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

• jp555 5y ago
  These results are not ergodic. ensemble average != time-series average. In order to make this claim you need to follow the same people and survey them throughout their lives, as opposed to a group snapshot in time.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• JohnWhigham 5y ago
  So we have this sentiment, how long will it take to be reflected in business schools, those leading these companies? We need at least boomers and Gen Xers to die off since they were instilled with the old way of go-into-the-place-and-give-a-firm-handshake bullshit. Are we looking at potentially decades before we seriously start making tangible changes with our relationships with work?
  • sethammons 5y ago
    I’m not following. What does this have to do with a global population who thinks their five-year prospects are not so hot? That is what the article is about after all.
  • fullstop 5y ago
    I question why you have lumped gen x and boomers together regarding job seeking.
• optimiz3 5y ago
  For those that don't read, this is a global population survey, not an American one. If you're American, surprise - you're much more likely to believe work pays off. Won't stop the parade of people with unsubstantiated statements about how much society sucks despite the frankly marvelous QoL advances over the past several hundred years. Also, total sample size is 500. Globally.
  • thenaturalist 5y ago
    Unsubstantiated.... Hm, your comment implies that this parade of people is deliberately ignoring QoL improvements. I think this is not the case. What's important is to remember that everything is relative. For sure QoL has improved significantly. But so has the relative share of wealth of those who already are wealthy. Look at wealth, not income measures and distribution, let alone how much wealth the richest people consistently added. The pace of this growth outpaces wage growth and has done so, for a long time. So where does QoL get you when you realize the system you're engaged in is fundamentally not equitable by design and that a small elite has basically decoupled itself entirely from the rest of the world?
    • trnglina 5y ago
      What is the use of wealth, if not to increase one's quality of life?
    • sethammons 5y ago
      All the survey said is people have a dim 5-yr outlook. You are reading deeper than that.
  • mistermann 5y ago
    How much more it could have advanced for the masses under a more optimum system though, is unknown. Take war for example: is the amount of war we wage actually necessary? Is there no better way to do things than we currently do, across all domains? If you think of our world as Sim Earth, what would 2021 look like under near perfect play, how far are we off from that, and for what reasons? One reason might be that we don't seem to think and talk about ideas like this very much, or perhaps not in a skillful enough manner.
    • Zababa 5y ago
      What is even a perfect play? Do you think all people on Earth would agree with your notion of a perfect play? If not, which opinions are you willing to sacrifice and why?
• spodek 5y ago
  It's difficult to believe something when the evidence opposes it and keeps growing. You can't change where you were born, but if you could it would lead to a better life more than hard work.
• nicomeemes 5y ago
  Seems like "strong economic growth" is only for those who are well off.
• hawk_ 5y ago
  There was a short window of time (anthropological scale) in the western world where this was seemingly true. The American conservative propaganda latched onto it and tricked people into thinking it was true. The fact is whenever quick upward mobility has been possible anywhere for a large number of people, it has been built upon slavery, colonialism and/or cheap imported labour. It was someone else's hard work that was the real source of abundance and hence upward mobility. "Hard work can't guarantee better life" is more the norm than the exception.
  • cousin_it 5y ago
    > The fact is whenever quick upward mobility has been possible anywhere for a large number of people, it has been built upon slavery, colonialism and/or cheap imported labour. Which of these was responsible for China's rise from poverty?
    • x1ph0z 5y ago
      Cheap labour?
      • freefal 5y ago
        Imported from where?
        • rerx 5y ago
          Rural, poorer areas of the country?
          • stickyricky 5y ago
            Really stretching the definition of imported.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
    • 5y ago
• randomcarbloke 5y ago
  Hard work doesn't imply productivity or progress.
  • hughrr 5y ago
    This is the important distinction. Achieving things efficiently is the only winning play.
    • BingoAhoy 5y ago
      Yes in a meritocracy. The real world and capitalism are far from a meritocracy though. Specifically a corporation might be under meritocracal pressures in competition with other corporations some times but individual workers within a corporation definitely don't necessarily get meritoracially rewarded in proportion to their efficient efforts.
• Anther 5y ago
  I’ve worked my ass off every opportunity I have gotten to do so. It certainly hasn’t made my life any better. It has shown me that those in charge rather like those below them working hard for no benefit whatsoever however. I’m sure some fair better than others. Not so much in the lab!
• nexus_dave 5y ago
  What does "working hard" mean? A lot of people seem to equate long hours with hard work. If you spend many hours a day on auto-pilot, are you working hard?
• realce 5y ago
  Today's ethos seems to be get yours hook or crook so you can basically cash out of society.
  • sidlls 5y ago
    I got mine honestly: a good ol' fashioned tech IPO. Soon as I cash out the rest of my unvested shares (next year or so), I'll definitely consider "cashing out." Why bother working for $400k - $500k per year total compensation when my investment portfolio is earning $400k or more and I have no debts?
    • jason0597 5y ago
      Your point being?
• sokoloff 5y ago
  > The informed public – wealthier, more educated, and frequent consumers of news – remain far more trusting of every institution than the mass population. Is “informed public” an accepted term of art in social science research? Because if not, that seems like an incredibly (and gratuitously) biased label.
  • LAC-Tech 5y ago
    The funniest thing to me is this mid-wit notion of thinking you are 'informed' by reading news sites and getting a degree from a 21st century university.
    • rejectedandsad 5y ago
      Yes, far more informed than reading Dinesh D’Souza Facebook posts or natural wellness Instagram stories.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • LAC-Tech 5y ago
        Is that the only other alternative?
        • rejectedandsad 5y ago
          Yes, unless you’re going to say Joe Rogan who I fit under natural wellness.
      • mensetmanusman 5y ago
        Politics is preference. If you don’t read any D’Souza, you might not know what half the country thinks?
  • newsclues 5y ago
    It seems to be a misnomer given by the (academic) elites. It’s problematic to label your followers as fools.
• mapcars 5y ago
  I think it's good news, living happily and freely is possible independently of our job occupation. Also if one is first happy and lives a good life then they will do that they really care for and do it good.
• wishigotitfree 5y ago
  Starting conditions (where one was born, levels of wealth and opportunity there, one's parents' education and jobs) are shockingly predictive about an individual's future. Hard work leading to social mobility has always been the exception, not the rule. Most will not beat the odds since if they did, those wouldn't BE the odds. A lot of us are just so deluded by survivorship bias borne of listening only to success stories, but it seems more and more people are seeing through the illusion. In my opinion, that's a good thing, as recognizing the true state of things is the first step to improving them, and this combination of consciousness and lived experience can prove to be potent immunization against bad faith actors who want to maintain the illusion of widespread social mobility.
  • throwaway894345 5y ago
    > A lot of us are just so deluded by survivorship bias borne of listening only to success stories, but it seems more and more people are seeing through the illusion. I don't think we can conclude that from anything. It could just as easily be that our previous optimism was warranted but we've become influenced by a more pessimistic media narrative. To be clear, I don't have a position because there doesn't seem to be enough evidence one way or another.
    • 52-6F-62 5y ago
      It sounded like an intuition rather than a conclusion. It’s an intuition that’s very familiar to those born without a leg up. There’s always hope. This isn’t about hope. It’s about seeing things as they are, as the parent suggested.
      • throwaway894345 5y ago
        > It sounded like an intuition rather than a conclusion. Fair enough. > It’s an intuition that’s very familiar to those born without a leg up. I was born to a blue collar family and I lived in a trailer until I was 6. I don't share the intuition. I worked through college while my classmates skipped class, spent loads at starbucks, restaurants, etc. I double majored and graduated with a fraction of the debt of my peers, and I picked majors that are likely to pay well. I now make multiples of what my parents made together. N=1 and all that, but it's not "intuition of those born without a leg up".
• lr4444lr 5y ago
  The most alarming thing to me in this report[1] is that a clear majority (> 60%) distrust technology and/or the government's ability to understand and manage it for our safety. That sort of sentiment is what can power through a destructive clamp down on big tech in the U.S. from ill-informed legislators. [1] https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2020-01/2020%20Edelman%20Trust%20Barometer%20Global%20Report_LIVE.pdf https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2020-0...
  • rdtwo 5y ago
    I think the people that distrust it are often the people that know the most about it as well not just back water hicks. How many folks here trust Facebook? Anyone?
  • sensanaty 5y ago
    No one should be trusting big tech. As is they hold a ridiculous amount of power over the entire world, and that's only going to get worse and worse. I also doubt most informed people trust governments either.
  • selfhoster11 5y ago
    Big tech brought it upon themselves. Had they been less greedy, they would have painted smaller bullseyes on their backs.
• etempleton 5y ago
  One trend I have noticed is a grass is always greener hiring mentality at a lot of companies. That is, looking external for new hires versus promoting from within. This forces folks to jump around for career progression. And those that are not as willing to jump around feeling discouraged that no matter how hard they work they will likely be overlooked for someone from the outside. To this end hard work is discouraged over networking and willingness to disrupt your life.
  • rdtwo 5y ago
    Promoting from within means you have to forgo quick wins for long them gains. That’s just not how US managers age leaders think.
    • B4CKlash 5y ago
      << "That's just not how US managers age leaders [are incentivized to] think." Just wanted to highlight that it's not a problem we're destined to deal with. Fix the incentives ala fix the problems.
  • mtberatwork 5y ago
    Often times it's not even a matter of "grass is greener" mentality but the fact that there is no position to get promoted into because a career tract was never put into place by the organization. The only thing you can do is stay put or do a horizontal jump.
  • pydry 5y ago
    I feel it's become a self fulfilling prophecy. 90% of the people I've worked with who stayed in one place > 7 years were paid under market but also not great at their jobs.
    • etempleton 5y ago
      I guess it depends on where you work, or perhaps the field. I have seen some truly awful external hires. I have also seen some great ones, but I suppose it is more of a gamble to go external, whereas promoting internally has a lower downside and also lower upside. One major negative of hiring externally is it harms employee moral. There have been a number of studies that hiring internally is better for long-term organizational health.
• steveBK123 5y ago
  You had the post-WW2 boom, which then wound down in the 80s/90s but there was a small resurgence of "everyone is getting rich" in the late-90s Dotcom bubble and then finally the run up into the housing bubble. Since we have fallen back to a more historically traditional model - hard work can advance your life, but you are capped within certain bands by where you start, by and large. Where you start is regional, family money & upbringing and then finally level/quality/quantity of educational attainment. Of course all 3 of those things are hugely interlinked. And if you start too low it's exceedingly hard to break out. If you start sufficiently high, its very hard to fall down. The wool has been pulled from GenZs eyes (or was never there, given what they've grown up in) and they see the world for what it has become..
  • myth_drannon 5y ago
    More like it was the collapse of USSR in the 80's and diminished threat of Communism in west that caused oligarchs to be bolder and grab more share of national wealth. Specially in the last year or two when only select few got extremely rich by loading debt on the rest of society. I wonder if Amazon's working conditions would be possible in the 60-70s with strong labour unions back then.
    • steveBK123 5y ago
      Sure that's a factor, but people discount how much 1940-1980 was a historical anomaly for the US. Virtually every advanced industrial economy with which we competed had their industrial base leveled and colonial empires in full retreat. They then spent 1950s-1970s rebuilding. Then China came online as an industrial power in the 1980s-2000s. By 2000 the scale of competition on cost and/or quality with our industrial might was at a scale we had not seen in generations.
    • medvezhenok 5y ago
      It's also some of the Russian oligarch money that came in to western institutions (via shell companies etc - some revealed in the Panama papers) and started influencing the discourse here. Especially in the last 20 years. They finance a lot of the disinformation campaigns, the social division, etc. In the times of the USSR there were surely influence campaigns, but people were more on the look out for it and there was a common external target, so it was easier to unite the country.
• dvh1990 5y ago
  Just working hard was never a guarantee of anything, but when is it ever a bad idea to adopt a positive mindset about putting in the work to achieve something? It's not like that DOESN'T work? You can get pretty far if you put your mind to it.
• mistermann 5y ago
  > “The informed public – wealthier, more educated, and frequent consumers of news – remain far more trusting of every institution than the mass population. > “In a majority of markets, less than half of the mass population trust their institutions to do what is right. > Trust levels among the informed public in Australia were at 68 per cent, far higher than the 45 per cent recorded among the mass population. I wonder what the meaning of "informed" is in this context? Someone who keeps abreast of "the facts" from consuming the news?
• BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
  I still think hard work and dedication is a virtue and our culture should continue to view it that way. However I think the work ethic should apply towards one’s family, friends, and community rather than just one’s job. In other words we should celebrate hard work but not being a workaholic or company-man.
• esens 5y ago
  Working hard but doing so for someone else can often not lead to significant gains. Many services like Uber or InstaCart or even McDonalds or Amazon Warehouse or Walmart or Retail Sales or call center, you can work hard but there is no where to progress to. Your rewards are capped. You need to find a way to work hard such that your rewards are not capped artificially. Startups were you get equity. Large companies where you can progress to high salaries if you are able to rise. Starting your own business and being competent at it. Working on commissions in an area where the commissions can be large -- true sales, or real estate. Being a professional, e.g. doctor, accountant, lawyer, has traditionally had high wages and you often run your own business. You need to work hard in a way that has unlimited rewards, or at least high rewards possible, and that aligns with your aptitudes. You need to not work hard at a minimum wage job if you can get something better. And if you are stuck in a minimum wage job, maybe you can organize with your fellow employees to demand better wages and benefits? This is also another way of working hard in order to get more for yourself.
  • CraneWorm 5y ago
    Post-scarcity cannot come fast enough; the (external) need to work hard should just die in a fire.
    • esens 5y ago
      It never actually seems to come though. I wouldn't count on it. I believe that getting something for nothing is usually not sustainable. Just because you serve no purpose to those giving the things away for free. Something will give (some type of resource constraint will arise, even if it is just competitive/alternatives) and it will fail if you are not providing value.
      • BingoAhoy 5y ago
        It's only been, what a few hundred years since the industrial revolution began? We haven't given it enough time for the innovators to figure out how to manufacture the needs of society in an overflowing plentiful way that's also automated & low effort. Some things never will be of course.
• wolframhempel 5y ago
  Hard work is one of multiple preconditions for success - not a guarantee. Working smartly, remaining focused and simply being at the right place at the right time are just as important.
• seibelj 5y ago
  I can’t think of any way to improve your lot in life without working hard. Unless you inherit money or win the lottery, no one is going to hand you a better life. We have a safety net for the disabled. If you are able-bodied and refuse to work hard yet still complain that life gave you a raw deal, I don’t have any sympathy for you. Everyone I know who is very successful (outside of FAANG employees who seemingly coast towards upper-middle-class riches) has worked very hard. This attitude of learned helplessness is self-defeating. Immigrants literally abandon their children and force them over the border for a chance at a life in the USA. Immigrants know they are going to have to work hard to make it here.
  • ganzuul 5y ago
    If you are pretty you can marry rich.
  • engineer_22 5y ago
    Another way might be a life of crime. But to be a successful criminal, I think, requires some hard work, too.
  • s5300 5y ago
    We (U.S.) do NOT have a safety net for the disabled. Not even slightly I will come back and expand on this later. Jeez does the fact people think that make my blood boil.
  • michaelt 5y ago
    You can't think of any way to improve your lot in life without working hard, but you know FAANG employees who seemingly coast towards upper-middle-class riches?
  • medvezhenok 5y ago
    Immigration is already a filter - not everyone can immigrate, and the ones that can are really motivated (since you have to jump through a lot of hoops to do so). So immigrants can work hard because they self-select for people who can work hard. Not everyone can - the people that can't don't end up immigrating. (I say that as a first-generation immigrant, albeit one who moved at a really young age, so I kind of straddle the line and understand both perspectives) Solutions for immigrants might not generalize to the whole population because of this filter effect.
• deleted 5y ago
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• LAC-Tech 5y ago
  > While 65 per cent of the worldwide informed public (aged 25-65, university-educated, in the top 25 per cent of household income) said they trust their institutions, only 51 per cent of the mass public (everyone else, representing 83 per cent of the total global population) said the same. As someone who has gone from a "mass public" background to an "informed public" one, this rings true. I have definitely kept my mistrust of institutions. And it definitely rubs people from the "informed public" background the wrong way.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• spamizbad 5y ago
  People are becoming more rational about labor. That’s a good thing.
• 317070 5y ago
  It's a questionnaire from 2019, so before corona [0]. It actually has quite a large number of respondents. I was originally skeptical (no significance levels in the paper), but I reckon they knew what they were doing? I found the following actually the more notable result than the one in the title. A majority agree with this statement in 22 of 28 markets: "Capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world" [0] https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2020-01/2020%20Edelman%20Trust%20Barometer%20Global%20Report_LIVE.pdf https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2020-0...
• Pxtl 5y ago
  Well yeah. I live in a city where the housing bubble is so bad that the average home-price-growth over the last 5 years greatly exceeds the average income. That is, houses made more than people pouring their sweat into their jobs... and those houses accumulate that value just by sitting there and existing, and don't pay income tax (principal residence is 100% exempted in Canada's capital gains system). With that in mind, why would everybody believe in the value of hard work? When buying at the right place and time is better by every metric?
• tim333 5y ago
  Market forces can work strange ways - you can make a purchase of a house of bitcoin when they were cheap and be set up. You can work your arse off as something like a cleaner and make almost nothing as wages are bid down and the cost of living bid up. I'm not quite sure how to make things fairer.
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  Every morning, I get up at 5, and go for a two-mile walk. Often, my walk coincides with the route of the garbage collection truck. Man, those dudes work hard. It makes my shoulders ache, just watching them. They are fast, energetic, efficient, and precise. Around here, they are generally Latinos, and they have quite high-paying jobs, compared to a lot of their peers. It's a dirty, dangerous job, and the benefits are reserved for the few union members. I appreciate them, and give them decent tips, but that is barely anything, for the work they do. I am extremely fortunate. I've worked hard, but I have also had a lot of breaks my way.
  • paaaaaaaaaa 5y ago
    I respect them too. Here in the UK I always try to say good morning and thanks to our bin collectors. Do you know how many hours do they do? Is it the fact that when their route is complete they are finished for the day? Because then there is a pretty good incentive to work hard and fast.
    • colanderman 5y ago
      I'm trying to wrap my head around how this, and tipping, works. Here (suburb of Boston), curbside trash collection is like a 10-second affair. Do you like wait outside on a lawn chair for hours and then run up to them waving your arms and shouting over the noise of the compactor truck?
    • jfrunyon 5y ago
      I highly doubt that they're salaried, so the incentive would actually be to take longer to make more money. A more likely incentive for them to work fast is that they'll be fired if they don't.
  • colanderman 5y ago
    This is the first I've heard of tipping trash collectors. Apparently it's a thing? How, logistically, does one even accomplish that?
    • 5y ago
• samsquire 5y ago
  Given that minimum wage in the US has been the same since 2009, I don't think anyone particularly cares about people who do the hard work at the bottom. Is it any wonder that people notice that nobody cares about them working hard? It just transfers wealth to shareholders.
• philmcp 5y ago
  I came to this realisation at the start of lockdown after experiencing burnout myself. As a result of this I launched: https://4dayweek.io https://4dayweek.io (Software jobs with a better work / life balance)
  • dt3ft 5y ago
    Thank you for doing this.
• skocznymroczny 5y ago
  I think one thing that changed in recent years is that there are more possibilities for hitting it big. Sure, it's survivor bias and all, but it takes one successful indie game (Minecraft, Flappy Bird), a good investment in the right time (early Bitcoin, early Ethereum, GME in December) and you can never work again in your life. Similarly if you are lucky enough and your Twitch channel becomes popular, you can stream some videogames and take donations which equate to multiply of what a "normal" job would give you.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • jrockway 5y ago
    I don't think any of these things are possible at any scale that matters. There are a handful of people rich from Bitcoin, Etherium, and Twitch streaming. Then there are 300,000,000 other Americans. Many of them bought high and sold low, or just aren't good at streaming games, and now they're just farther in the hole -- they have an investment account valued at $0, an overpriced mining GPU they bought from a scalper, and a bunch of A/V hardware they never use. The real winners in the gold rush are the people selling pickaxes -- I'm sure that elgato is making a killing selling Stream Decks to people with an average viewership of 0, and someone is sure making money on GPUs. Meanwhile, the people that saw crypto speculation or streaming as their ticket out of here are back to working 14 hour days for $8 an hour and praying they don't get sick.
    • medvezhenok 5y ago
      Yeah, especially since the people that hit it big on Bitcoin, GME, Ethereum are cashing out at the expense of the people getting in late; it's a wealth transfer mechanism akin to a pyramid scheme (and it keeps going until it runs out of people to pull in, just like any other pyramid scheme). Twitch streamers / YouTube creators at least provide some entertainment/educational value at scale, so it's more "legitimate" as a source of success, if you can call it that. It might not be as much of an issue if the people getting in late are already well off (then it's just redistribution), but otherwise it's people rising up on the backs of the misfortune (or cluelessness) of others.
• ralusek 5y ago
  I'm not sure how else to become a doctor. I'm not sure how else to get good at an instrument, or anything really. Working hard is necessary, but perhaps not sufficient, for a better life to most people. I understand that this study is international, but a common thread among the most popular countries to which people immigrate, America included, are places where outputs are most proportionally and predictably mapped to inputs. You may have a harder go at it than somebody else, and starting conditions can drastically impact the process, but working hard towards an objective that makes you useful to other people will almost invariably lead to a better life.
• slumdev 5y ago
  There is less social mobility in the United States (that paragon of bootstrap-pulling) than in the United Kingdom (where class is explicitly acknowledged and accepted.) https://www3.weforum.org/docs/Global_Social_Mobility_Report.pdf https://www3.weforum.org/docs/Global_Social_Mobility_Report....
• ashtonkem 5y ago
  I keep saying this over and over again; if those on the top of the system want to keep enjoying the benefits of the system, they need to give enough to the bottom to maintain the legitimacy of the system in the eyes of those who maintain it. Those on top have deluded themselves into thinking that they’re smarter and better than past elites, when in fact they seem to be making extremely similar mistakes.
• draw_down 5y ago
  The less hard I worked, the more money I made, the more prestige I garnered in my organization. Retired now. Playing the game is more effective than working hard, but you still have to work hard at times.
• myfavoritedog 5y ago
  Hard work and good decisions may not always lead to a better life. But not working and bad decisions will usually lead to poor outcomes.
• dharmon 5y ago
  I think there are a few factors unique in U.S. history that would naturally lead its people to believe that hard work alone is sufficient. Firstly, I think times of change are the catalyst needed for mobility (up and down). Just like in organizations: fast growing companies are where many employees first get elevated to, say, the CTO or Director level, and which they can then maintain from company to company. They worked hard, sure, but not harder than anyone else. It was that disruption in the status quo that gave them the opportunity in the shifting sands to find elevated ground. I think the other factor is points of leverage. A sibling comment points out slavery, colonialism, cheap labor. Those are general points of leverage, but there are others (and possibly not the most important ones for the U.S.) So the first great change in my mind was just the establishment of the U.S. For decades we pushed west "discovering"/stealing new territories and its natural resources. This led to mobility for some, but the leverage is small (still need lots of people to work your massive land stake in Kansas). Still, those resources were sent back to Boston or wherever and led to many opportunities. Second, the Industrial Revolution. Now you're getting into great leverage possibilities. Vanderbilt was an ace accountant, but what other time in history could somebody good with a ledger rise to the richest man in the world? Vanderbilt was an exception, no doubt, but there were plenty of people who had accounting skills who significantly improved their station in life (and hence their subsequent generations). Next was WW2. With Europe ravaged by war, the U.S. naturally was able to rise and fill various roles previously filled by the British and others. (Maybe the most important one here is reserve currency status.) This created ridiculous opportunity for its citizens to make a name for themselves. This is the wave many boomers rode to their current levels of wealth. Lastly is the computer revolution. The wealth from this one has probably been more concentrated, but the leverage possible has improved the station of many many people (myself included). So I think hard-work (or related things like "savviness") is necessary, but not sufficient. Maybe now people are just coming to terms with a world / country that is mostly settled, and without that disruption, the chances of moving up in life are greatly diminished back to where they've been for most of human history.
• u678u 5y ago
  Meritocracy is the illusion that justifies inequality. I think so much focus in the US is on helping giving working class people opportunities to become millionaires, but would be better if it just made working class life less miserable.
• whiddershins 5y ago
  This is so sad. Most people in the developed world have so much opportunity. We live in tiniest upper .000001% of wealth compared to all the rest of the humans who have lived ... And we still figure out how to be cynical, pessimistic, and resentful of the good fortune of others.
• jbluepolarbear 5y ago
  I grew up in poverty and never expected that I’d do anything in life because of learning disabilities and poor home life. Except I happen to have been born with a gift of an excellent memory. I’m may be slow to learn completely new stuff, but I will never forget it and I can immediately start incorporating new skills into existing skills. I work hard because it’s shown that little by little my life improves.
• johncessna 5y ago
  There are a lot of things people believe, the real question is if it's true or not.
• corry 5y ago
  As trite as it sounds, "Success = Hard Work + Opportunity" is still the default equation that makes the most sense to me. And while people from all strata of life work very hard, opportunities are obviously and incredibly unequally distributed (and perhaps becoming more so?). If you were born middle-class in US/Canada 20 - 40 years ago, your access to opportunities to improve your station were/are immense. Layer on your ethnicity, if your parents were in a stable relationship, if you grew up in relative safety, if you had a decent education... hard not to think that your opportunities were 10x or 100x someone who had none of those things. But you also need to define "success". To this crowd, is "success" merely "leading a better life"? I'd argue most of us already have this as our default reality. I.e. the gradual reward for working hard via promotions and relative safety of career. I remember after my startup was acquired, a few people would say to me (well-meaning obviously) "wow it's great your hard work paid off!". And I just said something like "thanks, ya, lots of people work a lot harder than me but didn't get the same outcome - so there was a lot of luck involved too!" etc. Even thinking of my own immigrant grandparents - what THEY did was HARD. I think about those exchanges often. Tech -- at this particular moment in history -- disproportionately rewards "hard work" (which many of us find fun anyways). Or perhaps better to say that Tech provides access to the right kind of opportunities that allow for a DEFAULT "life gets better", with the possibilities of "life suddenly gets 100x better".
  • koheripbal 5y ago
    One thing all tech employees can appreciate is that some people are far more efficient than others. In some cases, by orders of magnitude. You can sort of blend that with "opportunity" if you think it's entirely nurture/education based, but I went to school with a lot of people who had an identical home environment and education as me, and are easily 10x better at coding. There's very little research into how brains function, but I personally believe that human brains are all physically different, in terms of capability, and that everyone has a unique blend of innate talents. So I think the equation is... Success (in x field) = Hard Work + Talent (in x field) + Opportunity (in x field) ...which means that a major key to success is selecting the field that you have a talent for.
    • 5y ago
• xyzelement 5y ago
  Scott Galloway quotes his immigrant dad as saying "America is a hard place to be stupid." It should be obvious that you need to work hard and work hard on the right thing. For example you can "work hard" to get a degree which is not valuable and make no economic gain, or you can work hard to get an engineering degree and go from poverty to 1% in a few years. I met an immigrant Uber driver who had got a janitorial job at a university, because it allowed him to go to business school for free. He worked "as hard" as any other janitor who Ubered on the side, but at the end of it he'll walk away with a Columbia MBA. I am not worried about this guys' ability to become wealthy. But you do need to use your brain and hustle a bit if you want to go from nothing to something. This is why immigrant can do it - because they come to the US knowing they have to do it.
• technicolorwhat 5y ago
  To be honest I find it more interesting to know why people thought this in the first place to begin with, any pointers?
• inigojonesguy 5y ago
  Concerning the deterioration in social mobility, in France, this book from 2005 opened my eyes "Generation 69, les trentenaires ne vous disent pas merci". In France "generation 69" are the boomers, to simplify. Therefore a rough translation of the title would be: "Boomers, the 30 something don't thank you". It passes, in a humorous way, through all problems which later will be more and more magnified. https://www.michalon.fr/index.asp?navig=catalogue&obj=livre&no=69099 https://www.michalon.fr/index.asp?navig=catalogue&obj=livre&...
• humanrebar 5y ago
  Since when does "a better life" and "social mobility" mean the same thing? Does hard work make you rich? Does it guarantee you a specific source of income? There are plenty of examples against those propositions. Does hard work help provide for you and your loved ones? The world is complicated, but there are many jobs that pay fine and mostly ask you to reliably show up and pitch in. So generally, hard work is a good bet. I don't know why folks expect to see billionaire janitors before they believe hard work is wise.
• h2odragon 5y ago
  Amusing how so many comments here equate "better life" with "monetary wealth". If your roof has a hole in it, it will take hard work to fix that hole; but your life will get better once you have. The same but moreso if you have no roof at all to begin with. I don't think "hard work for others benefit" was specified in the questions, it's just assumed as part of the context, probably more in my USA context than in other cultures with less unicorn fart in their air.
• ticviking 5y ago
  A lot of this is just a reversion to the mean. For most of history the opportunity to advance your station was basically nonexistent. We're starting to see that pattern return where a variety of institutions(including naked oppression and conquest) created briefly a place where some categories of people could get a head in a dynamic society. All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again.
• ceilingcorner 5y ago
  I have noticed an increase in negative attitudes toward work, hard work, and generally the idea that one should sacrifice time/pleasure/etc. to reach a goal. I blame it on finance, crypto, and social media. When you can see millions of people casually get rich simply by holding an asset, the narrative of “working hard pays off” gets buried.
  • Jotra7 5y ago
    Because hard work does not pay off. You'd have to be a fool to believe it.
  • lm28469 5y ago
    This is oversimplification. My personal opinion is that we're still working as much as ever, productivity per hour/individual is through the roof, automation made a lot of processes much easier/productive, yet every few years the legal retirement age goes up, pensions go down, workers right are eroded, life gets expensive faster than wages are growing, &c. Keep in mind most people here live in a bubble. We make 2-10x our country's min wage while sitting on expensive chairs in ventilated offices, most people don't live like that. The increase of negativity towards work comes from the majority of people who barely make ends meet and know for sure they'll never be able to afford the life their parents/grandparents had no matter how hard they'll work. The system is designed to have a majority of people doing shitty jobs The "work hard pays off" propaganda is very convenient when you want to make people feel personal guilt and divert their focus from the broken system that make them feel miserable. People have been shitting on work well before cryptos and social medias were a thing. I'm not particularly versed on the subject but even I read books from the 60s which were already predicting what's happening now, we're just at the visible end of a very long process and more and more people can't take it anymore.
    • ceilingcorner 5y ago
      I’m not a coder and I don’t make 2-10x the national wage. Hard work does pay off. Ask any children of immigrants. And I mean recent immigrants. While inequality certainly is rising and there are legitimate economic issues, I find that people have just become far lazier and more distracted. It’s not uncommon for the average American to spend 8-10 hours a day on your phone or watching television. If I had to guess, I’d say the rhetoric is rising because of this, not because everyone is just working so hard.
• ARandumGuy 5y ago
  I feel this through personal experience. My first job was working at a pizza place over the summer. It wasn't a bad job. It was part time, my boss was good, and I always knew what I needed to do. Despite that, it was the most work I've ever had, and for only minimum wage. Every tech job I've had has been much easier, and less stressful. And even during my internships, I was making more then I ever could at the pizza place. How much you get paid is completely irrelevant to how much hard work you're doing. I think a lot of people are seeing that these days, and are becoming disillusioned with the working world as a result.
• blocked_again 5y ago
  If working hard is the key most of the blue collar workers would be billionaires.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  I mentor college students as part of a structured mentoring program. Some of the young people who come through the group have wildly pessimistic views on the world, especially as it pertains to jobs and capitalism. Part of our job is to defuse some of the more self-defeating views, but it’s increasingly difficult to compete against the non-stop onslaught of pessimism that comes from their subreddits and Twitter follows. When someone has been conditioned for hours each day to believe that capitalism is evil, that no one should have to work, that UBI is as simple as taxing Jeff Bezos a little more, and that jobs are “wage slavery”, it’s hard to compete with healthy mentorship advice. Some of these online communities are downright toxic. Some of my most difficult mentees subscribed to “NEET” (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) communities on Reddit that felt like the notorious incel communities we’ve all heard about, but with the vitriol directed at jobs and bosses. There are even explicit anti-work movements, like /r/antiwork on Reddit, that have a stated goal of ending work. No alternative is proposed and no one explains how society would function if no one works, but instead they complain about having to work at all. Someone consuming this material on their phone before, during, and after work every single day is obviously going to become bitter and miserable. This doesn’t explain everything, of course, but it is a growing factor among the most disgruntled young people I see coming through our program.
  • praptak 5y ago
    > /r/antiwork on Reddit, that have a stated goal of ending work This got me interested, so I checked it out. The top thread is literally about r/antiwork NOT having this goal: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/o032ek/for_anyone_who_might_think_otherwise/ https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/o032ek/for_anyone... And "not wasting your life working for something you don't believe in" is quite a different beast. I believe even Paul Graham could say this, albeit with totally different idea about what you should do instead.
    • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
      > This got me interested, so I checked it out. The top thread is literally about r/antiwork NOT having this goal: It's the same way that incel communities insist they're NOT about hating women, but rather something deeper and more respectable: It's a veneer of misdirection so they can justify their continued complaining about having to work. Like I said, they want to end "work" but they don't ever explore ideas for how society would function or how they'd get their food, clothing, and housing if work was abolished. They tend to romanticize primitive, pre-industrialized societies as the easy times, while assuming we could abolish work and still maintain our iPhones, internet, food, and shelter simply by [other] people's innate desire to build these things for free.
• nextstep 5y ago
  Empirical data shows this as well, so I guess this just means there’s a gap in propaganda convincing workers to accept less and less each year while productivity increases. I’m sure the media will correct this misperception quickly.
  • joejohnson 5y ago
    Looking at the data more closely, it seems this (international) survey is not representative of the average views among Americans. So there is a large propaganda gap between Americans and others in the western world.
• jokoon 5y ago
  People who believe in hard work are just creating unemployment. It's a rat race. > "Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off." — Speech at the People's Forum in Troy, New York (March 3, 1912) -- Franklin D. Roosevelt Competition matters, but I really have the feeling that we believe competition is a form of cooperation, but it's clearly not. How often do we blame other for their lack of motivation, of drive, of life goals, of success? Social darwinism is a belief that covertly dominates.
• B4CKlash 5y ago
  I don't mean to be cynical - I ultimately want to contribute to the conversation in a meaningful way. The original article and the surrounding comments remind me of the Tyler Durden quote from Fight club: "I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables - slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war... Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off." What proportion of 'this' sentiment is echoed by that quote? "Tyler" seems to indicate that this is a marketing problem - expectations not aligning with reality. It's a mixture of hard work, consumption and advertising. The question I propose, what proportion of this sentiment can be attributed to falsely attributing financial success (aka 'things') to a better life? That's not to say money isn't important, it's just stripping out the consumption element. Never in our life has it been so apparent how little we have compared to others (thanks Instagram) - is it possible the crux here is that our 'internal expectations' have risen exponentially while reality moves linearly?
  • nr2x 5y ago
    Many people live paycheck to paycheck just to barely cover food and shelter for their children. I don’t think the problem is influencers, it’s actual, old fashioned, poverty.
    • rantwasp 5y ago
      I think there’s multiple buckets here. One is the old fashioned poverty you bring up. It exists, it sucks. A lot of people are struggling. Another one is people that technically have all they need but spend money they don’t have on things that they don’t really need. This leads to being stuck “working hard” and for working longer than you would normally do (since you don’t really have a choice - you’ve gotta pay that loan)
      • 5y ago
• joejohnson 5y ago
  Wages across the western world have been flat for about 40 years, yet productivity has grown immensely in that same time. We should be asking ourselves where all that extra wealth ended up.
• elzbardico 5y ago
  The counter example are the immigrant populations that value education and hard work like asians. While pampered Americans are complaining why they don't get a 250k job with their PhD on women studies, asians surely and slowly climb the social pyramid.
• ralph84 5y ago
  This is by design. Progressive taxes on labor but not capital combined with comically low interest rates ensure there’s no true class mobility.
• zitterbewegung 5y ago
  Over my career it was never working harder that would make feel better. The things that make me had a better life was. 1. Becoming more empathetic about the team I was in (including my boss and the rest of management) 2. Experiencing failure trying to do two startups which lessens my regret 3. Always leaving a job when the work life balance doesn't match the salary
• asah 5y ago
  Serious q: how much is this due to inequality, and how much is due to greater transparency caused by social media and the internet? (Not an excuse, but helps point to solutions)
• drakythe 5y ago
  Pretty sure this thread is being brigaded. Awful lot of newly created accounts responding about how people are just lazy and don't want to work. At least two people bringing up and mis-representing the subreddit r/antiwork, and just general ignorance of how the cycle of poverty works.
• itronitron 5y ago
  Here is the link to the source material for the insidermag article, which has a lot of additional and interesting information. https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2020-01/2020%20Edelman%20Trust%20Barometer%20Global%20Report_LIVE.pdf https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2020-0... While I think that most of the discussions on this thread are worth having, I don't think they really relate directly to the referenced insidermag article and the Edelman report. My takeaway from the article is that distrust is a consequence of the growing wealth inequality in many countries. And that while during the pandemic many governments have provided economic stimuli the net result was an increase in stock market performance and not economic security for the lower and middle classes.
• bluedino 5y ago
  What is working hard? Putting long hours in at your dead-end job may be hard work, but is not working hard. Working hard is doing things outside of work in order to create opportunities. School, networking, learning. Working hard is sacrificing by saving your money, not blowing it. Making good choices. Hanging around positive people. Working hard is also being honest and not making excuses. I have a young child and use that as an excuse for not going back to college. Plenty of people finish their degree and have more kids at home than I do. I just don’t prioritize it as much. So I don’t have a right to complain when I get rejected from a job for not having a degree. I have had twenty years to get one, instead I chose to do other things.
• anovikov 5y ago
  I think trust in general is overrated as a concept. Even after 20 years of working in software business, it is shocking to me how gullible many Westerners are because they are ready to trust people by default. No surprise they are getting duped more often than not. In fact, i believe decline of trust is mainly due to globalisation: when Westerners get to meet and work with people from low-trust countries, their trust level naturally decreases. I would go on to say is that levels of trust, for the mutual economic and social benefit, need to be dramatically decreased across the board. No credit card chargebacks, no ACH, use of escrow for all non-trivial transactions, improved methods for identity verification, and overall teaching people that they should not try to "build reputation" or rely too much on someone's reputation: reputation is just a metric, and every metric is a hackable metric. Relying on it only makes you a victim of someone who is better at gaming the system.
• ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  As I have said many times before... I blame the government. I have a small company, dealing with high tech stuff, and yeah... If i got thaxed at the same rate as eg. Amazon is, i'd be totally rich... like really really reach... currently i make about as much as an engineer in a 'better' startup here. We have large companies that don't pay taxes at all, and owe the government millions, and nothing... we hear about them on the news, there are talks... If I don't pay taxes one month, I get a reminder, the next day, they take away their money from my bank account, and if they can't, they leave my accounts closed, so I can't do business. Covid help? Good luck. ... There are many many cases, where hard workers and small business owners (i'm talking about mom-and-pop businesses, not 100+ people) would have a better life, if they were treated the same as facebook/amazon/... are. But the governments let the "big players" get away with murder, and then bother the small businesses, because their automatic hand sanitizer dispenser has a too-small label with sanitizer specifications/contents, even though the label was literally ripped off the hand-pump bottle, which would be ok if it was still on the bottle instead of the automatic one.
• Tarucho 5y ago
  Hard work + opportunities leads to a better life. Hard work alone? nope. Go to a construction site and do the work the low graded workers do for a day. Tell me if this is not hard work. Tell me where are they going to be in 10 years? At the same time opportunities are getting more and more scarce as wealth is getting distributed between a smaller set of people. People can be fooled, but not all the time.
• happytrader 5y ago
  If you do a great job this year and kill yourself working… your boss might be able to afford a bigger house!
• foolinaround 5y ago
  This survey result is to be expected, as the zeitgeist has moved from advocating for 'equality in opportunities' to 'equality in outcomes'
• praptak 5y ago
  I'd say that "Productivity-pay gap"[0] is a good starting point for a discussion about how working harder may make your life better. [0]https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
• yalogin 5y ago
  Capitalism right now is just a perverse version of its self from 50 yrs ago. The politicians made money at the expense of the common man and now it’s eroding the trust in it, finally. This is to be expected. Unfortunately even though it did not change the lives of the lower half of the economic population and went directly against its purported value proposition, the lower half of the economy Had the staunchest belief in it. Am not surprised things are changing.
• benjaminwootton 5y ago
  I do wonder if this will be one of the major changes as a result of the pandemic. Everyone I know is re-evaluating their priorities, and many are taking early retirement or changing careers. The whole game of office politics feels even less appealing than it did a few years ago.
• TX0098812 5y ago
  Sure it will, just not for the people doing the work. If a consultant push themselves harder to squeeze out that last percent, their company makes more money.
• someguy321 5y ago
  I kind of figure that a lot of people are trapped in a "local optimum." Their life is fairly comfortable, but not extremely satisfying, and any direction they push doesn't yield results in an easily accessible way. I kind of figure that this is a result of the standard of living in developed countries having a high baseline level of easy comfort, and the fact that life is getting more and more complicated all the time. It's hard to justify striving really really hard toward a complex goal (that didn't even exist in its current incarnation 20 years ago) when the immediate rewards aren't satiating or apparent.
• meragrin_ 5y ago
  Why is the conversation about comparing the people at the current low end of the ladder to those at the current top end of the ladder? Why aren't we talking about how far the ladder has been moved up the mountain?
• tacotacotacos 5y ago
  Hard work is the only way to climb. But you must choose your mountain wisely.
• twirlock 5y ago
  Because we no longer even pretend success is merit based. In fact, we've allowed literal communists to convince everyone it would be evil if it were.
• re-al 5y ago
  Define a better life, define success. I know that for 99% of people its about money. This sort of discussion isn't even up for debate. Morality (doing the right thing, even if it means a personal loss) is a secondary consideration. We're on the road to hell, and most of us are working very hard to make it a reality.
• me_me_me 5y ago
  hard work 99% leads to more work when you work for somebody else
• mark_l_watson 5y ago
  I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth: a Dad who was a physics professor at Berkeley and a stay at home Mom - lucky! In order of most important first, what makes people successful: empathy, being grateful and appreciative, intelligence, luck, hard work. I think that young people get a lot of bad advice, like follow your bliss (I love Joseph Campbell, but he got that one wrong). People should figure out what they are good at, get very good at whatever this is, be kind and helpful to other people, and most importantly be grateful for what you have.
• throwaway24124 5y ago
  Genuinely curious- why are so many on here upset by this statement?
• DiffEq 5y ago
  Well -- working hard may be your only chance at a better life. You certainly won't have one by not working at all.
• marto1 5y ago
  Now if only people started practicing what they preach we would see a massive shift in the labor market and fast. Alas it rarely works out that way. The dominating protestant/north European ethic on work worked well when people mostly had their own business to take care of(e.g. a homestead) but obviously makes little to no sense in a time when we mostly have people working by the hour for someone else.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  It seems to me that nobody has figured out how to properly incentivize workers. We all accept that workers aren’t compensated based on the value of their labor. At least where I live, it’s also pretty accepted that if you are able to do 40 hours of work in 20, you won’t be able to get the same pay for half the hours, not twice the pay for the same hours. If you come up with something clever that makes your company $X, you probably won’t see even a fraction of that. Within firms, working hard isn’t particularly incentivized. It doesnt lead to a better life. Across firms, it seems to, but the friction there is in some cases inaccessibility high (e.g. “learn to code” or “move somewhere else”).
• codyswann 5y ago
  Awesome. Less competition.
• curation 5y ago
  Historically, serfs who were convinced by their ruling lords, that they were free, believed in hard work. The biggest difference from today is, in late feudalism, serfs had more holidays than us: Indeed, if we’re to believe Dr Lynn Parramore, senior research analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, we’re working a lot harder than medieval peasants did. “Ploughing and harvesting were backbreaking toil,” she says, “but the peasant enjoyed anywhere from eight weeks to half the year off.”https://www.smh.com.au/business/workplace/compared-to-you-and-me-the-feudal-serfs-had-it-easy-20190104-p50pkb.html https://www.smh.com.au/business/workplace/compared-to-you-an...
• popileviz 5y ago
  The fact that in many countries the trend is towards downward mobility being more common it's no wonder that people don't believe things that were never true to begin with.
• markus_zhang 5y ago
  Problem is if you are not of good background then working hard is the only way to reduce the risk of falling futher down on the ladder. You see, it's the perfect world for the top aristocracies. They have a world in which - it's harder and harder to the lower echelons to climb up the pole; - it's a lot easy to fall down the pole due to a number of reasons that ordinary people don't have control in (Financial crisis, terminal illness, etc.) - For the top dogs, they actually gain from some of the reasons listed above. Guess who gained a lot from the financial crisis and where did all those huge medical bills go? The result: - Top aristocracies are the safest guys - Everyone below (including the small aristocratics) is subject to huge risks of falling down, and the lower you are, the more risk you bear. Of course, unless when you are already at the bottom. - So everyone has to work super hard, not to climb up, but NOT to drop down.
• adyer07 5y ago
  For those arguing that grit is all that is needed to lift oneself from poverty: I recommend the book "This is all I got" by Lauren Sandler (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/51229737-this-is-all-i-got https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/51229737-this-is-all-...). It's a very powerful, deep account of how even those with incredible tenacity need societal support to succeed.
• m3kw9 5y ago
  How much does social media factor into these “unattainable better life” thoughts?
• lordnacho 5y ago
  Why would you think that working hard leads to a better life? Look at people you know. Is there any connection between how hard they work and how good their life is? By good life, you can take that to mean "material wealth" or "subjective happiness". I've never seen a connection. I know poor people who are happy. Rich people who are stressed all the time. Poor people who are stressed. Rich people who are happy. I've read it a few times now that the connection between income and happiness is tenuous, according to studies. The connection between working hard and getting either of those, I haven't seen so much about. My guess is it's just as tenuous. If you look at how people landed in their jobs, what do you see? Is it really the people who work hardest who got furthest? I get this feeling it's the other way around: people who got the best opportunities often feel they need to do something to deserve them.
• deleted 5y ago
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• okareaman 5y ago
  I think this is another way of people saying the system has failed to deliver for them, especially in comparison to the rewards for hard work accrued by their parents. I think most people would agree that there is a system where hard work would lead to a better life. Communism has failed that test. Now Capitalism is failing that test.
• jokethrowaway 5y ago
  I think we're approaching a point in time in which class climbing will become impossible, but we're not there yet. I'm worried about my sons' future and I feel like I need to earn money for them as well. Right now there is still plenty of opportunity, but it gets harder and more sophisticated every year.
• RickJWagner 5y ago
  I guess as (mostly) programmers, we have good reason to have hope. And we have a whole lot of anecdotal evidence that people who do work hard (or at least show good productivity) earn good rewards. Maybe we should look for ways to publicize it? I hate to think others might give up and not find paths to prosperity.
• mikewarot 5y ago
  The hoarding of opportunity by those who have already made it up the ladder, for their children is a natural response. Everyone wants better for their kids. It is the job of society, using the government as one of many tools, to help rebalance the game, by raising the floor so that everyone gets a fair chance, even if random bad things happen. The fewer we let fall through the cracks, the better off we all are in the long run. The worst of us deserves humane treatment.