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

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.

People are paid to create value . Hard work is not enough. This seems obvious enough.

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.

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

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.

> Isn’t this a bit obvious?

I thought the same thing as I left the church, but it's so ingrained in many people in ways they don't even realize.

Another commenter mentions the "just world fallacy," which I agree drives this sentiment directly: if you work hard, you get good things. If you got bad things, it's because you didn't work hard (enough).

There's lots of feedback loops that perpetuate this: survivorship bias, historic wealth (ye olde boomer-bought-a-house-on-a-single-factory-salary), startup CEOs. I find the description of the American poor who don't see themselves as poor but as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" to be incredibly true.

Additionally, in many cases the people who're the most affected have the least resources to make themselves heard, the classic "rich people don't have the same 24 hours a day as the rest of us."

So, yeah, to a degree it should be obvious to anyone who goes looking, but there's so many sociological effects layered on top of each other that make it counterintuitive to someone for whom the system is working well.

Where in corporate America are you working where "hard work" and not "sucking up" is translating to climbing said ladder?

The current American system is premised on people buying into this. If people don't there is no societal foundation which probably leads to societal change. It's like the one societal contract we have (had). Not society helps you, not society puts a roof on your head. Not we're in a society together, so when you get sick we help out. Purely just 'if you work hard, you will be rewarded, and the rewards will take care of the things our social model doesn't'.

Comments like this are why I stopped going on reddit.

To show that this isn't exclusive to USA - I heard that in Japan nowadays workers can't rely on their megacorp to provide them predictable work position and can be fired regardless of their tenure. This is all after being told for decades that megacorp is literally their family and they should dedicate their whole time to it.

You're in a meeting. A task comes up. Do you volunteer to do it? Taking on the task is additional work. It is also "sucking up". If you don't want to do something, and then make fun of the people that actually want to get things done and call them names, instead of, y'know, choosing to take on additional work, it's easy to believe that hard work doesn't get you anywhere, because you've chosen to divide things to do at work into "real" work, and "sucking up". There's not really a difference, but in one scenario you think you're better than the other person.

People like it when you do things for them. If you suck up all the work you can do at your job, in my version of corporate America I've experienced, you get promoted.