I wouldn't say that's the obvious conclusion, if only because it assumes that income is highly enough correlated with work effort. It doesn't strike me that su

I wouldn't say that's the obvious conclusion, if only because it assumes that income is highly enough correlated with work effort. It doesn't strike me that such a correlation, which I do believe exists, is obviously within 20%, for example. Moreover, I would consider the situation of working at or very near capacity and yet still not producing to be a plausible, if not likely, source of feelings of futility.