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Agreeing with the article.
Hard work works, especially in 1st world countries. I know that hard work alone would not make anyone successful. Luck plays a lot of factor as well, but the harder you work in general you increase the chance of you encountering turning point(s) that lead you to living a comfortable middle class life in 1st world country. Be rich (i.e, billionaire)? Maybe not, but not everyone can and should be rich.
Of course no system is perfect, and you can't save everyone. There will be some people who fall through the cracks. But to setup a system such that no one will ever fall through the cracks is giving diminishing returns while taxing to the whole system.
Rich people will always be with us, so does poor people. So does ignorant people who thinks pandemic is a hoax, so does lazy people.
I grew up in a 3rd world country. Competition and social mobility in the USA is relatively way easier compared to my home country. Or I should say, a piece of cake, really. I'm not obsessed with hard work, but I'm not lazy either. I'm willing to Leetcode for 3 years, failed many interviews to finally got into a high paying tech company. Leetcode for 3 years non stop is way way way way easier than hauling bricks all day.
I know what a hard work is, and I also know what useless futile hard work looks like. I worked through low paying jobs such as cleaning service, deli worker, laundry worker.
My most back breaking work was cleaning an entire restaurant who got shutdown by a health department by myself. I only lasted 5 days. I had to scrub rat poop of walls and floors kneeling down with bleach everywhere by myself (yes that was minimum wage). The next back breaking work was an 18 hour shift non stop working at a deli during Christmas/New Year in a really busy touristy location.
And like the author. My single mother was the one that pushes me through many educations. She said "I can't give you anything other than education, the rest is up to you".
I completely agree.
I think it's hard for people living in countries that allow for social mobility like the USA to appreciate how good they have it. In the country I was born, if you start working by yourself you'll have to pay 50-60% in various taxes, making it really hard to become rich. People who care more about career than friends and family just leave.
I also think it's amazing how access to information was democratised by internet.
Your last phrase in the last year can be summed up to "I can just give you a computer, the rest is up to you" which is pretty much what my parents did before I started working online.
I just wanted to say thank you for posting. I find your words inspirational.
What bothers me is just how much luck factors into absolutely everything. The family and region you are born in determines so much about your life that individual contributions seem laughable in comparison. Even then, your individual characteristics are heavily based on the former as well, in the form of nature and nurture. Even the ideas you might cultivate are the result of happening on the right resource at the right time. Lastly, it becomes harder and harder to explain the successes of outliers without it being mostly about luck and the environment. The notion of free will is under assault from all corners. Not to mention that apparently the brain makes decisions before the thought comes to your conscious awareness...
Talking about luck is often instinctively interpreted as a method to avoid responsibility and cultivate laziness, but try as I might, ignoring this aspect of the world feels like a type of wishful religious thinking that is torn apart after even the most cursory investigation and thought. Generally, people will tend to attribute the bad things to luck and the good things to their own efforts, but in reality both seem to fall under the same purview.
The internship I got for my job was posted on our statewide college job board. My employer posted the position in a city 120 miles away from me. I still applied because I figured I could suck it up and do that for a summer. Turns out they needed someone in the exact city I was in because they also operated near my school as well. Also they wanted to extend it year round as well even though the posting just said "Summer."
When you say it comes down to luck, it pretty much does. I'm fairly certain, if not 100% sure I was chosen simply because I was the only one in my area that applied. All the other positions in the location 120 miles away were filled and nobody wanted to move to my city. So to make things simple, they just chose me, a fresh OOP learned programmer with little to no skills except for writing a basic linked list in java.
Plus, it has an exponential distribution (survivorship bias, compounding). The shape of the curve seems to be trending over time. We're being sorted on a global scale. This isn't a new phenomenon. Genes, social status, geography, always played a role. But, it's quickening because of the Internet and globalization. One used to be considered lucky to have born with a 120 IQ. But, nowadays, a 120 IQ is the entry fee.
Most people have enough luck in their life to change it for the better. Part of intelligence is being prepared to take advantage of it when it you encounter your luck.
Work ethics and culture differs wildly around the world - and can obviously result in different levels of productivity.
What I like about the Nordic countries, is that workers there are productive. When they're at work, they work - but at the same time, they have a healthy relationship to their workplace, due to strong workers rights / laws.
Another thing to keep in mind, is that social conformity there, is on par with countries like Japan.
In some countries, you're almost applauded if you manage to screw over your boss / company, by simply getting paid without doing much at all. For many, it's the dream situation - to just clock in at work, do nothing, get paid, and go home.
That's not at all the case in the Nordic countries, where you're expected to work hard and produce.
Strong sense of work ethic, labor laws, balanced with expectations of healthy work/life balance.
(But with that said, there are some serious drawbacks. If your only goal is to accumulate as much wealth as possible, at all costs, and as quickly as possible - Nordic countries is not the right place, IMO).
> In some countries, you're almost applauded if you manage to screw over your boss / company, by simply getting paid without doing much at all. For many, it's the dream situation - to just clock in at work, do nothing, get paid, and go home.
I think that this is direct result of exploitation of workers - devaluated work and very low wages regarding to the amount of work you are expected to do. People are normally trying to improve their life situation and if there is no perspective, they try to make the improvement by minimizing the work done.
If they are miserably paid they will "raise the wage" by doing less for that money and I think that this correlates with all the places where I have observed this behavior.
> If your only goal is to accumulate as much wealth as possible, at all costs, and as quickly as possible - Nordic countries is not the right place, IMO.
If that was the only drawback then that would be great. But there are many other problems. One is that it’s very hard to save up money and start a business or retire early. Another is that you see very little “high risk / high reward” economic activity, like really innovative companies. It’s a system that definitely has strong benefits if you live in “the mainstream of society”, but at the same time can feel like “halfway on the road to serfdom”, especially if live a bit differently and don’t really value the benefits.
Source: I’m a Swede living in Sweden since forty+ years.
>That's not at all the case in the Nordic countries, where you're expected to work hard and produce.
After working in both Germany and The Netherlands I found this to be false as it depends more by company size rather than the country.
In SMEs or family owned businesses people were busting their asses, often longer than 40h/week. In giant megacorps I saw plenty of incompetent clockwatchers, mostly in management positions, where the business could function the same without them but they were inexplicably kept around, at least as long as the business was booming. Often times they would just have their teams switch offices so they would have something to put in their annual performance review ("I optimized personell location, fostering a culture of synergy and creativity leading to future improvements in productivity and innovation").
Okay, so stepping even further back, why is social mobility considered an important metric? Why can’t I just walk away from social strata to begin with, and live my life happily as a “lower class” citizen living in the woods if I want? What if the goal of changing social strata is actually just a larger scale version of the Peter Principle?
Last year I saw a chart posted on imgur with habits and traits of lower, middle, and upper class people. I’m sure many saw that and thought “oh I need to act like X so I can stop being Y.” What I saw was contentment that I am in the social tier that feels right to me. I don’t need “more,” I would struggle with “less.”
Because if you are weak (and being poor is a form of weakness), then you are at the mercy of those who are strong.
Now there are to ways for the weak/poor to combat this. The first is to join forces and act as one. The problem with this is that to do so one must give away some of their freedom (because they need to act as one). The other option is to climb the ladder and become richer and therefore stronger. And that is why social mobility matters.
Wealth and power are intrinsically linked. You could try to just mind your own business and live your simple life, but it is not up to you. It is up to those stronger than you to let you live your simple life. Maybe you get lucky and maybe not.
I think the Indian caste system is a good example on why it's very important to promote social mobility.
Even if you (or some other person) enjoy living a simple life, there are probably others out there that want to enjoy a different life. Would suck if that's next to impossible, because those in the superior classes are bent on keeping status quo, and suppressing those below.
Social mobility in and of itself isn't desireable. But the possibility for it, is. Otherwise you'd (1) live in a static society where those in power, stay in power, and those who're not, never will, even if they wanted to. And (2) you'd also live in a society which is not conducive to exploiting the talents and resources within it, as swathes of people are never able to move up the socioeconomic ladder.
When looking at an individual, you of course can't conclude that because someone didn't move up the socioeconomic ladder, that there's some kind of problem to be remedied. This could have many reasons, many of which entirely reasonable.
But looking at it from a societal perspective, on aggregate, it is a useful proxy. You'd expect that among different population groups in different countries, humans would be roughly similar in their tendency to be ambitious, safe for some cultural differences. If one in country you see that there's very little social mobility compared to another (taking into account cultural differences), that's a good proxy to determine that the earlier mentioned problems exist, (1) the power imbalance and (2) not using human resources effectively.
So if you find that in the US, social mobility is lower than in Nordic countries, despite a stronger culture of 'you can be anything you want' and the 'american dream', that can be a useful indicator that there's a power imbalance and a system not conducive to letting people be the best version of themselves.
How any one individual chooses to live their life is a completely separate manner. We would have to assume that roughly, there will be about as many people with a disposition to life as you, in countries around the world. That's why ceteris paribus it's interesting to look at social mobility on a national level.
It's a bit like BMI not being useful for individuals, but being useful for larger studies.
And the sister observation - we can't all be in charge. High mobility is good because at least the people in charge aren't chosen by heritage, but regardless there are going to be people who don't have a lot and are perfectly respectable. And entitled to feel satisfied. May as well work hard and feel proud about it, what is the alternative? Work lazy and feel good about it?
Hard work isn't path to riches, but it is a path to respectability.
We see research all the time about how poor people are more likely to have bad life outcomes. Not in the circular sense of “continually becoming lower class”, but in terms of things like health.
You could go live in the woods in which case you might not suffer from the same fates. Until civilization starts to encroach on your cabin (I think that’s what happened to the Unabomber).
Protestant work ethic. Work hard is Good. It's deep in the US culture. There's even a quote from Wesley about work in another comment here!
So deep that in the recent "i was fired from X" articles, the subject points out that their colleagues were lazy and they worked hard. Whereas a southern (or culturally Catholic) European would see that this shows their colleagues also hated the place, and that there's no shame in being lazy.
It's not an obsession and not something that can be stopped. It's utterly integral in all of American society even the left wing radical side.
Progressivism is basically the belief that doing hard good work brings Good things.
(A non protestant culture would emphasise belief and being a better person more than doing good works)
See:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic
It should be noted that there was 'work ethic' thinking around before Martin Luther showed up, but it's just that Protestantism turned the dial to 11:
> Andersen et al found that the location monasteries of the Catholic Order of Cistercians, and specifically their density, highly correlated to this work ethic in later centuries;[18] ninety percent of these monasteries were founded before the year 1300 AD. Joseph Henrich found that this correlation extends right up to the twenty-first century.[19]
Even if Luther hadn't shown up, no doubt there would have been something else that would probably have achieved similar things:
>(A non protestant culture would emphasise belief and being a better person more than doing good works)
This sounds kind of odd, given protestants generally believe in salvation by faith (Jesus saves those who believe), and catholics believe in salvation by works.
reading the comments and the links, I'd like to think about this a bit differently.
Instead of "working hard is Good" it appears that it's more like "Because I have worked hard and been successful it means that I probably have Gods favour compared to this beggar over there".
So working hard is the result from predestination (its already been decided who will get into heaven so we better do our best to look like we are blessed already and working hard and being successful looks like that ), and also a result from a kind of protestantism that advocates spending time intently working as a kind of devotion, and the kind of protestantism that pushes asceticism; saving money, not spending much, not giving cash to the poor but instead donating time and work to charities..
To say Catholics don't believe in hard work being good and only believe in belief isn't correct therefore. I suppose I would clarify by saying that they believe in doing good work but don't view being rich and successful (the end results of working hard) as a way to get into God's good books.
White collar worker here from a background of poverty (collecting change at McDonald’s parking lots as a child). I feel that my hard work happened during school.
I remember studying for multiple 16 hour days over the years while others partied hoping for a C+. I have to remind myself of this sometimes when it feels like my job is ‘too easy’ compared to my past jobs of washing dishes or moving inventory by hand.
The Nordics have taken a special role in the global economic system: Almost all of the large companies are in some sense high tech. The economies are also quite heterogenous.
Norway is probably the least good example example, due to the relative dominance of the oil & gas sector, but if you look at the stock market index of Denmark or Finland, for example, you'll find that the top companies are in different industries, exporting globally and world leaders in their respective niche. I've included a Nordics fund in my global stock market portfolio, since this small part of the world economy is disproportionately diversified in high tech.
I'm sure this can be duplicated elsewhere, through education and increasing the reliability of institutions. It's the kind of non-zero-sum development that would leave the world better off as a whole.
In fact, I'm a bit frustrated that Norway lags behind the other Nordics in this respect. There's something about our country that slows us down when it comes to building profitable export industries.
> Norway is probably the least good example example, due to the relative dominance of the oil & gas sector,
I once found an article I haven't been able to find ever since, but it's on a basic economic theory that high profitability in sector X makes sector Y uncompetitive. (read X as Oil and Y as anything else in this example).
This is because the profits not only X push up wages in sector X. But also in Y, because the entire market must also compete with X in a bid to attract labour.
This makes Y less competitive compared to other countries which don't have such a sector X.
Of course in a world without friction, labour would move across borders to the first country's sector X and thereby push up wages in Y around the world. But labour mobility is obviously lower between countries than within countries, so other countries tend to be a little more insulated from this effect of profitable industries abroad.
Does anyone remember the name for this economic theory?
I feel this happened with Norway. In the 70s and 80s for example you saw it become less competitive and more rapidly deindustrialised.
Still, you'd also think this would fuel a high-tech industry because you'd have to get into high-value added sectors to compete. Meanwhile Norway's second biggest export product is fish. Would be fun to have a Norwegian (economist) join us for some explanatory thoughts!
"The economies are also quite heterogenous."
Collapse of Nokia was very traumatic for Finland, it was a classical case of having your eggs in one basket. I think you never came close to such an earthquake in Norway.
Oil and gas is such a large part of Norway's economy it will always be difficult for other industries to thrive. We have the same problem in the UK with finance.
I work in the US for a “startup” company. They’ve gotten a big round of funding and are hiring like crazy.
There’s constantly this exhortation to “work hard” and “overcome the obstacles”. People work ALL THE TIME. There’s an underlying pressure to be on constantly.
And I’m asking “why?” I’m an IC. I am by no means invested in the company. If some big event happens, the C-levels and investors may pay out. I might be lucky and keep my job. I’ll bet money that the good health insurance we have and “unlimited” PTO goes away when that happens.
So again, why should I put in extra to make someone else rich? I have no problem with working within reasonable bounds and trading my skills for a salary. I don’t want to start my own business.
I recommend always calculating your hour rate when comparing your salary with others. And yes you are 99.999% likely to not benefit at all from the extra hours you put in. If management can screw you over they will. The rare occasions where that doesn’t happen is rare enough to be headline news.
This article only slightly dips its toe into the discussion of human capital.
There isn't something inherently different about people in the nordic countries that makes them work well. It is the social systems and contracts we live in/with.
I can be secure in the knowledge that I can not be laid off if I am doing good work, unless my employer can truly justify it (the myth of employers not being able to lay of employees is just that. There has to be a justifiable reason though). I know my healthcare is taken care of by the state, I get financial support if I want to start a family, get paid leave to be with my new born child, get most of my education for free, have high trust in the capabilities and fairness of the justice system and on and on.
All of this creates a relaxed environment where most of the base needs in Maslow's pyramid are taken care of, and I don't need to worry about them. Similar to the Harvard study that showed that there was a sweet spot for the ratio of performance to salary increase, having these social norms & contracts in place leaves most of us free to get on with the work with a focus of doing the best we can each time without financial/health/education worries.
And, ofcourse there are plenty of problems in the nordics! Let no one ever sell you a utopian fairytale telling you otherwise.
Interesting thing to think about, yes.
Who knows if people from Bangladesh had found oil in the 50s, maybe today some Bangladeshi would have written a post about hard work and good quality of life, ignoring this particular ingredient.
While it is a point, the fact is that other Nordic countries, Benelux, and France all have similar attitudes to the work-life balance, and not all of them have access to infinite money like Norway does.
Does it really need to be pointed out that the notion of an "average" economic producer, while tenuous in any sizeable population, is especially meaningless in a country like China, where you're averaging "very hard working" tech workers in Shanghai with "also-very-hard-working" subsistence farmers and unskilled labourers?
I accept the notion that simplistic glorification of "hard work" is unhelpful and often counterproductive, but most people understand that "hard work" doesn't just mean physical exertion, but also good decision-making, sensible investing, scaling your impact, etc.
Any concept is easy to write a disparaging essay about if you just focus on the most reductive interpretation.
A far more useful essay on the topic would focus on what ability an "ordinary" person (particularly one without substantial inherited wealth) has to influence their life outcomes, and what kinds of things can be done at the individual and societal levels to improve the present situation.
Hard work on the right thing is key to social mobility. CEOs work hard, and hard to work hard to get there. Long hours are common. In one "work life balance" class we finished the section on personal goals and everyone was ready for the break when the instructor said something like "I can tell you are low level employees, when I give this section to executives they get mad as they realize that their personal goals are to spend more time with family and they are instead preparing for another long international trip" I'd love their pay, but I'm not willing to give up that much family time.
I have worked construction jobs. The body is exhausted at the end of the day, but it is always satisfing at the end of the day to look back on what you have done. However because anyone can do it there isn't as much value in it and so it doesn't pay as well. What hard work you do is more important than how hard you work. However once you have picked the area to work hard work is a second key to getting more.
Of course eventually you need to decide how much is enough. This is a personal question and there is no right answer.
What doesn't work is for zero people in society to work (at least not at out current automation technology level). Someone needs to grow food and make shelter. Someone needs to act in the latest TV shows (even though there are enough reruns to fill a lifetime so this work could be eliminated, and it has always been possible to live without TV).
Hard Work is great when it benefits the person doing the work. Expecting "Free Work" however, is exploitation passing the costs to society and the workers.
It is good for individuals to work hard and invest in learning. I like the comment by John Wesley that you should make all you can, save all you can and give all you can.
I think we often experience disappointment in life when we seek much wealth. I don't want to be mega-wealthy and I don't to be poor.
I hope my government try to do their best for my society. On a personal level I also try to help those less fortunate than myself.
Hard Work and the American Dream are some of most often repeated falsehoods about the US.
The US is one the worst Western countries when looking the actual metric of Social mobility. As of 2020 the US is 27 after Lithuania in Social mobility[1].
[1] https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index...
It all comes down to the definition of "hard", doesn't it.
Seth Godin has a riff on how to think about hard work to get the most out of it: https://seths.blog/2019/02/hard-work/
As someone from the US, my experience is different from what this article portrays. When it's come up, everyone I've heard from acknowledges the role that their parents, schools, community and even luck play.
A lot of the political dialog is also about how more people can have access to quality education. In my own state, we spend around $20k per student per year in the poorest school districts, so I don't think the story that the US just ignores poor communities and tells them to work harder is quite so simple.
I've noticed that, on a personal level, people seem to perceive the value of others' work not in terms of how much was created, but how much they sacrificed in the process.
ie, we seem to care more about our colleagues'/employees' blood, sweat and tears than the achievement of our (joint) goals.
The economy, on the other hand, doesn't give a damn about anything except hard results.
I think this is more of a problem with our evolved social instincts not being well adapted to modern industrial capitalism than a quirk of American culture.
So why are Norwegians so much richer than the Chinese if success is all about hard work?
Oil.
Stopped there.
The author kinda lost me when he claimed the social mobility in USA is "shockingly low" pointing to the article showing it's just 13 percent points behind Norway. That is not a shocking difference.
I am not sure why I can’t read the article. Even if I request the desktop site, it still wants me to read it using an app...
as an engineer: base must be same for comparison. we've to keep all other resources same then hard work
comes as major.
I'm already there and don't need this article. If hard work was enough, single parents with jobs would be billionaires.