A universal truth about work

[bilby]

There are different kinds of work. I think it's a lot easier to work longer hours consistently at the top end, and you have more of your life to excel. It's certainly easier to add value, and to differentiate yourself from others.

My brother described his job as basically walking down a line of mathematicians and shouting 'code faster!'. He pulls in well over half a million dollars in a good year. He does work long hours, and he doesn't goof off, but I can't really see a good reason to pay him several hundred times more than other people.

Fundamentally, people who are well paid without working hard, and people who work hard and yet are not well paid, are exactly what we should expect to see, given that there is no value whatsoever in hard work.

The value in what people do is almost entirely determined by things other than the effort they expend.

One of the things that IS highly valued by those who have the money to spend on employees is the dissemination of the myth that hard work is one of the things that is valued. So quite a bit of that gets done. Blue collar workers spend a lot of time being told how they can improve their lot through hard work, by supervisors and middle managers who earn far more than the blue collar workers, while doing far less of what anyone involved would call 'hard work'.

Where hard work overlaps with the creation of value, it is mere coincidence; there is no hard and fast relationship between the two. They are only really linked where the hard work is being appropriately targeted, and where mechanisation is not an option. In the pre-industrial era, hard work was linked to value (all else being equal); But today that link only remains in the very lowest valued activities - so a person who works hard as a fruit-picker is more valued than a person who works less hard; but neither is valued anywhere close to the level of the world's laziest hedge-fund manager.

What counts is luck - picking the right parents, picking the right innate abilities and skills, picking the right nationality and place of birth. Get that right, and riches are easy to attain. Get it wrong, and no amount of hard work will save you.

 

[rousseau]

There are different kinds of work. I think it's a lot easier to work longer hours consistently at the top end, and you have more of your life to excel. It's certainly easier to add value, and to differentiate yourself from others.

My brother described his job as basically walking down a line of mathematicians and shouting 'code faster!'. He pulls in well over half a million dollars in a good year. He does work long hours, and he doesn't goof off, but I can't really see a good reason to pay him several hundred times more than other people.

Fundamentally, people who are well paid without working hard, and people who work hard and yet are not well paid, are exactly what we should expect to see, given that there is no value whatsoever in hard work.

The value in what people do is almost entirely determined by things other than the effort they expend.

One of the things that IS highly valued by those who have the money to spend on employees is the dissemination of the myth that hard work is one of the things that is valued. So quite a bit of that gets done. Blue collar workers spend a lot of time being told how they can improve their lot through hard work, by supervisors and middle managers who earn far more than the blue collar workers, while doing far less of what anyone involved would call 'hard work'.

Where hard work overlaps with the creation of value, it is mere coincidence; there is no hard and fast relationship between the two. They are only really linked where the hard work is being appropriately targeted, and where mechanisation is not an option. In the pre-industrial era, hard work was linked to value (all else being equal); But today that link only remains in the very lowest valued activities - so a person who works hard as a fruit-picker is more valued than a person who works less hard; but neither is valued anywhere close to the level of the world's laziest hedge-fund manager.

What counts is luck - picking the right parents, picking the right innate abilities and skills, picking the right nationality and place of birth. Get that right, and riches are easy to attain. Get it wrong, and no amount of hard work will save you.

I've never seen the equation being as simple as that. Hard work isn't the only variable that's valuable, but it is certainly a valuable variable.

Consider that any high-skilled position takes a set of attributes to reach: let's just say hard-work, logical reasoning, social ability, and connections. Hard-work still has value, but without the other three attributes someone will struggle to reach that position. In other words, hard-work is important, but it alone isn't enough.

Where your point gets interesting, though, is where you mention luck. If our ability to work hard, be social, and use reason is mostly random, and not within our control, then you're right and our outcomes are really due to luck. I don't know if I fully buy that narrative, though, although obviously genetics/family has a massive effect.

When it comes to how much people are paid, it's a case of supply and demand, and that's pretty much it. While a mid-manager, or exec may not appear to be in physically laborious positions, the decisions they make and the paths they must take to earn the trust to get into those positions take skills that almost no one has, and that's why they're paid well. Do you want to call their jobs hard-work? No? Fine. Would you trust a twenty year old college Sophomore in their position? Probably not.

 

[bilby]

Fundamentally, people who are well paid without working hard, and people who work hard and yet are not well paid, are exactly what we should expect to see, given that there is no value whatsoever in hard work.

The value in what people do is almost entirely determined by things other than the effort they expend.

One of the things that IS highly valued by those who have the money to spend on employees is the dissemination of the myth that hard work is one of the things that is valued. So quite a bit of that gets done. Blue collar workers spend a lot of time being told how they can improve their lot through hard work, by supervisors and middle managers who earn far more than the blue collar workers, while doing far less of what anyone involved would call 'hard work'.

Where hard work overlaps with the creation of value, it is mere coincidence; there is no hard and fast relationship between the two. They are only really linked where the hard work is being appropriately targeted, and where mechanisation is not an option. In the pre-industrial era, hard work was linked to value (all else being equal); But today that link only remains in the very lowest valued activities - so a person who works hard as a fruit-picker is more valued than a person who works less hard; but neither is valued anywhere close to the level of the world's laziest hedge-fund manager.

What counts is luck - picking the right parents, picking the right innate abilities and skills, picking the right nationality and place of birth. Get that right, and riches are easy to attain. Get it wrong, and no amount of hard work will save you.

I've never seen the equation being as simple as that. Hard work isn't the only variable that's valuable, but it is certainly a valuable variable.

Consider that any high-skilled position takes a set of attributes to reach: let's just say hard-work, logical reasoning, social ability, and connections. Hard-work still has value, but without the other three attributes someone will struggle to reach that position. In other words, hard-work is important, but it alone isn't enough.

Where your point gets interesting, though, is where you mention luck. If our ability to work hard, be social, and use reason is mostly random, and not within our control, then you're right and our outcomes are really due to luck. I don't know if I fully buy that narrative, though, although obviously genetics/family has a massive effect.

When it comes to how much people are paid, it's a case of supply and demand, and that's pretty much it. While a mid-manager, or exec may not appear to be in physically laborious positions, the decisions they make and the paths they must take to earn the trust to get into those positions take skills that almost no one has, and that's why they're paid well. Do you want to call their jobs hard-work? No? Fine. Would you trust a twenty year old college Sophomore in their position? Probably not.

Probably. They could hardly do a worse job than a good half of the executives I know, most of whom are executives not because of any ability, but because they know people - either because they went to school together, or because they are from rich families, or, most commonly, both.

There are lots of people out there (myself included) who will tell people they work hard, and so they deserve their large income. But those of us who have done both laborious jobs and well paid jobs know that there is little or know intersection between those sets.

I have never worked as hard as I did when I was a casual labourer. Nor have I ever been close to as poorly paid.

Most of my current colleagues believe that they work hard, but that's because they have no idea how hard other people actually have to work.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Fundamentally, people who are well paid without working hard, and people who work hard and yet are not well paid, are exactly what we should expect to see, given that there is no value whatsoever in hard work.

The value in what people do is almost entirely determined by things other than the effort they expend.

One of the things that IS highly valued by those who have the money to spend on employees is the dissemination of the myth that hard work is one of the things that is valued. So quite a bit of that gets done. Blue collar workers spend a lot of time being told how they can improve their lot through hard work, by supervisors and middle managers who earn far more than the blue collar workers, while doing far less of what anyone involved would call 'hard work'.

Where hard work overlaps with the creation of value, it is mere coincidence; there is no hard and fast relationship between the two. They are only really linked where the hard work is being appropriately targeted, and where mechanisation is not an option. In the pre-industrial era, hard work was linked to value (all else being equal); But today that link only remains in the very lowest valued activities - so a person who works hard as a fruit-picker is more valued than a person who works less hard; but neither is valued anywhere close to the level of the world's laziest hedge-fund manager.

I think you've got it totally wrong here. You are treating it as a single value when in reality it's two values.

What actually matters is both working hard AND working smart. The guy who works hard but dumb won't produce all that much value and thus won't be paid a lot. The guy who works smart but doesn't do much likewise won't be paid all that much. To make the big bucks you have to do both--work hard in a fashion that's productive.

What counts is luck - picking the right parents, picking the right innate abilities and skills, picking the right nationality and place of birth. Get that right, and riches are easy to attain. Get it wrong, and no amount of hard work will save you.

Luck in picking the right economy to be born into, somewhat luck in picking parents who will raise you to do well. However, one's own actions contribute an awful lot more than you think--the well to do generally get their by their own efforts, they're not handed it.

To attain the pinnacle requires a whole bunch of luck besides but that's inevitable in any large system--there will be plenty of good prospects for being at the pinnacle--even a small luck factor matters when people are otherwise awfully evenly matched.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

There are different kinds of work. I think it's a lot easier to work longer hours consistently at the top end, and you have more of your life to excel. It's certainly easier to add value, and to differentiate yourself from others.

My brother described his job as basically walking down a line of mathematicians and shouting 'code faster!'. He pulls in well over half a million dollars in a good year. He does work long hours, and he doesn't goof off, but I can't really see a good reason to pay him several hundred times more than other people.

Then he's not very good at his job.

Yelling at mathematicians to code faster is liable to produce positions that need filling, not more code. Rather, a good manager seeks to provide the means to code fast and remove the obstacles that keep people from coding fast.

Consider the best manager I've ever known: He got forced out of his position for political reasons. Before they fired him they went around asking people "what does <x> do?"--but avoided asking a few of us close to him for fear of their actions leaking. The answer was pretty much "almost nothing". They figured they could get by without him--oops, afterwards there were a million examples of "who did <y>?" "<x> did that". For the most part these were subtle things whose absence wouldn't be noted for some time--he wasn't out there whipping up the troops, he pretty much worked behind the scenes keeping things on track. I rather enjoyed the meeting well over a year later "Who is updating our catalog to reflect material price changes?" "Nobody. I don't have the information to do it with and there's nobody else in the company that knows enough about the system to have taken it over without talking to me first."

 

[bilby]

I think you've got it totally wrong here. You are treating it as a single value when in reality it's two values.

What actually matters is both working hard AND working smart. The guy who works hard but dumb won't produce all that much value and thus won't be paid a lot. The guy who works smart but doesn't do much likewise won't be paid all that much. To make the big bucks you have to do both--work hard in a fashion that's productive.

What counts is luck - picking the right parents, picking the right innate abilities and skills, picking the right nationality and place of birth. Get that right, and riches are easy to attain. Get it wrong, and no amount of hard work will save you.

Luck in picking the right economy to be born into, somewhat luck in picking parents who will raise you to do well. However, one's own actions contribute an awful lot more than you think--the well to do generally get their by their own efforts, they're not handed it.

To attain the pinnacle requires a whole bunch of luck besides but that's inevitable in any large system--there will be plenty of good prospects for being at the pinnacle--even a small luck factor matters when people are otherwise awfully evenly matched.

Yes, the belief that hard work is important is strong, popular, and pervasive in our society; and I recognise that it is a treasured belief of yours. But it is still an unfounded belief, and my observations of the real world strongly suggest that it is false.

Some people succeed with effort; others succeed with ease, doing the exact same task. Those who do it on their elbow are generally smart enough to give the impression of hard work; Certainly by the time they get through school, if they learned nothing else at all from the education system, they have learned not to let on that they can do well without trying very hard.

If you have a deep and pressing desire for extreme financial wealth, then the way to get to your goal is to take risks, and to be lucky. Many try, but only the winners get asked how they did it; They rarely admit that luck was a factor, and they can't very well say how incredibly easy it was (even though for them, it was easy); so they tell everyone what they want to hear - that it was down to hard work. Picking the winning lottery numbers is unlikely; but it isn't arduous.

Even when they stop saying what people want to hear, people want to hear it so much that they believe it anyway.

Warren Buffet had a pretty good start; made some lucky guesses, took some risks that paid off, and became hyper wealthy. If hard work was the key to emulating his success, then we wouldn't be able to pick him out of the crowd.

The distribution of wealth in society is so clearly negatively correlated with the distribution of total effort expended that to suggest hard work as the means to wealth is laughable. But it is popular; and it is not as in-your-face crazy as a dead Jew rising from his grave after a few days. People firmly believe all kinds of total garbage; and all kinds of popular beliefs are the reverse of what the evidence indicates. Correlation may not indicate causation, but the absence of correlation is a pretty big hint that causation too is absent.

The belief in the value of hard work is just one such belief.

I blame the Protestants.

 

[Philos]

What counts is luck - picking the right parents, picking the right innate abilities and skills, picking the right nationality and place of birth. Get that right, and riches are easy to attain. Get it wrong, and no amount of hard work will save you.

bilby,

Yep, I think Don Trump scores 3 out of four on those.

http://www.russellbrand.com/2015/02/donald-trump-for-president-the-bald-truth-the-trews-e248/

Alex.

 

[rousseau]

I don't know, as kosher as it is to say that people who are in mid to upper management have no talent and no ability to work hard, in my experience it's usually not the case. During my first internship in college a few years ago, my boss was an architect after completing school and working successfully as a developer for almost a decade. Ditto for the next two managers I had, as well as the majority of managers that I met. And these weren't people who had easy jobs either. Yea they didn't go home with a sore back, but in most cases they were responsible for almost an entire IT department. That's not responsibility I'd be willing to take on myself. But they were in their position because they could handle it.

But again, the overwhelming factor comes down to the luck that Bilby describes. It'd be easy for me to describe that I earned the job I'm in, but truth be told I was just far more capable than most people I studied with. The idea that I don't work hard or that my life isn't stressful just isn't the case, though.

 

[bilby]

I don't know, as kosher as it is to say that people who are in mid to upper management have no talent and no ability to work hard, in my experience it's usually not the case. During my first internship in college a few years ago, my boss was an architect after completing school and working successfully as a developer for almost a decade. Ditto for the next two managers I had, as well as the majority of managers that I met. And these weren't people who had easy jobs either. Yea they didn't go home with a sore back, but in most cases they were responsible for almost an entire IT department. That's not responsibility I'd be willing to take on myself. But they were in their position because they could handle it.

But again, the overwhelming factor comes down to the luck that Bilby describes. It'd be easy for me to describe that I earned the job I'm in, but truth be told I was just far more capable than most people I studied with. The idea that I don't work hard or that my life isn't stressful just isn't the case, though.

Nobody is saying that people don't work hard; just that doing so is not the path to great wealth.

Or even just middling wealth.

Hard work and wealth simply are not strongly correlated data. So one clearly is not a significant cause of the other.

 

[braces_for_impact]

When I managed for a health care service provider, keeping hospitals and nursing homes clean, this was a conversation I had often with my boss. As many of you can imagine, keeping quality staff around for barely above minimum wage is difficult, especially for work which takes it's toll on the body and some level of skill. It was hard work at times, you had to deal with difficult patients occasionally, and you had to be well trained and deal correctly with bodily fluids and other issues.

I would approach my supervisor with requests for raises for people that stuck around, performed reliably and did a good job. He would always ask me, "What you think because we give them more money they'll work harder?" Yes, and they'll be more likely to stay. I would reward them in my own ways as I could through scheduling for preferred hours or more hours, etc. This guy just could not see the value in a decent wage. He got a bonus for how far below budget he stayed, so he was basically saying that money was important to him, but not anyone else. Very frustrating.