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

(www.wsj.com)
191 points impish9208 | 2 comments | 02 Sep 25 15:07 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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hakunin ◴[02 Sep 25 17:02 UTC] No.45105832[source]▶
I was always curious, why would anyone believe that hard work leads to economic gains in the first place? That's like saying "flapping your hands very fast leads to building a house". Nothing about working hard has anything to do with economic gains. This has always felt to me like magical thinking: if I check certain boxes, I'm automatically entitled to "hard work funds" allocated to me. Like anything in capitalist market, the only thing that matters is what people want to pay for, and doing that for them. It's not even that important how "hard" you "work" doing it, but yes, the more you do of what people want, the more you'll probably get paid for it.

Part of the issue is that when you're young, the school really imposes lots of schoolwork on you, that you can't ignore. It's like school takes over your time, but none of the liability for whether the time will be well-spent. And at this point you don't have good foresight to know the difference.

The more general wisdom I think that should be learned early in life: you always make your own path. Schools are tools for getting there, but the buck stops with you. If you decide to accept a "pre-made path" given to you by a school, you still have to be the one researching whether it makes sense and signing off on it. Just like when you work with doctors, financial advisors, or other contractors, you have to be the project manager of your life's project. Cannot delegate this part. Not easy to learn early unfortunately, but at least start with the understanding that the only thing that matters for economic gains is doing what people want to pay for.

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1. elptacek ◴[02 Sep 25 20:38 UTC] No.45108714[source]▶
Your logic is side-stepping the point. There was a period of time, at least in the USA, where the goal was economical and social stability (New Deal, GI Bill, unions). Over the course of my life, the goal has morphed into wealth transfer. You can track this with the Gini coefficient, right? Sharp upward climb during the Reagan years. A "losing faith" metric is also a bellwether. The promise of economic gains is the reason to show up. No gains, no show. There's only so much you can pump out of a system with churn before it collapses. Meanwhile, there is no such thing as "make your own path," and this is a direct contradiction to "what people want to pay for" -- definitionally a "pre-made path". We all make choices from the options that are available to us in a system where many of the variables and constants are completely out of our control (eg, what the market desires). In fact, I'd go so far as to say everything about capitalism trends towards pre-made paths.
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2. hakunin ◴[03 Sep 25 03:29 UTC] No.45111992[source]▶
I guess the “hard work = gains” sentiment is showing something, but since it’s literally a misnomer on its face, and people take it way too literally, I think it doesn't show what many think it does.

I think the problem is that work changed too fast. This shift is much harder to navigate. A lot of 20th century career conveyer belts have been disrupted in the last 30 years. A lot of schools are still setting traditional expectations that no longer match reality. This is why people think their work doesn’t lead to gains: job requirements have been swapped from under US workers, and everyone is struggling to keep up. That said, opportunities are larger than ever, but we have to become more "entrepreneurial" again, perhaps more akin to the way we were during Industrial Revolution. Take that English major and use it to become an excellent YouTuber rather than a writer, type shit.

> In fact, I'd go so far as to say everything about capitalism trends towards pre-made paths.

How do you explain every new innovation? Cars during the time of horses? Twitter during the time of Facebook and MySpace, family medicine during the time of hospitalists and experts (fairly new field), Amazon during the times of Sears, framework laptop during the times of Apple, etc, etc. People don’t always know what they want, and America is incredibly well catered towards starting businesses (at least until a certain guy in a certain white building does permanent damage). Saying that we’re all constrained to market is very reductive. We are more empowered to find new ways to be useful than ever before. Doing economically unviable things has never been ok.

I just want to make it clear that very specifically “hard work means economic gains” is ridiculous on its face, and a lot of people take it literally, without the caveat that you have to do something useful.