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As argued in the article - would you suggest that the life of that single mother would not get worse if she stopped working so hard? If we define success as som

As argued in the article - would you suggest that the life of that single mother would not get worse if she stopped working so hard? If we define success as some arbitrary amount of money, we can make the correlation between hard work and success “tenuous” just by making the amount of money defining success to be high enough.

bluefirebrand 5y ago
> would you suggest that the life of that single mother would not get worse if she stopped working so hard It likely would but not necessarily, depending on other factors. "Her life would get worse" is a complete distraction here from the fact that she is working crazy hard and is not very successful. I agree that if we define success as being a high enough value it ceases to be meaningful. Luckily society has a base level value we call "The poverty line" and we can use that as a metric. It's not a very good one, because living right at the poverty line is still not a desirable life. But it's what we have. How does "hard work -> success" explain the millions of workers who live below the poverty line? If that is the base level of success that society sort of expects, then you would figure that anyone who has a job they work hard at should be able to be above it, no? Are all of those workers just lazy? Not working hard enough?
- pitaj 5y ago
  The poverty line is arbitrary and defined in a relative fashion, so it's not useful for your example as there will always be somewhere we can draw the line that puts 25% of people below it.
kerkeslager 5y ago
> As argued in the article - would you suggest that the life of that single mother would not get worse if she stopped working so hard? No, I would not make the straw man argument you're proposing. > If we define success as some arbitrary amount of money, we can make the correlation between hard work and success “tenuous” just by making the amount of money defining success to be high enough. No one is defining success as some arbitrary amount of money. We're both defining success relatively: you're defining it in relation to a hypothetical outcome for hypothetical courses of actions for a hypothetical single mother, whereas I'm defining success in relation to real outcomes for real people who start from different situations.

bluefirebrand 5y ago

> would you suggest that the life of that single mother would not get worse if she stopped working so hard It likely would but not necessarily, depending on other factors. "Her life would get worse" is a complete distraction here from the fact that she is working crazy hard and is not very successful. I agree that if we define success as being a high enough value it ceases to be meaningful. Luckily society has a base level value we call "The poverty line" and we can use that as a metric. It's not a very good one, because living right at the poverty line is still not a desirable life. But it's what we have. How does "hard work -> success" explain the millions of workers who live below the poverty line? If that is the base level of success that society sort of expects, then you would figure that anyone who has a job they work hard at should be able to be above it, no? Are all of those workers just lazy? Not working hard enough?

pitaj 5y ago
The poverty line is arbitrary and defined in a relative fashion, so it's not useful for your example as there will always be somewhere we can draw the line that puts 25% of people below it.

kerkeslager 5y ago

> As argued in the article - would you suggest that the life of that single mother would not get worse if she stopped working so hard? No, I would not make the straw man argument you're proposing. > If we define success as some arbitrary amount of money, we can make the correlation between hard work and success “tenuous” just by making the amount of money defining success to be high enough. No one is defining success as some arbitrary amount of money. We're both defining success relatively: you're defining it in relation to a hypothetical outcome for hypothetical courses of actions for a hypothetical single mother, whereas I'm defining success in relation to real outcomes for real people who start from different situations.