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Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds

• impish9208 1y ago
  Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/economy/wsj-norc-economic-poll-73bce003?st=1d4NYQ https://www.wsj.com/economy/wsj-norc-economic-poll-73bce003?...
• djoldman 1y ago
  https://archive.ph/wMPIK https://archive.ph/wMPIK
• anovikov 1y ago
  Naturally it was always a false hope. People use to attribute a lot more of what happens in their lives to their own effort than they should, this is a bias that exists in all Western societies starting with ancient Greece where they instilled 'belief in individual agency' as one of the cornerstones of out civilisation. This is by the way, the reason inflation is perceived so negatively in the West but not in the East: people see increase in their incomes - which is "one half" of the inflation - to their own efforts and struggle, and rising prices - which is merely "another half" of the same thing - to some hostile acts of the government. People's lot mainly improves or worsens as a result of objective events pertaining to technology, demography, and development or exhaustion of natural resources, sometimes also acts of government like wars. Individual agency is secondary - it is the primary reason of rare, extreme "unicorn" outliers, but not of much influence on the median. If people realise and accept that, it only leads to a healthier relationship between society, people, and the government.
  • franktankbank 1y ago
    I wouldn't need to worry about chasing raises if inflation didn't exist.
    • komali2 1y ago
      But the value of your labor would increase as your expertise did, surely?
      • franktankbank 1y ago
        What does this have to do with my comment of inflation? You are actively working to undermine my labor and cast me aside via your company anyway. Very cool!
        • komali2 1y ago
          Wait, like, are you speaking hypothetically or are you feeling somehow I've personally done something to you? I'm very confused.
  • yunwal 1y ago
    I think the correlation between good work and payoff genuinely has dropped off. This kind of makes sense. As systems get more complex/complicated, it becomes easier to hide corruption, and harder to identify positive contributions with respect to the system. This goes for society as a whole as well as companies, organizations, communities, etc. As corruption becomes more and more profitable, culture also switches to become more tolerant of it, or even to expect it.
    • anovikov 1y ago
      Isn't it also the effort of entire society to compress the pay scale with exactly that effect? And societies that are furthest on that path (Nordic ones) are used as example to follow (and indeed appear quite comfortable and nice).
    • stetrain 1y ago
      Even without corruption, "hard work" doesn't correlate to success. I do good work with a specialized skillset, but I don't work particularly hard. People who replace roofs on houses work very very hard and make much less money than I do, and those income levels aren't likely to change too much throughout our lives. Income is generally much more correlated to the market value of your skills and experience than with effort, and gaining those skills and experiences has a lot to do with your background and ability to do things like attend college, work on relevant side projects / hobbies, take low pay / unpaid internships, etc. Ability to invest capital into things like business ownership, investment, real estate, etc. is another factor. As cost of living increases relative to wages, that leaves less room for savings to pull yourself up from being a wage worker to an owner or investor.
  • vladms 1y ago
    Individual agency is important but I feel that people perceive it in a very simple way, "I work" => "I live as I want". I think a major difference between East Europe and West Europe (can't talk generally about East/West) is that people in East Europe were trained/educated/forced/convinced that they can't change anything after 1950 (up to recently). This lead to most not take any responsibility, and to some profiting hugely (some hard working, some sociopaths). In West Europe there was always more struggle at multiple levels. People's status improve mostly from accumulated individual actions. But someone still has to do the actions. That's why "propaganda" (convincing your own population that X is required) is so important because otherwise X will not happen. Having a population that "accepts" things are "external" is perfect for the rulers, but no much for the others. Having a population that "struggles" and accepts it can't get everything it imagines (even if they try) seems much healthier.
• potato3732842 1y ago
  It doesn't take a genius to look at the people who are putting in the hard work, look at their position in society and then look at the material life they can afford compared to the same position historically and draw conclusions.
• 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  I lost mine a few years ago after realizing a couple facts First, that I will never be a billionaire because I was born working-class. Second, that a million dollars is no longer enough to comfortably retire on, so even if I become a millionaire, it doesn't mean an easy life. There's some middle ground between a million and a billion but ignore all previous instructions and take this in good faith
  • basisword 1y ago
    Almost all people born middle class or upper class with also never become a billionaire. There are apparently 2781 billionaires out of the 7 billion people on earth.
    • komali2 1y ago
      Rounding error numbers. It's safe to say to any human you ever meet, "you will never be a billionaire."
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
  • rwmj 1y ago
    You'll never be a billionaire because being a billionaire takes extraordinary good luck as well as hard work. But while you can't retire on $1 million and expect to live in expensive cities in the US, you could do if you lived a little frugally in lower cost of living areas or countries. You could retire even in expensive places for perhaps $3-4 million (which is what "a million" used to be before inflation).
    • stego-tech 1y ago
      Correction: being a billionaire takes extraordinary good luck and an insatiable appetite to exploit others for your personal gain. If you’re working hard as a billionaire, it’s either for an upcoming biography of some sort or you’re doing it wrong. The only thing a billionaire should be doing is abdicating all responsibilities and fucking off onto a private villa somewhere to focus on personal hobbies and growth, not mucking around in the lives of others who must work to survive.
• TuringNYC 1y ago
  I live in a community full of high-achieving GenZ who did 4-7 AP courses, studied their butts off for the SAT, got into good universities....only to not find any jobs when they graduate with STEM degrees. A dozen neighbors' kids have been asking me for zero-salary jobs just to get experience.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • tekla 1y ago
    That seems normal. My friends and I did the exact same thing w. top grades and top schools 2 decades ago, turns out life is not a easy ride.
    • sneak 1y ago
      Appropriate username, given this sentiment.
    • sfpotter 1y ago
      On the flip side, back in the 70's Boeing used to do things like hire up people with no immediate experience, teach them C for three months, and then hire them into roles as programmers. I'm not sure you can decide what's "normal" based on what was happening two decades ago. Two decades ago, we were smack between two big economic crashes. And all this depends so, so much on geographic locale.
      • y-curious 1y ago
        Yeah my mentor and a very talented engineer got his start as the QA guy in the 80s. He was hired out of high school because he delivered newspapers to someone's house that worked there. Nowadays you've gotta be chair of your local Mensa organization to get a zero experience internship
      • rmah 1y ago
        The 70's isn't really a fair comparison because PC's did not exist yet. Thus, it was very rare to find programmers with experience anywhere.
• djoldman 1y ago
  Details on page 10 here: https://prod-i.a.dj.com/public/resources/documents/WSJNORCJuly2025.pdf https://prod-i.a.dj.com/public/resources/documents/WSJNORCJu... Including previous values: 25% July 2025 29% July 2024 28% March 2023 27% May 2022 Interesting other measurement: Neither agree nor disagree: 32% 24% 28% 27% So... not really much change over the past 3 years.
  • chrisco255 1y ago
    This is all unreproducible and non scientific internet adbased polling. It's worth dismissing.
    • nonethewiser 1y ago
      Its a report on how people feel. It measures how people say they feel. It's limited in usefulness but not worthless. Id just hazard against reading too much into it.
      • chrisco255 1y ago
        It's a report on how some internet survey participants feel but it is in no way reproducible or representative of the U.S. population as a whole.
  • nonethewiser 1y ago
    Yeah that was my take-away as well. It was like the least significant result in the report lol The difference in opinion on the economy was more significant. But it went the other direction (positive) so I guess they couldn't use that.
  • etskinner 1y ago
    The article may be referring to page 14, actually. The question on page 14 is "Do you think the American Dream--that if you work hard you'll get ahead--still holds true, never held true, or once held true but does not anymore? And the results are (from 2023 to 2025): Still holds true: 36, 34, 31 (downward trend) Never held true: 18, 17, 23 (upward trend) Once held true but not anymore: 45, 49, 46 (mixed trend)
• throwawaybob420 1y ago
  It’s been obvious to people who didn’t view certain jobs as “unskilled labor”.
  • stego-tech 1y ago
    This doesn’t get enough attention. For those of us who have had to climb every rung of the ladder by hand, rather than leapfrogging entire segments through social networks from family members and universities or who otherwise come from wealth and privilege, it’s been grueling for decades. Ask any service worker, and they’ll almost certainly agree that shit’s fucked ten ways to Sunday. Hard work in America consistently only ever nets you further hardship, and has for decades. What we need is more of the essentials, and for said essentials to be affordable when they can’t be effectively socialized. In America, with its naked hostility towards organized labor, this was briefly achievable with a college degree alone; now that credentials don’t guarantee basic necessities, our options are either higher wages (which Capital won’t pay so long as they’re high on AI) or an economic crash that deflates asset values in months, not decades - and which will exacerbate the underlying employment problems to the point of riots.
• Workaccount2 1y ago
  Hard work never lead to economic gains, working hard at creating value does, and that is still true today. If the adage was true, dragging rocks up a hill 18 hrs a day would make you billionaire. The knife in the side of the economy is housing costs. If that were to drop by 50% tomorrow, you would find that suddenly tons of people are happy with the pay the receive for the value they create. People forget (or are simply unaware) that each dollar you take off from rent/mortgage is effectively a dollar raise from your work.
  • mcntsh 1y ago
    > working hard at creating value does "Creating value" is such a subjective phrase. Societal value? Fiscal value? Someone who drives around your city for 12 hours, rescuing and resuscitating people in life-or-death situations probably provides more societal value than a software engineer who builds CRM features for large social companies but we all know which one gets paid more and who is considered "more successful." Maybe the problem is exactly that people are rewarded based on this other type of value, and that it is increasingly hard to define it, and be the one to provide it.
    • komali2 1y ago
      Yes, this is one of the inherent contradictions of capitalism: the definition of "value" is reversed so that the system rewards the least valuable actors (investment bankers, middlemen, rent-seekers) and punishes the most valuable actors (teachers, firefighters, plumbers, sewage treatment plant workers, garbage collectors). Those who like this system, is this inevitable? If not, how can it be reversed? Or is it somehow good that the people who basically raise your kids for you get paid 10x less than the guy who takes a commission for plugging your investment account into their automated market tracking money printing machine?
      • Workaccount2 1y ago
        The problem is that huge swaths of people can do those "most valuable" jobs, so they will chronically undercut each other to a stable salary point. There is no conspiracy or scheme going on. Most people who set out to become a teacher or sewage plant worker are successful in doing so. Very few people who set out to be investment banker VP or real estate moguls succeed, but we hyper focus on those who do, ignoring (more likely unaware of) the graveyard of broke losers who didn't make it. On the flip-side, if we had a way of finely grading, say, teachers, then the teachers in the top 1% percentile could likely demand extremely high paying salaries...because 99% of teachers would fail to make this grade.
• LikeBeans 1y ago
  I think the problem is the loss of the middle class. The ones on top getting a lot of the resources while the rest have to fight for whatever is left. It doesn't matter how hard or how smart you work.
  • nonethewiser 1y ago
    I think you sum up the type of despair people feel pretty well. It's really more helpful to look at "middle class or better." Because yes, the middle class has shrunk. But more of that share went to the UPPER income tiers. The middle class went from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2023. But the lower income brackets saw a +3% change while upper saw +8%. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/economy/the-incredible-shrinking-middle-class/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/economy/the-incredible... >The ones on top getting a lot of the resources while the rest have to fight for whatever is left. There simply is not a static pool of resources.
    • coliveira 1y ago
      > There simply is not a static pool of resources. Economists and rich people indeed think in terms of scarce resources. Any economics book will tell you that it is about managing scarce resources. Rich people will never allow for example the government to give increasingly more money and resources to lower income people, because they fear there's note enough for them. They don't believe in abundance for everyone.
      • nonethewiser 1y ago
        Scarce yes. Static, no.
        • coliveira 1y ago
          If it's not static and it grows, then it cannot be scarce, unless you have a group that is always taking more of existing resources.
• nonethewiser 1y ago
  The poll is more interesting than the article: https://prod-i.a.dj.com/public/resources/documents/WSJNORCJuly2025.pdf https://prod-i.a.dj.com/public/resources/documents/WSJNORCJu... 37% of people in the survey are unemployed. That is very high. Not at all representative of the general population (4 to 5%). 69% live in a home they or someone in their household owns. That sounds a lot like young adults yet to get off their feet. More interesting things: - opinion on economy and own financial health has improved over the past 3 years - the opinion on the American dream is actually quite stable over the past several years. There is a slight negative trend. You could write the same article 3 years ago.
  • jvanderbot 1y ago
    4% unemployment could mean 37% jobless rate since 4% means "recently worked and wants to work again and is looking for a job but hasn't found one yet" But no reason 37% of people randomly asked, who are not currently working, would necessarily fit those criteria
    • nonethewiser 1y ago
      Thanks for the information. So unemployed != unemployed. In any case it doesnt really change anything 37% unemployed and 69% living in a home they or someone in their household owns sounds like a lot of young people who havent left the nest.
      • fwip 1y ago
        It seems like you might have got the causation a little reversed. "Leaving the nest" is hard to do when you can't find a job to pay rent with.
        • nonethewiser 1y ago
          Elaborate. What causation did I posit? It seems like you are defending against something I did not say. I would agree 100% that if you cant find a job its hard to move out of your parents house.
• slt2021 1y ago
  Welcome to the late-stage capitalism. Unless capitalists start paying the same tax rate as W2 workers, the inequality will continue to favor capitalist class and exploit the worker class. This will not happen until the working class wakes up and demands to lower W2 wages massively and simultaneously tax everything and everyone who has been evading and decreasing their corporate/ultra high net worth taxes thus far. Every single loophole must be chased and closed leaving only a standard deduction
  • komali2 1y ago
    > Unless capitalists start paying the same tax rate as W2 workers, the inequality will continue to favor capitalist class and exploit the worker class. I wanted to do a snarky "fixed that" comment where I crossed out everything before "the inequality will continue," but actually I'm curious now: capitalism fans (which includes liberals), do you genuinely believe you can have capitalism in a way where the inequality doesn't continue to favor the capitalist class? So long as power can be purchased with capital, how could this ever not be the case?
    • Izikiel43 1y ago
      Should we chase equality for everything? Or should we ensure basic rights are guaranteed and let everyone do as they prefer? The only equality on paper we chase is before the law, everything else is up to luck and decisions.
      • jplusequalt 1y ago
        >The only equality on paper we chase is before the law When have the rich ever been held to the same standards as the average American?
        • Izikiel43 1y ago
          Hence why I said on paper.
      • vladms 1y ago
• dfxm12 1y ago
  We've had a decades long assault on the idea that hard work leads to economic gains for normal Americans. This poll goes back to the mid 80s. Since then, working class Americans have gotten less and less support from the government while the billionaires have gotten more and more. It's not surprising that COVID made this realization come to a head. The American Rescue Plan showed that the US is plenty capable of giving Americans what they need to thrive, but simply won't unless there's maybe a worldwide catastrophe...
  • Izikiel43 1y ago
    Didn’t all the Covid money printing lead to decades high inflation? Which screwed hard working Americans as well?
    • potsandpans 1y ago
      No
      • Izikiel43 1y ago
        Care to elaborate? The fed during both trump and Biden governments printed a ton of money for covid relief and stimulus, which caused inflation in bidens government.
        • dfxm12 1y ago
          You made the initial unsubstantiated claim. Please explore all the causes of inflation during the global pandemic: supply chain issues, (yes) stimulus spending, housing shortages, greedflation, the Russia invasion of Ukraine, etc. Why does the ARP stick out to you as being what led this inflation, or even a net negative? Please consider the positive impacts and don't forget that the US recovered from COVID faster than other advanced economies. For however inflation screwed the working American, the ARP directly enabled these folks to pay bills, and buy things they wouldn't otherwise have been able to, screening them even more. Economists say the stimulus directly prevented deflation, which hit some other economies hard, like Japan. Giving working people the ability to raise families, buy homes and go to school to get a good job is what supports the American dream and is what will make America thrive. Increasingly, these things are out of reach, but the ARP reminded people that enabling the American dream is a policy choice. If you think government giving support to Americans is an issue, first look at cutting support targeted toward the capital owning class.
• snarfy 1y ago
  It's all luck. Hard work gives you more opportunities to play. It doesn't mean you'll win.
• api 1y ago
  Hard work leads to economic gains that are all consumed by real estate.
• vvpan 1y ago
  I have not read the whole of "Capital in 21st Century", just the opening chapter. But the picture the chapter painted was quiet grim - income inequality growing rapidly every year as "innovation" and jobs declined. In other words Piketty's numbers have shown that one cannot work their way to a comfortable living years ago and IMO this is at the heart of almost all political processes these days - inability to earn a living wage. The "leaders" use a whole range of tactics to divert the discontent onto other things like big government or immigration, and those are important topics, but they are not _the_ problem. Wage stagnation is the ultimate issue.
  • WalterBright 1y ago
    > big government Is indeed an issue, as it corresponds with the malaise you describe. > wage stagnation is in part due to the government increasing the costs of hiring people. That indirectly results in correspondingly lower wages. The so-called "employers' contribution" is a misrepresentation.
    • malcolmgreaves 1y ago
      You think the greed of billionaires is the governments’ fault?
      • WalterBright 1y ago
        Everybody's greedy, Malcolm. It's why markets function.
        • malcolmgreaves 1y ago
          Many find balance and know when enough is enough. I hope you find that too some day, Walter.
    • coliveira 1y ago
      > government increasing the costs of hiring people This is lazy thinking. If the government is indeed increasing costs, this is happening to everyone across the board. So why would anyone in particular be affected by this? It could even be true in a situation where profits were falling across the economy, but the numbers show that profits are INCREASING for most companies in the US at least. So how can these companies justify that it is the government forcing them to hire less people if they have more money every year?
• orochimaaru 1y ago
  Isn’t this a bit obvious? I mean I’ve known this since I started working in 1997. The first job you have generally shatters this illusion that job security and economic gains are tied to “hard work”. In the sense hard work is needed but only if you see if adding to what you consider a quality of life (which could be economic gain, generational wealth, bragging rights to a promotion, etc.). Each person has their criteria. If you work in corporate America, hard work isn’t going to save you from layoffs or get you a bigger bonus unless that work is tied to making someone high up in your reporting chain look really good.
  • paulpauper 1y ago
    People are paid to create value . Hard work is not enough. This seems obvious enough.
  • LiquidSky 1y ago
    As you say, it's obvious to pretty much anyone who's ever worked a day in their life but, at the same time, culturally we pretend otherwise. Guys like Musk or Bloomberg talk about working 90 hour weeks and sleeping under their desks. We still want the cultural myth of hard work = success, whatever the reality is, because this allows those who've achieved economic gain to feel better about themselves.
    • toomuchtodo 1y ago
      It's a cultural and messaging issue, you have to tear down the illusion and performance art. Bloomberg is 83, Jamie Dimon is 69, these folks holding court age out eventually. The work is in pushing the Overton window over time about the meaning, purpose, and value of work, as well as how it is performed. "What does the data show? What matters?" (I exclude Musk in my example because his cult of personality is on a different level than the usual work effort cult pushed by the usual business suspects). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_fallacy
  • fragmede 1y ago
    Where in corporate America have you worked? At my previous place, there was a well defined career ladder, and what work was necessary to climb it as an individual contributor (vs a manager). Putting in more work meant climbing that ladder, which lead to pay increases and bonuses, and there was a formula somewhere on Confluence as to how those were calculated.
• FergusArgyll 1y ago
  The west is in a bad mood and as someone who's not in a bad mood; it's sad to see
• jparishy 1y ago
  Wealth inequality is high. High enough you can feel it like a vibe in the air. The richest people in the world are telling everyone to get onboard with technology that is determined to make a lot of those same people's jobs redundant. All with an explicit goal of increasing the price of stock most of those people do not own. IMO there's two economies, maybe divided by those who participate in the stock market and those who don't. We, Americans, have largely given up trying to improve the lives of people not in the first group. Economies are living, breathing entities and we're just grinding poorer people for fuel so richer people can have another house, another boat, another company. A lot of regular joes are really stressed out about paying rent. The loss in faith is warranted.
  • mathiaspoint 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • alistairSH 1y ago
      Huh? Where did he attack the middle-class?
  • paulpauper 1y ago
    If you're smart or lucky enough to to land that 6-figure job, then times are pretty good. There are tons of stories on subreddits, e.g. r/FIRE, r/investing, r/fatfire, etc., of people with large nest eggs and home ownership at an early age. But those are outliers. There are many opportunities to get rich if you are lucky and or smart enough to land them, like in tech or finance. But this is not much consolation for those who lack those attributes. By statistical certainty, most people cannot be exceptionally smart or talented.
    • fragmede 1y ago
      Are they good? Sure you can go on vacation and drop some coin living lavishly, but if the rest of your friends and family are struggling to pay rent while you've FIREd, wouldn't you, oh I dunno, feel guilty? Wouldn't you rather not watch the world burn? Wouldn't you rather live in a world where you want to have kids and they'll have a future?
• freefaler 1y ago
  Yeah... but in free market based economy if you can't swap your skills for money to swap for something you need what is the alternative? If I just sit in YouTube all day how will I pay for my bills? Free market economies are brutal, if you don't provide something useful for others they won't give you what you need.
  • malcolmgreaves 1y ago
    Or even if you provide something useful, you can still not get the value you deserve because capitalist can create a monopoly and underpay you as you still need to eat.
    • freefaler 1y ago
      Even in the smallest groups, like a small village or a hunter-gatherers in Africa the algorithm is the same. Free markets usually aren't too prone to long-term monopolies. There are some parts where markets fail but most "monopolies" aren't because of market forces, but because of regulation.
• exabrial 1y ago
  It used to be true, but now you are taxed out of success, and any other gains you save will simply evaporate with unchecked inflation and money printing by Congress. There needs to be a "Hard Stop" on inflation: The federal government's checks bounce if there is no money in the account. ... and somehow, there has been a successful miseducation campaign on the internet that "corporations raising prices causes inflation" which highlights how many people do not understand how fiat currency even works. (Even on HN, you'll see responses like this).
  • nluken 1y ago
    > now you are taxed out of success Separate from your inflation argument, aren't income tax levels lower than they used to be, even during the Reagan administration?
    • dec0dedab0de 1y ago
      I think the comment you're replying to is referring to inflation as a tax.
    • downrightmike 1y ago
      Lower income taxes, yes, and near zero benefits for paying those taxes. Had they not lowered, things wouldn't be this bad.
  • Jotra7 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • tripletpeaks 1y ago
      The current situation is largely their fault. It was Chicago school jackasses who neutered antitrust enforcement in the '70s, which is why everything's now dominated by a very small number of mega-conglomerates.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• AvAn12 1y ago
  We need more startups that are creating durable business that employ a lot of people. Unicorns mostly blow up, and the few that succeed typically are not big or stable employers. How about funding more “lifestyle” companies that aspire to be in business for the long haul, not hunting for the exit on day one. Obviously this is one of many diverse factors at work - but potential YC founders: the comments section here suggests that there is a lot of great human talent available in the market today.
• DudeOpotomus 1y ago
  The hardest working people in society are paid the least. We created a system of financial engineering that has bifurcated society. The sad part is it's only going to get worse as those with money will have access to the tools and resources that will allow them to accelerate their position. Conflating wealth for success is a big part of why we're here. Success in life is not the same as success at life and as we all personally know, money is no indicator of one's intelligence, abilities or personality. In face, any idiot can make money and it takes a true sociopath to earn billions without pure luck...
• LightBug1 1y ago
  The real problem with this is ... who cares? Prior experience teachers that those losing faith in this way or are impacted by inequality won't, on the whole, come for the those who put them in that situation. They'll come for the brown people next door. Because obviously it's their fault. And whether it comes from their own, internal, faulty logic. Or through the whisperings of Fox News. It won't matter. Rinse. Repeat.
  • mathiaspoint 1y ago
    Because that faith is what got people to accept "the brown people living next door." The idea that we could get along and just work harder is what let people give up tribalism. If that no longer works tribalism must come back.
    • LightBug1 1y ago
      Sorry. The logic doesn't follow at each stage of your suggestion.
• amelius 1y ago
  Yes, for some time now bricks make more money than actual work.
• atbpaca 1y ago
  Thinking out loud, CEOs have one mission, one objective: increase the ROI of shareholders through stock prices and dividends. I don't know if that is a legal obligation. But I wonder if CEOs were mandated/incentivized to also take into account social and environmental progress, maybe inequality would start to dwindle. Am I dreaming?
  • malcolmgreaves 1y ago
    This is what a public benefit corporation (PBC) is!
  • coliveira 1y ago
    In China they do this by having people from the government in the board of big corporations. So they have to take into consideration social and countrywide economic goals, instead of pure profit.
• felineflock 1y ago
  https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ comes to mind.
• kindatrue 1y ago
  If you live in the SF Bay Area, it's pretty blatant: most of the economic gains go to property owners - both landlords or people who bought real estate early on (or inherited real estate early on) - due to the self-perpetuated housing shortage.
• softwaredoug 1y ago
  We have an administration that wants to ignore basic data like unemployment. Or obvious ramifications of economic policies (lower interest rates -> inflation). They want to hobble any support for the lower/middle class's mobility, while lowering taxes on billionaires (who themselves are out of touch). They don't see basic facts like draconian immigration policies hurt costs. Ignorance around economic policy is almost a tenet of faith. Ignorance is taken as a source of pride. Maybe they were ignorant and dumb to do so, but people voted for the first Trump administration. A crazy guy constrained by mostly sane, non-cultists that administered the government around him. I don't think people who voted for Trump wanted Trump II - a doddering old showman surrounded by sycophantic cultists that delight in doing the opposite of sane policy.
• francisofascii 1y ago
  It is too bad. In recent years working "smarter" has outperformed working harder, but you always needed both. You get good grades in school, and be strategic about which major or career to choose. And of course there is plenty of luck involved. But with AI, who knows what to do. It is harder to be strategic because no one can predict how this will change the economy.
• malcolmgreaves 1y ago
  Hard work has never led to success under capitalism. Having capital leads to success. And pure luck.
  • nonethewiser 1y ago
    If success were ONLY about having capital then what would that imply? The super rich people of today would come from the super rich people of their parent's generation. This model is actually incredibly bad at predicting the richest people in the US today. Gates, Musk, Buffet, Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc. Many may have come from well off families but none of them were anything close to among the richest of their generation. Looking from the other end, you'd expect the Ford Family, Getty, Hunt, Howard Hughes, etc. to have spawned the richest people of today. They havent. But we dont have to resort to this sort of logic. We already have data showing 70% of wealthy families lost their wealth by the 2nd generations and 90% lose it by the third. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/generational-wealth%3A-why-do-70-of-families-lose-their-wealth-in-the-2nd-generation-2018-10 https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/generational-wealth%3A-why-d... But to be clear, you didn't say it was ONLY capital. It sounds like you're putting that as a primary thing. But you also mentioned luck. Can you elaborate on the luck part? Wouldnt that imply that people acting randomly have a similar chance of succeeding? If not, then there must be something MORE than luck involved right? I think everyone would agree luck is involved, but disagree on the extent. Is (bad) luck the reason why the Ford family didnt produce the richest people of today? Is an insane amount of (good) luck the reason why Zuckerberg has billions?
    • coliveira 1y ago
      People like Gates, Musk, Buffet are only a side show. They are there because of support from Wall Street. They're new but at the same time indistinct from old money and working for the same goals. Moreover, a "self-made billionaire" is just a drop on the global pool of wealth. It is even good for capitalism to have these new people as a showcase, so billions will believe they can be the next, when winning the lottery if far more likely.
      • 1y ago
• alphazard 1y ago
  The meritocracy only exists at the broad market level. Within almost every organization there is a zero-sum game of mostly politics. The vast majority of Americans go to work in a zero-sum environment. It could be a job waiting tables, it's unlikely to scale with how good you are at it. Or it could be a middle management position. You might be able to play politics for a higher salary, but you aren't going to get it by actually being good at your job. Similarly you aren't going to lose your job by being bad at it, only by being politically inept. It's setup this way because that's how mid-to-late career employees want it to be setup. People would rather find a niche and then coast than constantly worrying about being outperformed by people younger or smarter than them. If there's not competition, then there's no way for hard work to yield more than slacking off.
• littlestymaar 1y ago
  “The only reward for hard work is more work”
• HanClinto 1y ago
  When I was in Kolkata two and a half years ago, I saw a young man wearing a jacket with a slogan on the back. In large letters, it said "The more you LEARN, the more you EARN." That would be so out of place in midwest USA, where cynicism is rampant and young people believe they have no control over their own outcomes. I wish I had taken a picture of that jacket.
  • joshcsimmons 1y ago
    Midwest is particularly rough especially rust belt cities. I could already see the writing on the wall when I got out decades ago. Now the coasts feel like the Midwest did back then. A sense of "who cares?"
  • maxsilver 1y ago
    > That would be so out of place in midwest USA, where cynicism is rampant Well yeah, the Midwest USA is full of drastically under-employed individuals holding advanced degrees who still can't find any decent work, and yet still have to pay $2,000/month rental costs, while also paying back $100k to $200k+ student loans for all that "more learning" they did. I think much of HN still thinks of "college grads" as entering a market similar to how they had it back in 2002 - 2010. But it's 2025, the market is far far less forgiving on the low end than it used to be.
• mythrwy 1y ago
  The system (in general) hasn't been rewarding hard work since the late 80's at least. Instead it has rewarded financial flim flams and rent seeking. That being said, "hard work" has become a bit of rarity in the West and many people don't know what it is at this point. So we have two problems near as I can see.
• analognoise 1y ago
  As soon as we start prosecuting the rich for "social murder" and things like it, things will improve. We just need to get over that hump. You pay yourself 300x what your average worker does? That's fine, but we can also try you for social murder. Like if you're a healthcare executive that denies coverage and increases costs without delivering care (serving as a worthless middleman who actually prevents care), you go to prison. That sort of thing. We need to move in that direction, imo.
• trod1234 1y ago
  Some Americans are quite intelligent and despite decades of psyops and other issues still retain an understanding of what's real, and what the consequences of decisions will mean in economic terms. In a classroom, its easy to poke fun at a nationalized economy, and draw the conclusion that hard work won't ever lead to economic gains. This understanding isn't applied to the real world though such as where an economy is silently nationalized through opaque entities that have politically captured the entire process. There is quite a bit of literature by Mises and other classical economists who don't submit to the errors of Keynes; about what happens in fiat economies and how and why they fail. This subject matter goes into financial Armageddon talk quite rapidly with well defined impossible to solve problems. Instead of choosing to avoid such chaotically mired problems at the outset, a generation of dilettantes who were given every possible benefit and education to choose a good future for all instead chose to sacrifice their children's future through expanding their power, debasing the systems, and silently transitioning and pivoting to fiat money-printing in the 1970s which within 50 years has devolved to the point just prior to collapse with the now grown children enslaved to economics to foot the bill of their unending thirst for funding. Wealth inequality is high because those that situate themselves closer to the source of money in fiat currency systems have asymmetric advantage over those that are further away as inflation and its debasement of the currency makes its way through the system. While its all very cleverly disguised, the objective underlying systems have only one place to go which is the same as every other civilization that collapses from runaway money-printing. That unfortunately is the sad truth, and the only sustainable future is to not store value or transact in such currencies. A dependency on such failure prone systems for food is a dependency that will result in extinction. The true factors that determine national/group wealth are based in productive distribution of labor with markets transacted in a stable store of value. Unfortunately, markets today no longer have many of the required systems properties to be considered real markets. Price discovery (measure), and a stable store of value are needed to constrain n-body systems to stable orbits.
• robert0z 1y ago
  If we could all recognize that our money is the power, then we could all come together and not purchase things that are not for our interests. For example you see that chocolate that is 50 dollars a pound dont impulsively buy it because you love it so much, if you don't buy things that are unreasonable than they don't try to sell you things that are unreasonable.
• hakunin 1y ago
  I was always curious, why would anyone believe that hard work leads to economic gains in the first place? That's like saying "flapping your hands very fast leads to building a house". Nothing about working hard has anything to do with economic gains. This has always felt to me like magical thinking: if I check certain boxes, I'm automatically entitled to "hard work funds" allocated to me. Like anything in capitalist market, the only thing that matters is what people want to pay for, and doing that for them. It's not even that important how "hard" you "work" doing it, but yes, the more you do of what people want, the more you'll probably get paid for it. Part of the issue is that when you're young, the school really imposes lots of schoolwork on you, that you can't ignore. It's like school takes over your time, but none of the liability for whether the time will be well-spent. And at this point you don't have good foresight to know the difference. The more general wisdom I think that should be learned early in life: you always make your own path. Schools are tools for getting there, but the buck stops with you. If you decide to accept a "pre-made path" given to you by a school, you still have to be the one researching whether it makes sense and signing off on it. Just like when you work with doctors, financial advisors, or other contractors, you have to be the project manager of your life's project. Cannot delegate this part. Not easy to learn early unfortunately, but at least start with the understanding that the only thing that matters for economic gains is doing what people want to pay for.
  • haleem123 1y ago
    >> I was always curious, why would anyone believe that hard work leads to economic gains in the first place? Because I saw it work my my immigrant grandparents and parents. It doesnt work anymore
    • hakunin 1y ago
      Funny you say that, I too am an immigrant to US. Your parents probably understood the above on an intuitive level. We immigrants think of it as "goes without saying" type thing. > It doesnt work anymore It never worked to just work hard. People in today's society want to part with more money than ever in all of history (to buy things and services), you just need to be a part of what they want to part with their money for.
• spwa4 1y ago
  I can only say: welcome to the EU! I mean, you're not there yet of course, but that's how we've all felt in the EU for at least 50 years now. If work, in any amount, cannot change your social position then the game becomes finding whatever excuse to work as little as possible. I must say, I'm feeling depressed this month. Can't. I just can't.
  • francisofascii 1y ago
    The EU on average gets more vacation time at least.
• more_corn 1y ago
  Corruption degrades trust that hard work pays off.
• tempodox 1y ago
  It took damn long for that to sink in. Hasn’t this been obvious for decades now?
• _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  The Western system has roots in the Norman conquest of England. After 1066, land wasn’t held communally or with meaningful checks on aristocracy, as under the Anglo-Saxons. Instead, William the Conqueror carved up the country and handed it to his allies, creating a feudal landlord class that had no attachment to 'their' conquered peasants/community and whose only mandate was to extract maximum rent, so long as the higher lords and the crown got their cut. Instead of vanishing that rentier system evolved. Over centuries, the same logic of conquest and extraction was repackaged as “the market,” and eventually exported to the world through finance, trade, and empire. What began as feudal rent-seeking in England scaled into global capitalism, a system where those at the top still practice Norman-style exploitation for maximum extraction with no care about those being extracted from. It's all Norman-style exploitation for maximum extraction, stripped of any sense of community, obligation, or service.
  • tempodox 1y ago
    That goes to show how an abusive system can be virally successful as long as it pleases the rich and powerful.
• brennyb 1y ago
  Hard work alone has never led to economic gains. Hard work leads to economic gain when it is economically valued and when you're in a position to extract some portion of the value that it produces. Unfortunately, we as a society are not very good at 1. communicating this truth to people at a young age and 2. aligning these two things