One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor.
I know lots of folks without a pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out, and not one single one, is "lazy." In fact, a few have more than one (difficult) job.
I am old enough to see a few of them getting into the back nine, with no cushion.
I'm extremely grateful for what I have.
[EDIT] Added "many" because it's more appropriate, and short-circuits the implied "all."
Yeah, most people probably underestimate the effect that several things have on where they end up in life: education, self discipline, hard work, making good decisions, persistence, and, especially, chance. If you screw up majorly on any the factors under your control, you dramatically reduce your chances of “the good life.” But, even if you do all of them right, you are still at the mercy of chance. Get born in the wrong year or at the wrong place or into the wrong family or with the wrong genetics and that's all it takes to set you up for a hard life.
The tragedy is that we could have a society that gives people more opportunities to escape the downward pull of chance gone wrong early in life. Maybe someday we'll get there.
Most of life is luck, with regards to success and economic prosperity. We’ve built a system that ignores that for the benefit of a privileged few, using fairy tales around exceptionalism and faux meritocracy. We should build socioeconomic systems where luck is less a component for survival and living a good life, imho. I think we’re on our way there (support of democratic socialism and their candidates is at record highs, mostly around the young, and the old age out at a rate of 2M per year 55+), but it’s going to take another decade or two to see the improvements (political cycles, electorate turnover, policy implementation lag, etc.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027462 (citations)
The pervasive myth that hard work == wealth needs to die. Every people I have met in my life wanted to have a shot at a decent life and would have put the necessary work for a decent wage.
The word lazy should be identified as what it really is: a pejorative.
The myth is so pervasive because it's propagated by people with more wealth against people with less of it, and the conflict of interest prevents anyone from giving it up.
Everyone wants to feel better about themselves and the easiest way is to look down on someone who has less. Less "whatever" really, people always find something that they think makes them better, money is just the obvious choice because society slowly associated money with success. It doesn't matter if the wealth came from their parents, or luck, they can still pretend it makes them better.
It's one of those situations where everyone's in on it. The poor really haven't much else to go on and they'll take this little boost in their standing, the rich are tempted to think they so much better than most other people. Everyone in between sits somewhere on that scale.
I think it’s self evidently true that hard work is not equal to wealth and I don’t know how that meme became a thing.
You can exert extreme effort in unproductive directions and provide marginal, even extremely negative, value.
You can work extremely hard, all day every day, and accomplish nothing.
Gulags aren’t known for their wealth or value generation. They’re known for their labor input.
Well some gulags produced heavy industries, now owned by oligarchs.
Being poor is a lot of work, as is very well documented. When you have more money you can offload some (or in extreme cases pretty much all) of the labor.
> convenient fiction that wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"
just like all poor people aren't lazy, so too all wealthy people don't think this.
Never said they did. Interesting read of what I wrote…
You wrote wealthy people tell themselves that poor people are lazy.
Yes, I did. There’s a word that was inserted into what I actually wrote.
By that logic, it is then accurate to say poor people are lazy.
Sure. Knock yourself out. I won’t lose any sleep over it.
I like the transition from “I have an issue with what you said” to “I have an issue with what I imagine you said” after getting clarification
That aside the statement was fine as written. For example it takes deliberate and active misunderstanding to twist the statement “people eat meat” into “there aren’t any vegetarians”
Just to clarify. What percentage of wealthy people do you believe think this?
Is 10% too high of an estimate for wealthy people that believe this? 50%? 75%? 90%?
Where would you throw the dart of your estimate and how wide do you think your error bounds are?
he wrote "many" wealthy people, not all.
To be fair, I added that, after being called on it. It was a fair point, but I also didn't mean "all," so I just clarified the meaning.
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Some people just have a several hundred year head start on others.
Talk to the immigrants - a lot of them came to the US with only a few thousand $$$ in the bank or even less. They are not multimillionaires, but a lot of them got from zero to high-paying programmer jobs.
Granted, there is a healthy dose of luck and talent involved, but saying that the only way to get rich is to have rich parents is a lazy and wrong take.
Ah, so you're jealous of the inheritance generation currently enshittifying everything? What word would you use to describe them? "Lazy"?
This is basic psychology: being rich for no apparent reason causes cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is annoying/painful. So rather than change beliefs to see one's self as very lucky, in most cases the brain re-works reality to provide a rational explanation: the rich person worked hard/is smarter, etc.
> One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor.
I've noticed the same thing over my life (I'm almost 53) and by and large the well-off people who assume the poor are lazy are among the laziest, most useless neobaby piles of shit I've met.
It is like they themselves had an easy road to success thanks to having well off, well connected parents and assume people significantly poorer must be even lazier than they are because their own success wasn't very hard to achieve, oblivious to the fact that the poor people they are looking down on started in a very different starting position than they did.
And to be clear, I'm not saying all wealthy people are lazy, some have worked legitimately hard for their success, and I'm not saying some poor people aren't lazy, of course you'll find examples of both. But there are tons of extremely hard working poor people, and tons of extremely lazy wealthy people who make absurd amounts of money doing very "bullshit" jobs.
The more money I’ve been paid the less hard I’ve had to work. Across my friends this seems to be a pretty strong trend.
I've worked in both tech and construction. Never seen a tech worker go home and come back with the soles of their shoes resoled overnight because they didn't have a better option for work tomorrow.
Is that the best option? Generally no, it's probably not worth your time to do things that you don't specialize in. But at some point, you run out of hours to profit from the things you specialize in, and you still need something, so you figure it out. You do your oil changes, and fix your shoes and repair things even when they would generally considered 'totaled'. You miss work or at least hours on days when your late model car doesn't start. You take care of your own house repairs and yardwork, if your lucky enough to own something your landlord's yard and maintenance work more likely. And this is all off hours stuff because that's the option you have.
I've worked so much less in tech, yeah the hours can be long and oncall sucks. But I end up being able to redirect all my effort into the thing I'm specialized in and that I get paid the most to do. Which means I can pay to have my boots resoled, or just buy new ones, I take my (newer cars that always start) to the dealer every 6 months. I can pay a premium for delivery of food and staples, I can hire help around the house for anything from lawn care to tree trimming to roof repairs.
When I left the trades, 50 hours was generally required and 60 was becoming the norm. I'm not working any more in tech at work, but I work a lot lest to have a better life outside of work. It's just night and day.
Also prosperity evangelism.
There's four quadrants, lazy, works hard on one axis, and poor and rich on the other axis. Of those four quadrants, people exist in all four of them and it's stupid to pretend otherwise. That means that not pretending lazy poor don't exist, nor that rich hardworking people also exist. I know lazy poor people that aren't lazy so much as have severe mental health problems related to being poor, but also know rich people who could have fucked off to the beach forever by now but they keep working for some reason.
Why do I bring this up? Am I nitpicking? (yes) Until such time that there are no poor people, claiming there are no lazy poor people just gets people that actually know lazy poor people to tune out anyone's dreams of UBI because I'm not paying taxes on income I earn through me working, so that everyone else can be lazy and not work. It's as simple as that. Yes we can point to systemic and racially moviated biases that lead to unequal outcomes, but that isn't convincing on why my tax dollars should go to lazy poor people who refuse to work or even go to the EBT office to. I'm all for my tax dollars going to hard working poor people, and especially to their health care because a cancer or diabetes diagnosis should not bankrupt anyone, but the rest is hard to swallow.
Your tax dollars go to all kinds of things far worse than helping people survive. The Protestant work ethic cannot die soon enough. Never once have I cared if someone is "lazy". A rich person may work very hard exploiting others, that's far worse than not working at all.
I feel like even a lot of atheists get trapped in this Protestant mindset because we've been raised in this environment (like a fish trying to detect water), but if you think it through you'll see it doesn't actually make sense. Especially under capitalism.
But the Protestant work ethic is good! There are hard-working people who are still poor, but there are very few situations where you, or anyone else, will be better off being lazy instead of working. (Hard manual labor that harms you permanently in some way, like old coal miners, is probably the biggest exception.)
In the counterfactual, where these hard-working poor people are lazy instead, they aren't suddenly rich or even the same as they are now. They're almost certainly worse off.
I was raised with a strong work ethic. Do I believe that working hard is the only reason I am where I am now? No, of course not. But if I didn't work hard my life would be worse in every way imaginable! Regardless of how lucky or unlucky your life is, having a solid work ethic will always always always make you happier. Work is not inherently 'bad' in some way, and neither is having to work to live and to learn and to have a good life.
> But the Protestant work ethic is good!
I don't agree, it's a one way ticket to exploitation. All of the richest people I know (and I mean really rich, like over $100M in net worth) are from rich families and have inherited their wealth. Most are lazy but the ones that "work hard" produce exploitation at scale to further enrich themselves at the expense of their workers.
> I was raised with a strong work ethic
Most Americans are raised like this, which is why they are so easy to exploit and why they are against basic social safety nets and other things that are generally good for society.
The fact is other than inheritance, the easiest way (and really only way) to make a lot of money is to talk well. Talk well and get as close to rich people as you can, then talk some more. Is that "hard work"? It's wasting your life for sure, but it doesn't compare to pouring concrete.
I recommend everyone read this and try not to end up "clueless" as it really is the worst option of the bunch:
https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...
Something like 90% of my tax dollars go to social security net programs.
Not if you're in the US. Social security is ~22% https://govbase.com/blog/where-your-tax-dollars-go
Not 90%[0].
Social Security is kind of a "zero-sum gain," if you believe people, because we are supposedly being paid back what we spent a lifetime, having withdrawn from our wages.
[0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
You might be misunderstanding what is meant by "lazy". I don't think it's such a difficult perspective to understand.
What if your wealth was created by self-employment and building up a business? When you see so many talented and hard working people rejecting all of their available opportunities to do so, what word would you use? Ignorance? Arrogance? I can't think of any positive word. At least "lazy" implies they're still waiting for a lower risk moment to pounce.
This is how most of the wealth in the USA was built, so I don't think it's offensive. It's the prevailing culture.
Not lazy, smart -> Likely to become a millionaire
Not lazy, not smart -> Will probably make ends meet, but not a millionaire
Lazy, samrt -> Toss-up. Can either make it far or end up broke
Lazy, not smart -> Likely to be broke
Not factual
You are going to have a rude awakening if you get a bit unlucky.
It's not "lazy"; it's "made the wrong choices"... which I suppose you could call "intellectually lazy".
It only makes sense that fetuses which choose to be born into blue collar families in the wrong zip code are more likely to continue to make poor decisions for the rest of their lives. You just can't trust people with such a poor history of judgement. Unless they're C-Suite.
I'm trying hard to make your post make any sense at all..
I guess you believe everyone gets the same starting point and same opportunities? How did you come to believe such a thing? Have you looked around to see what society is like?
Or… were never given a choice/opportunity…
> One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor.
If they aren't physically lazy, they're unambitious or refuse to attempt nominally mentally difficult things (like math) and that is mental laziness. Poverty isn't random.
> Poverty isn't random.
Now you're just trolling. Be nice.
Making neutral statements in concordance with reality is the nicest thing you can do for a reader.