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 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 love software especially because of this. You don't need credentials, just a willingness to study hard and Leetcode and you will get high paying jobs. Amazing, no gatekeeping at all like other professsion.
Software Engineering changed my life, and the life of my family. Me and my mom only had savings about $12k back then in 2015 and I lived in NYC, didn't know that it would change my life when I started studying programming using that money.
Hate all you want about SWE and Leetcode and JavaScript (lol), but they paid my bills, and my family's bills, and my old single mom's bills.
Please stop conflating taxes to something that is forcibly taken away from you. It is purely just money that is used for things around you. I am not sure where this obsession to be come "rich" truly comes from - what are you really searching for in life?
Sure, it pays for services around me but it's taken against my will.
If I stop paying taxes I will end up in jail like Peter Schiff's dad.
I could move to Dubai or locations which don't charge taxes, but it's not a tradeoff I'm happy to do.
Incidentally, I'm about to buy a property in a country with lower taxes than my current one and invest in their economy instead.
The reason I want more money is so I can stop selling my time in order to put food on the table and a roof over my family's heads and start building things I want to build which I doubt they will be profitable.
Please forgive me if I misunderstand but you are unwilling to let go of the kind of system/society you are in: "it's not a tradeoff I'm happy to do."
However, that very society/system has made a tradeoff that they will maintain a certain level of taxation which would allow them to maintain a certain level of services.
I think I expressed myself unclearly, the tradeoff I'm unwilling to make is not because I miss services paid with taxes but because there are many dimensions to evaluate a country.
From my point of view, I already pay a private health insurance on top of my public one because the public one is just unreliable - and that's the main benefit my taxes afford me. Someone who can't afford it, will probably grade countries differently.
And there are so many factors to consider: culture, english speaking schools availability, weather, detached houses availability, real estate prices, if your spouse likes the country, anything that could be important for you.
I lived in Dubai and I'm not a fan of how they deal with personal freedom (eg. LGBT rights, alcohol / drug consumption, sex outside of marriage) even if I like how they deal with economic freedom. Also racism towards American / European expats from natives is pretty vicious (albeit not as bad as towards expats from poorer countries).
Some people are indeed happy to live in Dubai - personally I found that there are several countries which offer a better tradeoff for me, low taxes and a good quality of life (whatever your definition is).
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.
I have a similar story. My first year of college I worked two 40 hour/week jobs during the summer and a 30 hour a week job during the school year. I was determined to get a well paying internship so I could reduce my work hours and still pay for school.
There was a snow storm during the day of the spring career fair. Classes were cancelled but the career fair still happened. I was one of the only ones that showed up and passed along my resume to all of the tech companies that attended the career fair. Had it not been for the snow storm I would not have received an internship which led to my first time job. I was a college freshman, B student due to having to work and I had zero practical coding skills outside of one semester of C++. The snow storm was certainly luck but showing up at the career fair was not.
However, much of my classmates in the dorm chose to play in the snow and I chose to go to the career fair. Luck does play a role but luck is really putting yourself in a position to take advantage of opportunity. If everyone that lived on campus showed up at that career fair I don't know if I would be in the position I am today (25 years later).
It's funny how that works. Having run the college gambit before getting an associates degree in business, I learned what was important and what wasn't in college. I knew an internship was practically vital if not required. So like another class I put in a lot of time to apply to as many positions as I could. Many students I'd talk to would always seem frustrated the moment I or someone else would bring up an internship and that was because they were more worried about working at their current job and graduating debt free. I at least had the foresight to know that the experience in this field was worth more any amount of interest I'd have to pay simply because you're income potential far outweighs the maybe few thousands in interest you would've saved working full-time.
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.
But that's what I'm saying. The wisdom and intelligence you end up with plus the knowledge of using this concept of preparedness are all to a great if not total extent determined by randomness. For me to exploit this, many factors have had to come together without any conscious input on my part.
A bit like a rock becoming sentient right after being thrown and believing that it is flying
Besides, is the first idea even true? Most people who have ever lived were hunter gatherers. The majority of people alive today live in shitty conditions that they are unlikely to fundamentally ameliorate. And if they manage to change their attitude about it, it will tend to be a factor of their innate personality and influences
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 they are miserably paid they will "raise the wage" by doing less for that money
Which is what I'm doing right now. If the company wants us to be motivated they should incentivize us by sharing equity or let us leave early if we complete our work faster but since my pay will stay the same if I work harder and I'm mandated to stay the full 40h/week at my desk even though I can finish my work sooner, why would I bother working harder?
> 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.
Yes, there are lots of difficulties in the Nordic countries - centralization and unemployment is a plight for lots of rural areas. Some towns are pretty much being propped up by local gov. and state employment, with very little private enterprise going on.
Hell, a lot of would-be entrepreneurs and business owners don't see the benefits / rewards of starting something for themselves, because you put in all those hours, with the possibility to come off worse than if you had just chosen a mediocre state job.
Salaries are quite compressed, which is great for equality - but not so much for motivation, if you're very ambitious.
With that said, we do live comfy lives, compared to most people around the world.
For reference, in case someone is curious: If you look at the working-age population of Norway, approximately 1/3 are on welfare benefits, 1/3 work in the public sector and 1/3 work in the private sector.
Its actually quite amazing, given those numbers, that things actually work in Norway. From what you're describing, somehow 1/2 of the working age population is able to support the other half of the working and a sizeable non working population.
Part of the story is that the 3% annual income from the Pension Fund (oil fund) covers approximately 17% of the national budget. These numbers couldn't work otherwise.
This is, of course, thanks to the incredible lucky foresight that let us capture most of the profits from the oil industry as a public good. One could of course question the priorities in how this money is spent.
I'm of the opinion that our public sector is too big, for instance. I'm fairly sure that a considerable part of it works more as a jobs program than a necessary public utility.
Another interpretation would be that we in effect already have a massive basic income program going, a priority with which I'd actually agree. We're just not being honest about it, partly due to still being unable to run it unconditionally. The unspoken and un-debated consensus seems to be that there needs to be a bit of a taboo in utilizing such services, or the system would be overloaded.
There’s a lot of startups in Sweden but they seem relatively “low risk / low reward” and less innovative compared to Silicon Valley. You definitely don’t see the really ambitious stuff, like SpaceX or OpenAI and stuff like that. I suspect that if you looked at the whole distribution it would be shifted towards “low risk / low reward”. That can be said for most of the world though, so I admit it’s not a very strong argument.
I thin kyou're looking at pretty much the wrong variables here if you want to see SpaceX and OpenAI.
Sweden is a country of 10M while USA has 330M and constant influx of brain power. Its more likely related to that than anything else.
Not to mention the couner argument that in a nordic society you are more able to live through life worry free, which according to some people is the key for innovation.
Isn’t that the case in a lot of countries, though? Even if you can make more somewhere else, you’re still likely to spend your life in the same way — ie, working “halfway on the road to serfdom”.
Definitely. It can be said for large parts of Europe. But I have a feeling it’s a bit more culturally pronounced in the Nordics... E.g. whenever parliament passes a new budget all the papers write articles with headlines like “Here Are The Winners And Losers” full of analysis of which groups will receive more/less money from the gov. Another example is that salaries of different professions are almost entirely determined by union deals, which in turn are decided by political clout. So it’s a feeling that the whole economy is “rigged”, but in a way that’s good for most people. It’s great in many ways, but I think the serfdom feeling can get more pronounced here and in most other regions.
I think you need to recheck your facts. Sweden is one of the most entrepreneurial countries in the world. It also (at some point) had more billionaires per capital than any other country (including the US). The of the likely reasons is that the consequences of failure are a lot less in Sweden compared with (say) the US.
>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").
They're not part of Scandinavia, no, but geographically and economically Netherlands and Germany (at least the northern part close to Denmark) are also considered northern european (not to be confuse with The Nordics).
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.
> Because if you are weak (and being poor is a form of weakness), then you are at the mercy of those who are strong.
That's the point. And the only way out is anarchy. Not the anarchy which lets ring your alarm bells of democratic turmoil, riots and revolution. But in the sense of a system where no one reigns over another.
I've always wondered about this in the context of dynamic equilibria; a system where nobody reigns over one another seems like it would be unstable. As soon as one person breaks the "truce" and does start to reign over somebody else, they then have a little more power and they might use that extra power to accumulate even more power. The usual answer seems to be that all the other people in society would somehow band together to oppose the initial perpetrator and then voluntarily split up their band/mob/militia again at the end, instead of keeping the power they formed by banding together. If one of the groups does not disband, you'd need an even greater group to forcedly disband the first and then an even greater group to disband the next and so on until you are right back where we are now: with nation sized groups in detente against each other.
It seems the current situation naturally forms from a system where no one reigns over one another as a result of people having personal ambitions. I don't think ambition is something humanity has the means for to abolish, even if we wanted to (which is in itself an interesting debate).
> other people in society would somehow band together to oppose the initial perpetrator
This band would probably also need some form of leadership, where a consensus-defined alpha role comes naturally to us, much like for chimpanzees.
In fact, I'd argue that it doesn't even take a human to be the initial perpetrator. Humans (again, like chimpanzees) have an ever-present initial perpetrator: the environment.
We're not built to stand strong against the forces of nature as individuals.
TBH I don't agree with anarchists. I don't think it is possible to have a flat society devoid of hierarchy. I also don't think all hierarchy is bad and it is not clear to me that a flat society would be better. I think it is easy to make the argument that some people should have more influence than others.
The crucial part is how the hierarchy is developed and how stable it is.
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.
I was reading it more like it’s a flawed argument/system. It should be regardless of what “class” you’re in, you should be able to live a happy and fulfilling life without a lot of worry. Instead, we paint it like, you have to get out of X class in order to even have the most “simple” of worries covered. (Food, housing, healthcare, etc)
And I hate to think of any “class” being superior. “Wish I was of the superior race/gender/orientation/class/etc”. To me, people see class as something you can change (true to some extent) but why even make one class seem worse than the other? It’s only because it’s sometimes possible for people to change socioeconomic classes that we critique them for being in one and accept that being in a poorer class can have hardships that we don’t like but find acceptable because “you can change it”. But... not everyone can be rich. And a lot of our system is setup to profit off of the hard work of the working poor... so without fundamental change to the entire system, there will always have to be poor people and there is no way for everyone to be lifted out and live a less worrisome life where we aren’t concerned with class.
We live in some weird ass feudalistic society now and think the peasants deserve what they get. I don’t agree.
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.
> 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?
That's certainly an idealistic or romantic idea but it's not in any way realistic.
Being poor, depending on where you live, also means having no social safety net. It means you can't educate your children, it means you and your family are vulnerable to all the social ills that afflict those who are in poverty. Being poor gives you the short end of the stick in almost every way that matters.
It's not like everyone (or anyone, really) can live like the family in the film "Captain Fantastic", isolated in the woods, yet somehow thriving, more fit, and better educated. There's a documentary about people that lived for generations in the woods in Siberia for religious reasons. It was fanatic Christian sect called "True Believers" (can't find the documentary, but here's the Vice News story, https://youtu.be/tt2AYafET68). Definitely not an attractive lifestyle!
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)
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.
I think the idea is that early Protestants like Calvinists believed in predestination - that it was already decided who would was going to heaven. One would think this would make the predestined not care about their actions, but the trick is that no one was sure who the predestined were. Since it was believed that the predestined would be exemplars of the faith, people would act like they thought the predestined would act.
I’m not a psychologist or a theologian, but it sounds related to that concept in child psychology: when a child misbehaves, it’s better to say “you did a bad thing” than “you are bad”. The latter leads to the child labeling themselves as bad, suggesting that’s the natural way they should act.
Protestants tend to be about sola scriptura, but nowhere in the Bible does it say faith alone is all that you need. Rather, going to James 2:
> 14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? 15 Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. 16 If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? 17 In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.
> 18 But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.”
> Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. 19 You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.
> 20 You foolish person, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless[d]? 21 Was not our father Abraham considered righteous for what he did when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? 22 You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. 23 And the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,”[e] and he was called God’s friend. 24 You see that a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone.
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!
Just a side note, both fish and oil are relatively high-tech sectors in Norway. Oil due to harsh weather and rough offshore geography, and fish through factory ships and clever farming. But they’re both closer to pure resource exports than you’d expect from a first-world country.
I believe this might be happening in STEM fields in north america (maybe other places too).
There's so much opportunity for smart people to make a lot of money working in tech that it makes other engineering disciplines (mechanical, nuclear, etc.) or research seem unattractive.
Yeah absolutely, it used to be that the biggest brains all went to finance for a while in the 80s-90s. Since the 2010s the biggest brains have been going to tech to drive an advertising business based on some addictive social network stuff, kind of sad really. But if you're ivy league level, it's hard to decide to work on anything else if you can make 200k a year starting salary at age 22 in sunny California, while also working on interesting technical problems.
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.
Well, Oil is 18% of Norwegian GDP, Nokia topped out at 4%.
Of course I'm comparing a sector vs a company but, in a way, Nokia was a sector of itself, and the Oil industry in Norway is dominated by a few companies like Equinor.
So, not sure if its that much more heterogenous than Finland, but yes no such earthquake has happened yet.
As a tangental note Iceland is still trying to diversify its portfolio having started with only fishing, then adding aluminum, then (catastrophically!) finance with the latest being tourism.
There are some interesting tech companies around (for instance one involed in the pfizer's covid supplychain, genetics, mmorpgs, ai, bionics and food processing machinery) but the lack of funding is making it real difficult for new startups to take flight.
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.
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.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think a vast majority of that money went to building bicycle and traffic infrastructure. We did not put it in the savings like Norway did.
We'll see soon how we will manage without that income - if they do actually shut down the fields.
Norway already was and would continue to be successful without oil. Bangladeshi is one of the most corrupt and disfunctional countries in the world. Oil would have made the situation worse not better. Google “oil curse” to see what happens to most countries when oil is found.
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.
I agree with the first sentence, but I don't think that ,,most people understand that "hard work" doesn't just mean physical exertion, but also good decision-making, sensible investing, scaling your impact, etc.''
I made a great investment 8 years ago that made me retire quite early. I'm still just sitting on the investment although many people told me to sell it, and also some people want me to ,,work again''.
For me not selling it is the ,,hard work'', as doing anything, like buying houses from the money, or ,,investing it to something sensible'', or ,,diversifying'' would be damaging to my impact. I don't see that people are understanding it.
> 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.
what can be done, as of today, is education, and applied effort to learn useful skills. That's what hard work is! That's why there's such a huge fuss every year in china regarding the national college entrance examination - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_College_Entrance_Exam... - entire towns are run silent and distraction free to allow students to study and take the exam.
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].
WEF is using strange definitions of “social mobility”, to say the least. How many newly made millionaires from originally poor families are there each year? Now _that’s_ social mobility, and nobody can beat America in that regard.
Looks like, once again, the USA is a country of extremes. Homeless to millionaire, no healthcare and best healthcare, least freedom and most freedom.
Europe is more moderate, you can get help if you're really poor and you can become middle class; you can't medicate properly but they will save your life for free; you've got basic freedoms but the ceiling is lower, etc.
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.
>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.
Perhaps we should work towards a society that offers better incentives in that case? I don't see what the point was of inventing technology if we still have to fight like crabs in an individualistic bucket.
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.
Given that the social mobility index used in the report[0] uses access to healthcare and education, along with "social protections" as part of their ranking, it should come as absolutely no surprise that wealthy welfare democracies top the charts here.
The average Portuguese has a much lower income than the average black American. The EU income inequality is much higher if you you don't look within countries but across countries. This actually makes the EU more unstable than the US. Poor countries keep threatening they will leave and rich countries feel that poor countries are dragging them down. You don't have this dynamic in the States.
You do, there is a huge disparity between coastal states and the rest of America. You can see that in the political map. This leads to problems like we saw last week.
European social mobility is quite low in general. European countries are optimized for welfare, not social mobility. These are wildly different things.
Yep. I would say it is even harder (and also the popular opinion here) to not be rich and become rich, in Europe.
Social mobility here means that if you are born destitute you have a chance to become part of the middle-income class, where the middle-income class is significantly poorer than the American middle class.
> Social mobility here means that if you are born destitute you have a chance to become part of the middle-income class
I’m inclined to say that it’s pretty much a given. It’s really hard to be unable to live a sort of comfortable life in Europe (you might not have a brand new TV, but you’ll have your own house and Netflix).
Interesting to hear, in Belgium for example the homeownership rate seems high(speaking from living here for a while). The culture is very much geared towards buying a house, alone or with a spouse.
It's also a small country where people don't move alot, which might mean that they don't value flexibility as much as larger countries where moving is generally over larger distances.
Also, the banks offer very good rates for these types of loans if you have a stable job and prospect.
Renting for very long periods seem like a waste for many people here.
Parent probably meant renting not owning. Although in Europe there is some social housing poor people can buy, while if you're middle class you're kinda screwed as you're considered too rich to be allowed to buy into social housing but are too poor to afford buying into upper class housing and middle class housing in almost a disappearing species. You either live in the nice green quiet areas where all the old money is or you'll be a renter your whole life.
I wonder how this is measured. Especially the Roma population in Central Europe seems to be stuck in endless circle of crime and misery, regardless of money and effort poured into the ghettos. Roma who escape those conditions are rare, and they almost always marry someone "white" and move as far from their original community as possible.
If an Indian or Chinese person wants to migrate to a country with GSMI above 70, going by raw numbers the best bet would be the US. Per-capita rates are good for scoring feel-good points, but the US is a magnet for migrants in absolute terms in a way not many other places manage.
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".