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

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.

> 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.

Something tells me my mortgage would not go down and I might actually be a little unhappy (understatement) if housing prices were halved. But yes, this would be overall good for young people in society

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?

> working hard at creating value does,

You'll have to explain to me what a person at work is doing, then? I mean, if they're not creating excess value by working at a job, whose value is then sold at a surplus over what they get paid, why does that job exist? Why did they get hired?

What exactly do you think people at 'normal jobs' are doing at work all day?

The parent is pointing out that the labor theory of value is nonsense. How much something is worth is totally unrelated to how hard or how long someone worked on it.

You should watch the recent pod save America podcast where the LA housing debate was discussed and the La rep was super happy about reducing the height of a new housing unit by 4 stories.

Many objects track nicely the energy required to make said thing though.

Rejecting the labor theory of value was a choice, not some eternal truth of economics.

There’s no reason a society couldn’t be organized around labor values—other than the fact that such societies (or the movements that would give rise to them) are routinely destroyed or destabilized by one pre-existing superpower or the other.

Capitalist realism, in other words.

> working hard at creating value does, and that is still true today

This is the point that the parent was making. How you define "value" is the topic of discussion here, which in my opinion has become so abstract that it's impossible become successful around. Investors make money on failing businesses, software engineers make money on products that never monetize, top AI researchers make millions working for 2 weeks at one company doing training modules before moving to another.

In the modern economy, money is made by ideas, concepts, potentials. Not value.

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.

Yes, it's today's housing costs, combined with inflation, that are highly demoralizing.

Here's a personal anecdote: my grandfather was born in Arkansas in the Jim Crow era. He never went to school, and in fact was illiterate throughout his life. He moved to the Central Valley of California in the 1950s as part of the Second Great Migration of African Americans, where millions left the South to destinations either in the North or west to California. He worked on the same farm for 30 years before he retired on Social Security. He worked very hard; he regularly woke up around 3:30am and left his home before sunrise.

Despite being illiterate, having a low income working on a farm, and facing discrimination, he was able to provide for his wife and four children, and he was able to purchase a house in Bakersfield that he was able to pass on to one of his sons.

I had other family members who moved from Texas to California in the 1950s and were able to purchase homes in places like Oakland and even farmland in San Luis Obispo County.

Today a farm worker in the Central Valley would have a much harder time being able to afford a home.

I work as a CS professor in Silicon Valley making six figures, and all I can afford to purchase is a one-bedroom condo unless I wanted to live in a high-crime neighborhood of the type that I grew up in or unless I wanted a soul-crushing commute from the Central Valley. Yes, I know I signed up for that reality when I took my role.

But forget about me and consider the big picture: high housing costs are brutal for young people who weren't around to purchase when prices were more affordable.

This argument really breaks down when you consider that it requires a lot more training to become a teacher than an investment banker, and there is a massive shortage of teachers, and none of these factors makes teaching a lucrative career.

Value is something that motivates people to do work (that creates value). It's like bartering (I'll fix your car if you mow my yard), but currency makes work fungible (I'll fix your car for $80, and then pay another guy $80 to mow the yard). Key to this is understanding that someone might be willing to cut the yard for $75, and someone else might do it for $60. Probably no one for $20 though.

Speculation, which you lean heavily on in your example, is essentially just gambling. (I'll get my driveway fixed up for $120, and -educated guess- it allows me to fix two cars for $80 each).

Value is found by everyone voting with their currency units on what the value of any given thing is.

99% of the time when you are confused about why something has low value, or why something has high value, you can dig into the market around it and find out why and it's almost always pretty logical (and if it's not, congrats, you can make money on fixing it). This is also fuzzy around the edges, it's never sharp lines. But the shape is consistent on the whole.

Watching since the 1980s, the average tech startup in the bay area is just dragging rocks up a hill 18 hrs a day with the output thrown away in a couple of years when it doesn't pan out. Yet the people that do that there are HIGHLY compensated.

>Value is found by everyone voting with their currency units on what the value of any given thing is.

To me what you're describing sounds like market price discovery versus value, which can also be functional usefulness or social worth, in the vein of the diamond–water paradox. A price is what someone is willing to pay, but value is something's worth. For example while selling a car if nobody is currently interested nearby it's market value is $0, but it's functional value as transportation persists.

On the other hand I might pay much less for something than its value would be through price discovery. For example I might be willing to pay an extremely high price for a life saving medication, but rules or laws deliberately limit price discovery, because leaving it to the market would be considered unjust for similar reasons to laws regarding externalities via the tragedy of the commons.

>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.

This is already somewhat done with teachers. Those who teach wealthy children such as at a prep or private school make more money than those who teach poor children. The salary does not directly scale with the quality of teaching - for example a 2x better teacher might make 10x the salary, because the bidding power of the wealthy parent is much greater.

Because currency is unevenly distributed, voting with dollars reflects the wealth and preferences of those with more money, skewing prices. In an extreme example if person A can pay $1,000 for a life-saving treatment and person B $10,000, does that make person B’s outcome ten times more valuable? In that sense, market prices aren’t neutral measures of value and are more like an economic version of ‘might makes right'.

You could organize an economy around labor-as-value, at least in terms of how workers are paid and goods are priced, but you have to be extremely diligent that you're directing work towards useful endeavors.

You can't escape that people will evaluate how useful goods are to them. Goods which are priced way lower than their utility will get snapped up, goods priced way higher than their utility will go unsold.

I think there is a conflation between different types/definitions of "value" that always runs things off the rails. Economic value is a distinct thing that arises from markets and price discovery. It doesn't really cover social or personal values, despite them constantly leaking into discussions.

Pretty much everyone agrees teachers are valuable, but their economic value is relatively low or their market is distorted. As hellishly capitalistic as it sounds, a teacher that could reliably produce all star workers would probably be paid handsomely as a student conveyor belt to Megacorp, by Megacorp.

Also medicine breaks discussions of markets/economics, the value of a shot that saves your is infinite.

Becoming a teacher is far easier than successfully becoming an investment banker. Most people who try end up making teacher territory pay to push paper in a cubicle all day. And they don't even get summers off.

Your first paragraph I interpret as basically saying that the reason things are is because these jobs exist in a labor market, so that's just a restatement of my point that this is a negative aspect of capitalism.

The third paragraph argues for even more market mechanics involved in this labor market which I of course disagree would improve the situation.

Also there's a serious shortage of teachers in the USA which undermines your point imo.

That's no necessarily true since teaching requires a degree and certification, at least in the USA. Also it's an extremely hard job compared to investment banking - the hours are long, you must take your work home, you're usually on your feet a significant portion of the day, and you must function as a social worker and a live performer for a significant portion of the day. Every single day for a term.

And the pressure is enormous, you're in charge of making sure the kids get the tools they need for their life, all while making sure they can survive the arbitrary stuff like standardized testing.

If it was so easy why is there a shortage?

I don't think you have any idea about what investment banking is outside of teenage rage posts on twitter or reddit.

https://onlabor.org/wall-streets-dangerous-grind-the-human-t...

People drop dead in Japan from their jobs frequently as well, regardless of industry. This hasn't anything to do with the job being hard and everything to do with work culture.

I acknowledge that investment bankers have a toxic work culture, but I don't believe the job is inherently harder than teaching, which is unavoidably hard in many ways. Some of the ways are solvable by having more teachers (smaller class sizes, not needing to take work home), but not all of them.