to "I can just give you a computer, the rest is up to you" which is pretty much what my parents did before I started working online.

TrackerFF 6y ago

Work ethics and culture differs wildly around the world - and can obviously result in different levels of productivity. What I like about the Nordic countries, is that workers there are productive. When they're at work, they work - but at the same time, they have a healthy relationship to their workplace, due to strong workers rights / laws. Another thing to keep in mind, is that social conformity there, is on par with countries like Japan. In some countries, you're almost applauded if you manage to screw over your boss / company, by simply getting paid without doing much at all. For many, it's the dream situation - to just clock in at work, do nothing, get paid, and go home. That's not at all the case in the Nordic countries, where you're expected to work hard and produce. Strong sense of work ethic, labor laws, balanced with expectations of healthy work/life balance. (But with that said, there are some serious drawbacks. If your only goal is to accumulate as much wealth as possible, at all costs, and as quickly as possible - Nordic countries is not the right place, IMO).

ChuckNorris89 6y ago
>That's not at all the case in the Nordic countries, where you're expected to work hard and produce. After working in both Germany and The Netherlands I found this to be false as it depends more by company size rather than the country. In SMEs or family owned businesses people were busting their asses, often longer than 40h/week. In giant megacorps I saw plenty of incompetent clockwatchers, mostly in management positions, where the business could function the same without them but they were inexplicably kept around, at least as long as the business was booming. Often times they would just have their teams switch offices so they would have something to put in their annual performance review ("I optimized personell location, fostering a culture of synergy and creativity leading to future improvements in productivity and innovation").
- distances 6y ago
  Neither Germany nor Netherlands belongs to the Nordic countries though?
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago

hoppla 6y ago

I am not sure why I can’t read the article. Even if I request the desktop site, it still wants me to read it using an app...

jkingsbery 6y ago

As someone from the US, my experience is different from what this article portrays. When it's come up, everyone I've heard from acknowledges the role that their parents, schools, community and even luck play. A lot of the political dialog is also about how more people can have access to quality education. In my own state, we spend around $20k per student per year in the poorest school districts, so I don't think the story that the US just ignores poor communities and tells them to work harder is quite so simple.

deleted 6y ago

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emrah 6y ago

It all comes down to the definition of "hard", doesn't it. Seth Godin has a riff on how to think about hard work to get the most out of it: https://seths.blog/2019/02/hard-work/ https://seths.blog/2019/02/hard-work/

MrDresden 6y ago

This article only slightly dips its toe into the discussion of human capital. There isn't something inherently different about people in the nordic countries that makes them work well. It is the social systems and contracts we live in/with. I can be secure in the knowledge that I can not be laid off if I am doing good work, unless my employer can truly justify it (the myth of employers not being able to lay of employees is just that. There has to be a justifiable reason though). I know my healthcare is taken care of by the state, I get financial support if I want to start a family, get paid leave to be with my new born child, get most of my education for free, have high trust in the capabilities and fairness of the justice system and on and on. All of this creates a relaxed environment where most of the base needs in Maslow's pyramid are taken care of, and I don't need to worry about them. Similar to the Harvard study that showed that there was a sweet spot for the ratio of performance to salary increase, having these social norms & contracts in place leaves most of us free to get on with the work with a focus of doing the best we can each time without financial/health/education worries. And, ofcourse there are plenty of problems in the nordics! Let no one ever sell you a utopian fairytale telling you otherwise.

bassman9000 6y ago

So why are Norwegians so much richer than the Chinese if success is all about hard work? Oil. Stopped there.

Bakary 6y ago

What bothers me is just how much luck factors into absolutely everything. The family and region you are born in determines so much about your life that individual contributions seem laughable in comparison. Even then, your individual characteristics are heavily based on the former as well, in the form of nature and nurture. Even the ideas you might cultivate are the result of happening on the right resource at the right time. Lastly, it becomes harder and harder to explain the successes of outliers without it being mostly about luck and the environment. The notion of free will is under assault from all corners. Not to mention that apparently the brain makes decisions before the thought comes to your conscious awareness... Talking about luck is often instinctively interpreted as a method to avoid responsibility and cultivate laziness, but try as I might, ignoring this aspect of the world feels like a type of wishful religious thinking that is torn apart after even the most cursory investigation and thought. Generally, people will tend to attribute the bad things to luck and the good things to their own efforts, but in reality both seem to fall under the same purview.

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MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
The internship I got for my job was posted on our statewide college job board. My employer posted the position in a city 120 miles away from me. I still applied because I figured I could suck it up and do that for a summer. Turns out they needed someone in the exact city I was in because they also operated near my school as well. Also they wanted to extend it year round as well even though the posting just said "Summer." When you say it comes down to luck, it pretty much does. I'm fairly certain, if not 100% sure I was chosen simply because I was the only one in my area that applied. All the other positions in the location 120 miles away were filled and nobody wanted to move to my city. So to make things simple, they just chose me, a fresh OOP learned programmer with little to no skills except for writing a basic linked list in java.
- rticesterp 6y ago
  I have a similar story. My first year of college I worked two 40 hour/week jobs during the summer and a 30 hour a week job during the school year. I was determined to get a well paying internship so I could reduce my work hours and still pay for school. There was a snow storm during the day of the spring career fair. Classes were cancelled but the career fair still happened. I was one of the only ones that showed up and passed along my resume to all of the tech companies that attended the career fair. Had it not been for the snow storm I would not have received an internship which led to my first time job. I was a college freshman, B student due to having to work and I had zero practical coding skills outside of one semester of C++. The snow storm was certainly luck but showing up at the career fair was not. However, much of my classmates in the dorm chose to play in the snow and I chose to go to the career fair. Luck does play a role but luck is really putting yourself in a position to take advantage of opportunity. If everyone that lived on campus showed up at that career fair I don't know if I would be in the position I am today (25 years later).

jrjarrett 6y ago

I work in the US for a “startup” company. They’ve gotten a big round of funding and are hiring like crazy. There’s constantly this exhortation to “work hard” and “overcome the obstacles”. People work ALL THE TIME. There’s an underlying pressure to be on constantly. And I’m asking “why?” I’m an IC. I am by no means invested in the company. If some big event happens, the C-levels and investors may pay out. I might be lucky and keep my job. I’ll bet money that the good health insurance we have and “unlimited” PTO goes away when that happens. So again, why should I put in extra to make someone else rich? I have no problem with working within reasonable bounds and trading my skills for a salary. I don’t want to start my own business.

mbrodersen 6y ago
I recommend always calculating your hour rate when comparing your salary with others. And yes you are 99.999% likely to not benefit at all from the extra hours you put in. If management can screw you over they will. The rare occasions where that doesn’t happen is rare enough to be headline news.

aipri 6y ago

as an engineer: base must be same for comparison. we've to keep all other resources same then hard work comes as major.

jk20 6y ago

The author has probably never heard the phrase "work is the last, desperate way how to get money". With the advent of the modern technology it was believed that people would spend three or so days per week doing "work" in the usual sense of the word, with leisure taking up the rest. Still, most people are denied any such benefits. Work is now more of a means of a social regulation: people are supposed to spend most of their waking hours transfixed to a computer screen in exchange for the minimum amount of money that will keep them alive to repeat the cycle the next day, so as not to endanger those who distribute said money.