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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, @06:40PM (2 children)
I think most of everybody on all sides would agree with working towards equality of opportunity even if the proposed means of doing so might be different.
Where things get weird is what I actually mentioned in my post: enforced equality of result. Companies can be sued for hiring too many "blues" or not enough "greens" or paying "oranges" more than "purples" or other such ways where any group ends up with a better outcome all the while arguing that everybody is equal. For instance the gender gap is just completely illogical. If I can hire a woman who can otherwise perform identically to a man for let's say 7 units of money whereas it costs me 9 units of money to hire a man - I'm going to hire literally nothing but women. I mean at this point just about everybody has heard of the alleged wage gap. Yet it's strange. Look at just about every successful company. For some reason they're keeping those allegedly overpriced males around. If you assume rough equality in this case you're left, almost immediately, with numerous logical contradictions.
To be fair, let's also pick on the right. The argument against ensuring a livable wage is that people should just get better jobs. There's a lot of ways to refute this but to keep it on theme let's drag up the right's general embrace of extreme inherent differences between individuals. A common statistic being thrown about is the abysmal performance on IQ tests by "pinks" that leaves many in the mentally challenged range. Yet "pinks" also tend to be heavily overrepresented in the sub livable wage jobs. So their argument ends up appealing the competence of groups they view as incompetent. Again the logic doesn't really work there without some mental gymnastics or going full sociopath.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dry on Thursday April 13 2017, @02:18AM (1 child)
For instance the gender gap is just completely illogical. If I can hire a woman who can otherwise perform identically to a man for let's say 7 units of money whereas it costs me 9 units of money to hire a man - I'm going to hire literally nothing but women.
The problem is that the person who pays a woman 7 units instead of 9 honestly believes the man is more valuable, often for illogical reasons and might actually believe the woman is only worth 5 units so is overpaying at 7 units. Bigotry is not logical.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13 2017, @08:39AM
Yet is seems no person pays a woman 7 units instead of 9 and in fact they will rather hire an unqualified woman than a qualified man [theguardian.com] because most companies don't require entry level employees to be top of the crop but they are required to maintain a better gender ratio. For no reason but to placate the next moron who says 'bigotry' to get some vagina credit.