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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.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday April 12 2017, @03:02PM
That's not correct, though.
Imagine, if you will, 2 coal miners, Smith and Jones, each getting paid $20 per hour. Smith works his butt off, putting in 20 hours of overtime a week, and doing everything he can to shovel as much coal as possible in the hopes that his bosses will reward him with a raise and/or promotion. Meanwhile, Jones works as few hours as he possibly can get away with, shirks work as much as he can possibly manage.
Now, we can certainly agree than Smith is going to be paid more money in the short term: He gets an extra $600 gross pay for his 20 hours of overtime at time-and-a-half. That will add up to an extra $30,000 a year for as long as he can keep that up. And for the sake of argument, we'll say that he's able to keep this up for 20 years starting at age 25, which means he has approximately an extra $650,000 (thanks to compound interest) in the bank by the time he turns 45. However, Smith, because he's working his butt off, also is more likely to end up with black lung disease and a bad back which are going to force him to retire at 45, while Jones can still work until he's 55. The cost of the early retirement and additional medical bills could easily end up much more than that $650,000, thus meaning that Smith's decision to work hard in fact cost him. And that's also not factoring in things like Jones being able to enjoy more quality time with his wife and kids while Smith never married because he was too busy digging in that coal mine.
Therefor, Smith's hard work only pays off if the mining company is generous enough with their raises and promotions, and management is savvy enough to realize that Smith is the one who deserves a raise or promotion. What's at least as likely is that management will instead look at Smith as yet another cog in the machine that can be thrown out and replaced as soon as he's no longer useful, while giving that raise and promotion to their good drinking buddy. The sole purpose of giving Smith any kind of reward at all is to encourage other coal miners to think that being like Smith is more rewarding than being like Jones.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.