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.

> 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.

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.