Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds

Income taxes are higher than capital gains taxes.

This isn't based on economic theory or anything, it's just a political choice we have made as a country. We've chosen to reward those who move money around and trade capital more than we reward those who labor. And this at a time when, supposedly, the country is trying to increase its ability to build things.

I thought this specific fact worth mentioning.

>> The richest people in the world are telling everyone to get onboard with technology that is determined to make a lot of those same people's jobs redundant.

The richest people I know are trying to convince everyone

1. There is a "worker shortage" in an attempt to bring in immigrant workers whom they can boss around and keep on a leash

2. That "AI is taking jobs" so you cannot point the people who are really taking jobs -- policy makers

3. There is "low unemployment" to perpetuate the myth that the economy is great

4. "Anyone can make it" while their nepo-babies get back-door access to jobs at top firms and claim "they worked hard up the ranks"

> Wealth inequality is high. High enough you can feel it like a vibe in the air.

I agree, but I think it's more than just a "vibe in the air". Throughout my youth and young adulthood, we (GenXers) knew vaguely about rich people, but nothing specific, just that rich people existed and they had nice stuff. Now, thanks to social media and the decline of humility, the lifestyles of rich people isn't just known, it's pushed in front of our faces constantly. And too often the message is straight from A Bronx Tale: "The working man is a sucker".

I guess, but ... people then vote to give those rich folks power.

I don't doubt there are vast differences in opportunity and even rights at this point, but I don't think that's how people see it. Not if they're trying to get more of those folks in power.

> maybe divided by those who participate in the stock market and those who don't

In many places there's a divide between home owners and people who rent.

If you're smart or lucky enough to to land that 6-figure job, then times are pretty good. There are tons of stories on subreddits, e.g. r/FIRE, r/investing, r/fatfire, etc., of people with large nest eggs and home ownership at an early age. But those are outliers. There are many opportunities to get rich if you are lucky and or smart enough to land them, like in tech or finance. But this is not much consolation for those who lack those attributes. By statistical certainty, most people cannot be exceptionally smart or talented.

I've only known a "good" economy from about 1995-1999 when the internet went mainstream and for the briefest of moments, we got a taste of what public investment in tech feels like.

The powers that be quickly saw the danger in that and IMHO orchestrated the Dot Bomb, 9/11, the Housing Bubble, etc to keep as much money as possible out of public hands so that the average person wouldn't have the means to participate in the stock market.

Suze Orman told everyone to put their savings into Vanguard in the 2000s and they did. But since America chose to invest in McMansions and SUVs instead of moonshots and automation, Vanguard is now cannibalizing US real estate rather than making venture capital available to small businesses and startups in its insatiable hunger for profit. Along with countless other zero-sum game thinkers who choose to work within existing systems of control rather than pursuing innovations which could raise the median standard of living. This is why as America has been losing its empire status as holder of the world's reserve currency, it's been colonizing itself, particularly its young.

So that's my greatest disappointment with the present era. That we collectively chose to invest in private profit rather than shared prosperity.

Now, tons of people will complain that I'm oversimplifying and will kick and scream in resistance to what I'm saying. But at the end of the day, personal wealth represents wages withheld from workers. I don't know why we worship people who have reached positions of power and wealth, whose purpose for existing seems to be to withhold resources from everyone else.

For any current students reading this, it's entirely doable to finish your program with real experience and connections under your belt. Not just with internships, but TA, research, and student org leadership experience absolutely count too. There are tons of overlooked low-stakes zero-experience opportunities available only to university students, and it's really useful to develop the habit of identifying and pursuing those.

Pretty much all of the good stuff I've done in my life have resulted from going off the beaten path. AP courses and SAT scores are the core of the beaten path, so everyone is competing for the same stuff. But the world is big, actually, and there's incredible opportunities for meaningful work once you start looking around more broadly. These sorts of jobs aren't necessarily "stable" employment, but I've never once felt precarious. Rather, I find that doing meaningful work with concrete impact tends to create more opportunities dynamically - if you can demonstrate that you get shit done, people will want your help getting their shit done. And if the work you choose is meaningful, it is very easy to make the case that you've done good and important things.

Capitalism allows trading money for solutions to problems: The massive problem in this system is that people and groups with less money end up with a surplus of problems. There are schools that need help with their tech stacks. There are legal aid groups who need better ways to process massive amounts of text. There are kids all over the world who need better ways to learn math, languages, etc. Plugging in and helping people solve their concrete problems is IMHO the best way to get started.

Why didn't they take an internship or co-op or some other job?

FWIW, as a hiring manager, I'd almost always pick a new graduate with co-op experience over somebody without it (all else being roughly equal).

More than half of STEM grads with careers don’t have a career in STEM.

But they still will be faring better than others though. I am sure STEM grads are doing better than law school grads or humanities grads. But graduating in STEM in 2009-2010 would have been awesome. right at the takeoff of a decade-long economic expansion and tech boom. It was much easier to be hired

We have flooded the STEM market with foreign workers. Sometimes we don't even give the foreign workers real jobs, we pretend they are "grad students" and pay them a pittance doing high level science at the universities. I generally like all the foreign folks I've worked with, but they are definitely suppressing the wages of natives to an insane degree.

That seems normal. My friends and I did the exact same thing w. top grades and top schools 2 decades ago, turns out life is not a easy ride.

>> 37% of people in the survey are unemployed. That is very high. Not at all representative of the general population (4 to 5%).

I think the confusion here is the definition of various BLS metrics on unemployment. If I have a STEM degree, for example, but was working as a cashier -- I wouldnt officially be considered unemployed. In practical terms, many of these individuals would label themselves as unemployed, as they may be seeking work aligned to their aspirations/degrees/years-of-training. Same for gig work, Uber driving, Door Dashing, Amazon deliveries, etc.

Also, once you are unemployed/underemployed for long enough, it gets treated as "structural unemployment" and doesn't get counted, hence the 4-5% figure you are citing.

I have friends' parents who were used to making 50k, 60k, or more. They dont have the same opportunities and now might be faced with making much less, often without benefits. In one case, I knew someone who was offered 35k p/t without benefits (thus, they would then just sink 20k of that into healthcare.) They did the math and the 35k was a net negative considering having to pay for healthcare, transportation to work, etc. Instead they just stayed unemployed. That isnt counted as unemployment, hence the 4-5% figure you are citing.

4% unemployment could mean 37% jobless rate since 4% means "recently worked and wants to work again and is looking for a job but hasn't found one yet"

But no reason 37% of people randomly asked, who are not currently working, would necessarily fit those criteria

It is important to note that retired people are not employed. 31% of respondents were 60+ years old. Some chunk of the 18-29 year olds were likely full time students. There are also other people who can't or don't need to work.

4-5% unemployment rate captures something different from "do you have a job right now, yes/no?". There are also different "unemployment rates" that mean different things.

FWIW, adults might live in homes owned by their spouse or child. It doesn't necessarily point to children living their parent's home.

The poll is conducted on the internet. Busy people are less likely to fill out surveys and are more likely to believe that hard work leads to economic gains.

No that's close to the compliment of the male labor participation rate. 4-5% is only the people who have lost their jobs in the past six months and are actively looking for another one.

The current American system is premised on people buying into this. If people don't there is no societal foundation which probably leads to societal change. It's like the one societal contract we have (had). Not society helps you, not society puts a roof on your head. Not we're in a society together, so when you get sick we help out. Purely just 'if you work hard, you will be rewarded, and the rewards will take care of the things our social model doesn't'.

As you say, it's obvious to pretty much anyone who's ever worked a day in their life but, at the same time, culturally we pretend otherwise. Guys like Musk or Bloomberg talk about working 90 hour weeks and sleeping under their desks. We still want the cultural myth of hard work = success, whatever the reality is, because this allows those who've achieved economic gain to feel better about themselves.

Where in corporate America have you worked? At my previous place, there was a well defined career ladder, and what work was necessary to climb it as an individual contributor (vs a manager). Putting in more work meant climbing that ladder, which lead to pay increases and bonuses, and there was a formula somewhere on Confluence as to how those were calculated.

People are paid to create value . Hard work is not enough. This seems obvious enough.

> Isn’t this a bit obvious?

I thought the same thing as I left the church, but it's so ingrained in many people in ways they don't even realize.

Another commenter mentions the "just world fallacy," which I agree drives this sentiment directly: if you work hard, you get good things. If you got bad things, it's because you didn't work hard (enough).

There's lots of feedback loops that perpetuate this: survivorship bias, historic wealth (ye olde boomer-bought-a-house-on-a-single-factory-salary), startup CEOs. I find the description of the American poor who don't see themselves as poor but as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" to be incredibly true.

Additionally, in many cases the people who're the most affected have the least resources to make themselves heard, the classic "rich people don't have the same 24 hours a day as the rest of us."

So, yeah, to a degree it should be obvious to anyone who goes looking, but there's so many sociological effects layered on top of each other that make it counterintuitive to someone for whom the system is working well.

> big government

Is indeed an issue, as it corresponds with the malaise you describe.

> wage stagnation

is in part due to the government increasing the costs of hiring people. That indirectly results in correspondingly lower wages. The so-called "employers' contribution" is a misrepresentation.

The article may be referring to page 14, actually.

The question on page 14 is "Do you think the American Dream--that if you work hard you'll get ahead--still holds true, never held true, or once held true but does not anymore?

And the results are (from 2023 to 2025):

Still holds true: 36, 34, 31 (downward trend)

Never held true: 18, 17, 23 (upward trend)

Once held true but not anymore: 45, 49, 46 (mixed trend)

Yeah that was my take-away as well. It was like the least significant result in the report lol

The difference in opinion on the economy was more significant. But it went the other direction (positive) so I guess they couldn't use that.

This is all unreproducible and non scientific internet adbased polling. It's worth dismissing.

I think you sum up the type of despair people feel pretty well.

It's really more helpful to look at "middle class or better." Because yes, the middle class has shrunk. But more of that share went to the UPPER income tiers.

The middle class went from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2023. But the lower income brackets saw a +3% change while upper saw +8%.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/economy/the-incredible...

>The ones on top getting a lot of the resources while the rest have to fight for whatever is left.

There simply is not a static pool of resources.

We still have a middle class, it just starts at a net worth of about 20 million. and Upper class starts at around a billion now.

Your logic is side-stepping the point. There was a period of time, at least in the USA, where the goal was economical and social stability (New Deal, GI Bill, unions). Over the course of my life, the goal has morphed into wealth transfer. You can track this with the Gini coefficient, right? Sharp upward climb during the Reagan years. A "losing faith" metric is also a bellwether. The promise of economic gains is the reason to show up. No gains, no show. There's only so much you can pump out of a system with churn before it collapses. Meanwhile, there is no such thing as "make your own path," and this is a direct contradiction to "what people want to pay for" -- definitionally a "pre-made path". We all make choices from the options that are available to us in a system where many of the variables and constants are completely out of our control (eg, what the market desires). In fact, I'd go so far as to say everything about capitalism trends towards pre-made paths.

>> I was always curious, why would anyone believe that hard work leads to economic gains in the first place?

Because I saw it work my my immigrant grandparents and parents. It doesnt work anymore

Or even if you provide something useful, you can still not get the value you deserve because capitalist can create a monopoly and underpay you as you still need to eat.

In China they do this by having people from the government in the board of big corporations. So they have to take into consideration social and countrywide economic goals, instead of pure profit.

This is what a public benefit corporation (PBC) is!

> plenty capable of giving Americans what they need to thrive

You mean by going increasingly deeply into debt?

Didn’t all the Covid money printing lead to decades high inflation? Which screwed hard working Americans as well?

This doesn’t get enough attention. For those of us who have had to climb every rung of the ladder by hand, rather than leapfrogging entire segments through social networks from family members and universities or who otherwise come from wealth and privilege, it’s been grueling for decades. Ask any service worker, and they’ll almost certainly agree that shit’s fucked ten ways to Sunday.

Hard work in America consistently only ever nets you further hardship, and has for decades. What we need is more of the essentials, and for said essentials to be affordable when they can’t be effectively socialized. In America, with its naked hostility towards organized labor, this was briefly achievable with a college degree alone; now that credentials don’t guarantee basic necessities, our options are either higher wages (which Capital won’t pay so long as they’re high on AI) or an economic crash that deflates asset values in months, not decades - and which will exacerbate the underlying employment problems to the point of riots.

> working hard at creating value does

"Creating value" is such a subjective phrase. Societal value? Fiscal value?

Someone who drives around your city for 12 hours, rescuing and resuscitating people in life-or-death situations probably provides more societal value than a software engineer who builds CRM features for large social companies but we all know which one gets paid more and who is considered "more successful."

Maybe the problem is exactly that people are rewarded based on this other type of value, and that it is increasingly hard to define it, and be the one to provide it.

Yes, it's today's housing costs, combined with inflation, that are highly demoralizing.

Here's a personal anecdote: my grandfather was born in Arkansas in the Jim Crow era. He never went to school, and in fact was illiterate throughout his life. He moved to the Central Valley of California in the 1950s as part of the Second Great Migration of African Americans, where millions left the South to destinations either in the North or west to California. He worked on the same farm for 30 years before he retired on Social Security. He worked very hard; he regularly woke up around 3:30am and left his home before sunrise.

Despite being illiterate, having a low income working on a farm, and facing discrimination, he was able to provide for his wife and four children, and he was able to purchase a house in Bakersfield that he was able to pass on to one of his sons.

I had other family members who moved from Texas to California in the 1950s and were able to purchase homes in places like Oakland and even farmland in San Luis Obispo County.

Today a farm worker in the Central Valley would have a much harder time being able to afford a home.

I work as a CS professor in Silicon Valley making six figures, and all I can afford to purchase is a one-bedroom condo unless I wanted to live in a high-crime neighborhood of the type that I grew up in or unless I wanted a soul-crushing commute from the Central Valley. Yes, I know I signed up for that reality when I took my role.

But forget about me and consider the big picture: high housing costs are brutal for young people who weren't around to purchase when prices were more affordable.

You should watch the recent pod save America podcast where the LA housing debate was discussed and the La rep was super happy about reducing the height of a new housing unit by 4 stories.

> working hard at creating value does,

You'll have to explain to me what a person at work is doing, then? I mean, if they're not creating excess value by working at a job, whose value is then sold at a surplus over what they get paid, why does that job exist? Why did they get hired?

What exactly do you think people at 'normal jobs' are doing at work all day?

Something tells me my mortgage would not go down and I might actually be a little unhappy (understatement) if housing prices were halved. But yes, this would be overall good for young people in society

Watching since the 1980s, the average tech startup in the bay area is just dragging rocks up a hill 18 hrs a day with the output thrown away in a couple of years when it doesn't pan out. Yet the people that do that there are HIGHLY compensated.

> now you are taxed out of success

Separate from your inflation argument, aren't income tax levels lower than they used to be, even during the Reagan administration?

There's always one Chicago School cultist here to educate us rubes on how the real solution is to just streamline the oligarch corruption by just removing any controls.

Who'd all that printed fuckin' money to? The already rich.

Because that faith is what got people to accept "the brown people living next door." The idea that we could get along and just work harder is what let people give up tribalism. If that no longer works tribalism must come back.

The EU on average gets more vacation time at least.

I think the correlation between good work and payoff genuinely has dropped off. This kind of makes sense. As systems get more complex/complicated, it becomes easier to hide corruption, and harder to identify positive contributions with respect to the system. This goes for society as a whole as well as companies, organizations, communities, etc.

As corruption becomes more and more profitable, culture also switches to become more tolerant of it, or even to expect it.

I wouldn't need to worry about chasing raises if inflation didn't exist.

Individual agency is important but I feel that people perceive it in a very simple way, "I work" => "I live as I want".

I think a major difference between East Europe and West Europe (can't talk generally about East/West) is that people in East Europe were trained/educated/forced/convinced that they can't change anything after 1950 (up to recently). This lead to most not take any responsibility, and to some profiting hugely (some hard working, some sociopaths). In West Europe there was always more struggle at multiple levels.

People's status improve mostly from accumulated individual actions. But someone still has to do the actions. That's why "propaganda" (convincing your own population that X is required) is so important because otherwise X will not happen.

Having a population that "accepts" things are "external" is perfect for the rulers, but no much for the others. Having a population that "struggles" and accepts it can't get everything it imagines (even if they try) seems much healthier.

If success were ONLY about having capital then what would that imply? The super rich people of today would come from the super rich people of their parent's generation. This model is actually incredibly bad at predicting the richest people in the US today. Gates, Musk, Buffet, Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc. Many may have come from well off families but none of them were anything close to among the richest of their generation. Looking from the other end, you'd expect the Ford Family, Getty, Hunt, Howard Hughes, etc. to have spawned the richest people of today. They havent.

But we dont have to resort to this sort of logic. We already have data showing 70% of wealthy families lost their wealth by the 2nd generations and 90% lose it by the third. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/generational-wealth%3A-why-d...

But to be clear, you didn't say it was ONLY capital. It sounds like you're putting that as a primary thing. But you also mentioned luck.

Can you elaborate on the luck part? Wouldnt that imply that people acting randomly have a similar chance of succeeding? If not, then there must be something MORE than luck involved right? I think everyone would agree luck is involved, but disagree on the extent. Is (bad) luck the reason why the Ford family didnt produce the richest people of today? Is an insane amount of (good) luck the reason why Zuckerberg has billions?

That goes to show how an abusive system can be virally successful as long as it pleases the rich and powerful.

Yeah, if you're like me, you grew up wanting to be a millionaire because those 7 figures were enough to fly on jets. Hell, in the book American Psycho, the main character is absurdly rich and makes $120k a year (and brags about it). Now, 18% of Americans are millionaires.n

Why do you need to be a billionaire? That's a very different goal from retiring comfortably by the way.

Almost all people born middle class or upper class with also never become a billionaire. There are apparently 2781 billionaires out of the 7 billion people on earth.

You'll never be a billionaire because being a billionaire takes extraordinary good luck as well as hard work.

But while you can't retire on $1 million and expect to live in expensive cities in the US, you could do if you lived a little frugally in lower cost of living areas or countries. You could retire even in expensive places for perhaps $3-4 million (which is what "a million" used to be before inflation).

The most prosperous moment of the USA was when rich people paid 97% of their income in taxes.

> Unless capitalists start paying the same tax rate as W2 workers, the inequality will continue to favor capitalist class and exploit the worker class.

I wanted to do a snarky "fixed that" comment where I crossed out everything before "the inequality will continue," but actually I'm curious now: capitalism fans (which includes liberals), do you genuinely believe you can have capitalism in a way where the inequality doesn't continue to favor the capitalist class? So long as power can be purchased with capital, how could this ever not be the case?