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Hard work is often touted as the key American virtue that leads to success and opportunity. And there's lots of evidence to suggest that workers buy into the belief: For example, a recent study found that Americans work 25 percent more hours than Europeans, and that U.S. workers tend to take fewer vacation days and retire later in life. But for many, simply working hard doesn't actually lead to a better life.
In the past, economists have acknowledged that citing hard work as the path to prosperity is overly simplistic and optimistic. Ultimately, whether hard work alone can lift people into better economic conditions is a more complex question. The formula only works if an individual's efforts are met with opportunities for a better life. According to research, it's getting harder and harder for Americans to move up the income ladder.
A new poll from the Strong, Prosperous and Resilient Communities Challenge (SPARCC), an initiative to bolster local economies, found that Americans are quite skeptical of the narrative connecting wealth with personal agency. SPARCC found that 74 percent of those surveyed believed that most poor people work hard, but aren't able to work their way out of poverty due to the lack of economic opportunities. In the U.S., 19 percent of income inequality is attributed to predetermined circumstances such as a person's race, gender, and parental income. The SPARCC report also points to past research showing that economic mobility and health outcomes are greatly affected by geography as evidence that individual hard work won't ensure success because opportunities aren't evenly distributed.
The hard-work argument also plays into the policy discussion around inequality. As Katharine Bradbury and Robert Triest, both economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, write:
Increased inequality may result from increased risk taking and entrepreneurship in an environment of rapid technological change, with some entrepreneurs producing better, or just luckier, innovations than others, and reaping greater rewards. It may also result from increased disparities in work effort, with more industrious individuals earning higher incomes as a result of their greater effort. In both these cases, one could argue convincingly that the increase in inequality is justified and that no remedial changes in public policy are needed. On the other hand, if the increase in inequality results mostly from factors largely beyond the ability of individuals to control or counteract, then a strong case can be made for a public policy response.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @12:04PM (16 children)
Yes, that is the problem we need to address. Preferably before the working class decides they've had enough and take matters into their own hands, communist revolutions are never fun for anyone.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 12 2017, @01:38PM (15 children)
Preferably before the working class decides they've had enough and take matters into their own hands, communist revolutions are never fun for anyone.
I'm predicting more a right wing one. The working class tends not to like the SJW types very much about now. Today the 60s boomer hippie left is "the man" in charge of everything screwed up which needs to be overthrown. Which puts me in a pickle where I don't want things even more screwed up, but the more things are screwed up the faster we get the right wing takeover I'm happily looking forward to. By analogy something like Germany in the 20s sucked, but you can't have Germany in the 30s without first passing thru Germany in the 20s, sort of.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @01:43PM (2 children)
Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, Newt Gingrich?
All well known 60s hippies obviously...
Good talk!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @06:49PM (1 child)
Good talk!
VLM is able to talk quite a lot. Not very good, though. He seems not to know that reality has a well known liberal bias, that the right in America is a dwindling minority of less than 12% of the population, and far less of the working class. VLM is a Nazi, advocates concentration camps for migrants! And, Paul Ryan is way too young to have been at Woodstock.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Thursday April 13 2017, @09:08AM
Reality has no bias, but leftist love self-flagellation.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @02:35PM
The only saving grace here is that you libertarian / co servative types are really so out of touch. You claim there will be a resurgence for your ideologies yet the vast majority of the US population disagrees with you. Cheat your way to victory with gerrymandering and the most terrible propaganda campaign selling ridiculous lies to gullible fools.
Yup, maga indeed as you are being sold out and stolen from.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @02:49PM
More like a 50/50 IMHO.
Out of control divorce, abortion, toxic sexualization, drugs have been implemented first (you thought it was about your freedom, huh?). Crowd control drills, the rise of ubiquitous surveillance has been implemented second, and now the humanitarian/social/economic crises get here.
So, either the irregular army of refugees/immigrants win, and we end up with a totalitarian theocracy, or the incumbents react and we end up with a totalitarian right. Neither of them will go against really powerful interests, because neither of them would be possible without their help. Maintaining armies costs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @02:53PM (1 child)
I'm predicting more a right wing one.
The right is already the status quo.
The working class tends not to like the SJW types very much about now.
Oh, perish the thought. The SJW types would be the first to die in the fires of the revolution, if such a thing would come to pass. Think more Bolshevik and less Tumblr feminism.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 12 2017, @08:55PM
The right is already the status quo.
LOL yeah they sure run the media and academia and hollywood and the music biz and ...
Think more Bolshevik and less Tumblr feminism.
That is an interesting point to consider.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Whoever on Wednesday April 12 2017, @03:17PM
Then you are even more of an idiot than I realized.
Apparently in all of your hard work, you haven't looked at what life is really like under a right-wing takeover. There are many examples in fairly recent history. I'll give you a clue: life is crap for everyone who is not part of a close circle around the leadership. You are looking forward to a crap life. That takes a special kind of stupid.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday April 12 2017, @04:38PM
"Happily looking forward to?" Jesus. If your naive dumb ass thinks you're going to get something you deserve but were prevented from obtaining in your new right-wing dystopia, you are sorely mistaken. This kind of person cares only about themselves. They'll throw you in the gas chamber along with all the people you no doubt refer to as cuck, SJW, etc.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Funny) by julian on Wednesday April 12 2017, @08:20PM (3 children)
By analogy something like Germany in the 20s sucked, but you can't have Germany in the 30s without first passing thru Germany in the 20s, sort of.
Are you Sean Spicer? You want something like 1930s Germany to happen here? You can't think of anything bad that happened there at that time we might want to avoid?
I hope you're sterile or profoundly ugly.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 12 2017, @09:25PM (2 children)
I hope you're sterile or profoundly ugly.
LOL
I've noticed that people who oppose the right are just not pleasant to be around. Personal attacks, holiness signalling spirals, holier than thou claims of devoutness, the two minutes hate...
But people that oppose the left are generally pretty good folks. Nice neighbors, easy to get along with, fun to build a civilization with. Much more tolerant, generally.
Its not just one or two people, the stereotypes seem to ring true in general.
The kind of people attracted to political wings says a lot about those wings. The "cool kids" were left wing hippies in the 60s, but as the boomer die off the "cool kids" today are of a somewhat different political view...
(Score: 2) by julian on Wednesday April 12 2017, @09:36PM
But people that oppose the left are generally pretty good folks. Nice neighbors, easy to get along with, fun to build a civilization with. Much more tolerant
Actual Nazis. [npr.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 12 2017, @10:19PM
dude
you just described a cocoon or bubble.
you surround yourself with people like yourself and yeah everything is great.
then you start spouting ideas that entire other communities don't like and you act like you are the polite person in a sea of anger. you don't see that everyone else is not like you and equate that the fact you get along with like minded folks somehow makes it so that everyone else are noble savages. I am surprised you haven't expressed white mans burden yet.
no--you are being interpreted as the jerk in the crowd that god sprinkles upon us to make life interesting.
and yeah. there are jerks in the other crowds. some of them are the ones that you take most offense with. but lots of people would prefer to stay in their communities and ignore you as you ignore them -- except politics get in the way of that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2017, @03:32AM
Are you really saying that you would like to see a return of the Nazis? Seriously?!?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday April 13 2017, @05:05PM
Wild guess, you nominate the Muslims for the ovens this time?