While this is only anecdotal evidence, I have gathered from conversations with people not in the workforce, while being well educated, and the lack of motivation wasn't coming necessarily from a lack of ethics but more from an actual understanding what their work was contributing to, and not desiring being part of an activity they disagree with the finality of it, or at best consider it a waste of time and energy.
Again, only personal conversations with some friends and acquaintances, nothing statistically representative, but definitely show there is room for looking deeper at the root this trends before labeling people as lazy.
That resonates with me. The work I find fulfilling or important doesn't pay well or at all. Other jobs range from pointless to actively harmful. Even then, my hard work is really just to make some CEO out founder rich.
So yeah, I try to find work that will pay the bills and that doesn't drain all my energy, so at the end of the day, I can still do something good. We only get roughly 80 years to be alive on this world, so why should I pour my adulthood into feeding social parasites? That's what would be unethical.
I have fulfilling work and just enough pay to get by. My employer hired a new HR director, who came out and said "working at this company is an intangible benefit" and went on to explain that we underpay people as a matter of policy specifically on account of that benefit. In retrospect, I should have called a vote to unionize at the end of that meeting, because employee dissatisfaction hit an all-time low that day...
This is also my own experience. For my recent job I was paid a ridiculously big amount of money for what? For basically working on a website that is not even useful to society in any meaningful sense. Did I bring any value to the society? No. It even feels I diminished it somehow. And the disproportion between my earnings and those of my fellow colleagues in other fields is solely because at this point my skills are valued by the marked more, not that I am "better" than them in any other way. Something is broken and I don't believe it can be fixed easily.
Or perhaps they are discovering work/life balance. America runs on the dread of losing your job and health insurance. You have no choice but to overcompensate for it. Respond to Slack after 8PM, respond to an email on a weekend, don't take that two-week vacation, etc.
There is no "work ethic" - just the fear of destitution and medical debts.
Yes. This is a weakness --- which can be exploited. The Japanese auto industry did this very successfully --- on our own turf. Toyota became the world's largest auto manufacturer by building most of their products in the USA --- using American labor.
Right now, those trying to follow in the Japanese footsteps are the Chinese.
This may seem like a low effort response to the topic at hand, but sometimes these are necessary against low-quality articles that like to dance around the issue.
A typical student who did the “right things” starts life with 60-120k in debt. To acquire remunerative employment, they must then move to a successful major city likely to consume 30-50% of their income. To afford a house, this individual must then save 2-300k in liquid capital to afford a down payment and prove they have stable employment to purchase a home, which dependent on the whims of the federal reserve may erase what is now 10-15 years of savings.
A rational observer would remark on where this 10-15 years of surplus went? A Luddite would argue that one should simply do nothing
If they're only in the major cities because they have to be to get their careers going and would prefer to be somewhere else, $2-300k would buy them a complete, well-renovated house large enough for a family in cash in much of the central part of the country.
Having to move to a city isn't the same as having to stay in a city.
One moves in a large city to start a career. At which point, by the time that middle America house is within reach, your support system is in the city as well. Friends for pet-sitting, likely family close-ish for child care, public transit to avoid paying for insurance, gas, parking, and a car. An emotional support network, instead of being (for at least the first bit) physically all alone with no friends nearby - because let's be frank: having all your friends a multiple-hour drive away, and none nearby, can feel bleak. Doubly so when your long-term partner isn't ready to sacrifice the above for a house in flyover country. And all of this precludes keeping your professional network nearby as well, making getting a new, better paying job easier as well.
None of these are insurmountable. Not at all. But the more barriers in place, the more likely it is that our hypothetical person will be stopped by one.
Granting that I only lived in the Midwest for 8 years, my experience was that those who "moved away to a city" still had most of their family support system in the place they left, not the one they moved too. Yes, they certainly made friends in the city, but their family and "oldest friends," the ones they grew up with, were still at home in flyover country.
These people should not be confused, though, with those who could not wait to get away from home and were beyond glad for an excuse to move to the city. Their motives and relationships are completely different.
I'm only talking here about the ones who "had to" move to a city to get started--the folks middle-American companies depend on for the long haul after they cut their teeth on the coasts.
>A typical student who did the “right things” starts life with 60-120k in debt.
Very few degrees are worth taking on that kind of debt. Also, doing the first 2 years in community college with basic FAFSA is very affordable. And since when do college students not work while going to school? My nephew finished his mechanical engineering degree a couple years ago (State University system with first 2 years in community college) and he ended up with under $12k in debt which he already paid off.
Then again, he didn't decide he just had to go to an out of state private university for all 4 years while not working at all. Vastly different approaches will deliver vastly different results.
Owning a house a the sine qua non of middle class life was a) a historical anomaly and b) a big mistake.
We can’t fix the cost of housing because so many people own houses. If 10% of people owned their own homes and the rest were owned by corporate landlords we would not have politicians climbing all over each other to make sure that homes values are a one way bet.
Politicians would like to help corporate donors, all other things being equal. But that imperative for any particular donor is no where near as strong as the need to acquiesce to desires of a large majority of their most engaged constituents (i.e. homeowners). The times when politicians are most strongly in favor of a particular company/industry is when they have a lot of jobs in the district. Campaign donations are a means to an end. Pissing off large numbers of voters directly contradicts that end.
> Pissing off large numbers of voters directly contradicts that end.
Pissing off large numbers of voters is a daily occurrence by virtually every politician in the US. Politicians don’t care about that. They only care about pissing off certain voters and certain political leaders.
Perhaps. The issue is how much power they can organize into impact. If you piss off a million people with psychosis and intense depression, it might be survivable compared to angering thousands of rich Christian cattle ranchers who call their lobbyists to fine-tune the political hacks in office to their liking. It's not impossible to do it without means, it's more difficult to play the game as an outsider from below rather than work connections through channels from at or above.
Yes, which is a good thing. Why not create wealth that the citizenry can take advantage of?
Politicians in your world would never see any community voter permanence, because if everyone is a resident, everyone is effectively a transient voter to them. You would only need to kowtow and keep them happy for the 6 months prior to the election.
The communities have no anchors…except for the corporations that own all the property. They would have all the power and that sounds horrible to me.
It’s a good thing if you are a homeowner. But homeownership is further and further away from the have-nots. It’s getting to the point where generational wealth is needed to come up with a down payment in a lot of regions. And there’s no way to square the circle—we can’t have affordable and a great investment that goes up all the time.
I just don’t see it. Right now we are in a moment of perhaps “discouraged” buyers, because interest rates are rising and home values have increased in some areas. But I have watched builders and agents in my area sell homes within a day of homes becoming available over the last few years. People are buying homes, and it’s not just the wealthy, it’s the middle class.
In the US FHA loans are available with relatively low 3.5% down payments even with mid-level credit. The problem driving affordability for some people is excessive debt to income ratios much more than housing prices.
If you can save $10k, and are not saddled with excessive debt you can afford homes in most places in the US.
We need to subsidize the building of houses outside of dense urban areas but close enough to areas offering employment choices. As of now, the inventory is primarily being driven towards the high-end in a "trickle-down" non-management of inventory where average people lose interest in investing in themselves or the future of anything. Millions of disgruntled, idle, and dissatisfied individuals don't make for a stable economy or safe country. E.g., you don't have many suicide bombers, mass shooters, or addictions/crimes/"quick-fix" politicians of despair in productive, sustainable economies.
The entire workforce is men plus women. So, your expansive way of framing your comments to span a boolean classification makes it seem like you’re just looking for something to be angry about. Any way you slice it, 7 million Americans out of work is a serious issue. Denying the author use of the national identity of the affected population is problematic.
Who said I'm angry? If the title was "American Men Are Losing Their Work Ethic", then I wouldn't have a problem with their statistical analysis -- except, perhaps, that they've further narrowed it to a certain age group -- perhaps, "Prime-aged American Males Are Lacking Work Ethic." They're drawing overbroad generalizations from a subset, and that's fishy at best.
I'm not "denying the author use the national identity." I'm wondering about is why the author would deliberately fail to examine a full half of the population. If you think that's problematic, I guess I'm okay with disagreeing with you.
The story further goes on to completely ignore the supply side: what jobs are available, and why don't "prime-aged males" want them? Is that an interesting story? Maybe, maybe not, but I'm sure there's nuance to be found there. But no, "Americans Are Losing Their Work Ethic" is easily supported with some cherry-picked charts and that's way easier to write about.
Eberstadt has been doing the rounds with his research on this problem for several weeks. Reason is just the latest to run the story. I mention this because he’s very clear about the scope of the study in the paper. Feel free to criticize the scope: the many questions you raise are good questions for follow up.
Bullshit me once, I stop listening. Those aren't follow-up questions, they're coffin nails. Blowing smoke up my ass about "good questions" is one of the most consistent ways that hucksters reveal themselves.
I think there are legitimate avenues for follow up study in Eberstadt's paper. I'm sorry that you disagree, but waiting for every angle and every perspective to be explored before publishing isn't how research is done.
"Work ethic" oh, like working unpaid overtime, pushing hard on the weekend so the boss can have that report 8am Monday morning? Working with lack of resources/protection equipment etc?
Sounds like a lack of ethic by the employer instead
The Eberstadt piece is making the rounds. Participation of prime-age men in the labor force is down to Great Depression Era levels.
Unaddressed is whether this is the expected result of increasing workforce participation of women.
Yet, there is something to be said about young men with nothing to do. Historically, excess men are sent to war. Now, we placate them with video games and antidepressants and disability checks.
Overall, this is an interesting observation and we don’t know where it will lead. The best take that I’ve heard is that this, at scale, is the most likely effect of UBI.
The second chart seems to show that 25–54-year-old American males have been incresingly "not in labor force" over the decades since the 1950's, and the trend has been fairly stable.
Other than that there's not really a lot of information to "hang your hat" from, eh?
I think we should try to understand what's happening before we try to change "incentive structures", eh?
A mere quick glance at their chart belies the description — the [Not In Labor Force] line is definitely flattening off in the last decade or so.
While the point that immigrants are working hard is very valid, the main body of the article seems like a lot of hand-waving and fluff.
It also completely ignores the employer side of the equation, or the fact that labor now gets a lower share of GDP (vs capital) than at any time in the last 8 decades. With employers systematically designing their systems and pay to extract more labor for lower cost than ever before (increasing "productivity" — this quarter), no wonder that anyone who can stay home, is staying home. Yet the article completely ignores that.
It also ignores the fact that the US Minimum Wage was initially designed and set, into the early 1970s so that a single minimum wage employee working a full-time job could keep a family of four above the poverty line. Since then, the minimum wage has nearly flatlined. It should be into the $23hour range, or $46K/year to meet that standard (actually implementing regional levels would probably be best, but that's another story). Again, the fact that these basic worker protection failures are completely ignored by the article is damning.
It is basically a bogus opinion piece masquerating as fact-based reasoning.
This is an article mostly about importation of workers and how absent that usual stream, native workers have not filled the gap. The thing is, I'm not sure why you'd expect that to occur in 3 short years in the midst of a pandemic. Companies will always complain about not having enough workers so feds will grant more work visas which suppresses wages in companies favors. How do we know the truthfulness of these vacancies?
What changes are they making, or what changes have been made for them, that allow them to meet their subsistence needs this way?
Is it really just the trope that they've moved into mom and dad's basement and aren't doing anything? Are the older generations picking up the slack of providing for the younger ones?
I think I just still haven't wrapped my head around how people who used to feel like they "had to work" their dead-end jobs because they needed to pay rent, gas, and food, suddenly realized they could stop working their dead-end jobs and still cover rent, gas, and food.
It made sense while there were additional government support programs in place, but I thought most of those had ended. Are there enough still going to explain this? Or is it something else?
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadAgain, only personal conversations with some friends and acquaintances, nothing statistically representative, but definitely show there is room for looking deeper at the root this trends before labeling people as lazy.
There is no "work ethic" - just the fear of destitution and medical debts.
Being totally oriented toward the short term, many American businesses have yet to fully appreciate all the implications.
Right now, those trying to follow in the Japanese footsteps are the Chinese.
I for one am never going back to the grind.
Wait, I can't afford the house. And i don't have a family.
Oh well, at least I have my video games.
The job that takes the longest is the one you don't start. Don't want to be successful? You're on the right path.
EDIT:
Since HN won't let me respond, here's my response:
When I first graduated, a house was definitely out of reach. It all seemed so unfair.
Instead of dwelling on that, I got to work. I now own (completely) my house and am in a profession that is rewarding.
You can either hold yourself back with cynicism and blame others for your problems, or you can get to work and solve them. No one else is going to.
A rational observer would remark on where this 10-15 years of surplus went? A Luddite would argue that one should simply do nothing
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/16/china-youth-reject-hustle-cu... unemployment-economic-uncertainty.html
Having to move to a city isn't the same as having to stay in a city.
None of these are insurmountable. Not at all. But the more barriers in place, the more likely it is that our hypothetical person will be stopped by one.
These people should not be confused, though, with those who could not wait to get away from home and were beyond glad for an excuse to move to the city. Their motives and relationships are completely different.
I'm only talking here about the ones who "had to" move to a city to get started--the folks middle-American companies depend on for the long haul after they cut their teeth on the coasts.
Very few degrees are worth taking on that kind of debt. Also, doing the first 2 years in community college with basic FAFSA is very affordable. And since when do college students not work while going to school? My nephew finished his mechanical engineering degree a couple years ago (State University system with first 2 years in community college) and he ended up with under $12k in debt which he already paid off.
Then again, he didn't decide he just had to go to an out of state private university for all 4 years while not working at all. Vastly different approaches will deliver vastly different results.
We can’t fix the cost of housing because so many people own houses. If 10% of people owned their own homes and the rest were owned by corporate landlords we would not have politicians climbing all over each other to make sure that homes values are a one way bet.
Or that wealth is better held by corporations than by individuals?
Pissing off large numbers of voters is a daily occurrence by virtually every politician in the US. Politicians don’t care about that. They only care about pissing off certain voters and certain political leaders.
Politicians in your world would never see any community voter permanence, because if everyone is a resident, everyone is effectively a transient voter to them. You would only need to kowtow and keep them happy for the 6 months prior to the election.
The communities have no anchors…except for the corporations that own all the property. They would have all the power and that sounds horrible to me.
In the US FHA loans are available with relatively low 3.5% down payments even with mid-level credit. The problem driving affordability for some people is excessive debt to income ratios much more than housing prices.
If you can save $10k, and are not saddled with excessive debt you can afford homes in most places in the US.
It feels like less of a mistake than packing people in to corporation owned apartments forever.
The role homeownership and single family houses more generally plays in our culture is not a fact of the universe. They can and should change.
I'm not "denying the author use the national identity." I'm wondering about is why the author would deliberately fail to examine a full half of the population. If you think that's problematic, I guess I'm okay with disagreeing with you.
The story further goes on to completely ignore the supply side: what jobs are available, and why don't "prime-aged males" want them? Is that an interesting story? Maybe, maybe not, but I'm sure there's nuance to be found there. But no, "Americans Are Losing Their Work Ethic" is easily supported with some cherry-picked charts and that's way easier to write about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
Sounds like a lack of ethic by the employer instead
Unaddressed is whether this is the expected result of increasing workforce participation of women.
Yet, there is something to be said about young men with nothing to do. Historically, excess men are sent to war. Now, we placate them with video games and antidepressants and disability checks.
Overall, this is an interesting observation and we don’t know where it will lead. The best take that I’ve heard is that this, at scale, is the most likely effect of UBI.
The second chart seems to show that 25–54-year-old American males have been incresingly "not in labor force" over the decades since the 1950's, and the trend has been fairly stable.
Other than that there's not really a lot of information to "hang your hat" from, eh?
I think we should try to understand what's happening before we try to change "incentive structures", eh?
While the point that immigrants are working hard is very valid, the main body of the article seems like a lot of hand-waving and fluff.
It also completely ignores the employer side of the equation, or the fact that labor now gets a lower share of GDP (vs capital) than at any time in the last 8 decades. With employers systematically designing their systems and pay to extract more labor for lower cost than ever before (increasing "productivity" — this quarter), no wonder that anyone who can stay home, is staying home. Yet the article completely ignores that.
It also ignores the fact that the US Minimum Wage was initially designed and set, into the early 1970s so that a single minimum wage employee working a full-time job could keep a family of four above the poverty line. Since then, the minimum wage has nearly flatlined. It should be into the $23hour range, or $46K/year to meet that standard (actually implementing regional levels would probably be best, but that's another story). Again, the fact that these basic worker protection failures are completely ignored by the article is damning.
It is basically a bogus opinion piece masquerating as fact-based reasoning.
Is it really just the trope that they've moved into mom and dad's basement and aren't doing anything? Are the older generations picking up the slack of providing for the younger ones?
I think I just still haven't wrapped my head around how people who used to feel like they "had to work" their dead-end jobs because they needed to pay rent, gas, and food, suddenly realized they could stop working their dead-end jobs and still cover rent, gas, and food.
It made sense while there were additional government support programs in place, but I thought most of those had ended. Are there enough still going to explain this? Or is it something else?