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.

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.