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

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.

"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.

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.