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Comment by raiyu | Hacker News Reader

The American dream is to make it through hard work, what you are referring to is simple greed and laziness and it’s been around since humanity attained consciousness.

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> The American dream is to make it through hard work

Now that's the actual con, or at least a pipe dream. Hard work is never enough.

Luck plays a huge factor but few who get lucky, and then rich, will ever admit to that part.

It's a minor detail: "through the hard work of OTHERS".

I admit it. Many of my peers do. Luck is fickle and hard quantify. Effort and decision making less so. It is at least obvious why people have such a bias.

Of course, saying "I got lucky" is not the story most successful people want to tell themselves..

I am not implying it is all luck, but there is never no luck involved in success.

> Now that's the actual con, or at least a pipe dream. Hard work is never enough.

This seems like a bad faith, intentional misunderstanding of the concept of hard work. You're right, mindless hard work (with no proactive consideration for your own life trajectory) is not enough to "make it". If you take the first minimum wage job you find and you work hard at that job for 40 years, you're not going to make it. That doesn't invalidate the American Dream. The American Dream isn't "if you work hard, the American Dream fairy will appear and present you with a house, a car and a white picket fence", it's "if you work hard at making it, you can quite easily make it". This presupposes that a given worker will take responsibility for their ability to earn, and be willing to course correct if they are not on a good path toward "making it".

> Luck plays a huge factor but few who get lucky, and then rich, will ever admit to that part.

Nonsense. The goal of the American Dream was never to be Jeff Bezos. It was to live a comfortable life. In that sense, the American Dream is being realized by the vast majority of Americans every day. The median income of a middle-class household in this country is 78K,[0] which puts them in the ~94th percentile in global income.[1]

[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-america... [1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/global...

The Pew Research article you are quoting show a considerably shrinking middle class over the past decades with a stagnating income: „Median income of the middle class in 2016 is about the same as in 2000“.

This is propaganda based on a mix of the Protestant work ethic and stoicism in an effort to keep the populace compliant and malleable. This is why political parties are constantly in the business of creating wedge issues to distract people so they don't figure out their lot in life is determined by their material conditions.

Which is itself propaganda from other religious sects of note who got so fast and loose with doctrine they allowed salvation to become pay-to-win (indulgences), and corruption to become so endemic, even members of the faith started nailing protests to doors, or schisming due to overreach by the theocratic edifice.

If uou're going to make a historical argument, please follow through.

Two back-to-back on-point comments. I appreciate you!

is that really the dream? I always thought it was just having a normal job, work 9-5 and come home to house/car/family

From wikipedia [0]: "The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States, the set of ideals (democracy, rights, liberty, opportunity and equality) in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, as well as an upward social mobility for the family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers."

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream

I suppose I'm wondering if the definition of "hard work" has shifted. In the '50s and '60s was "hard work" like 60 hour weeks and "hustle economy" type of stuff? or was it just "doing a good job" 40 hours a week?

I think to some extent it's always depended on who you talked to, but "hustle culture" as we know it today definitely wasn't part of the ideal of the American Dream at any point before the '90s, at the very earliest.

I’d say it was more “an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay”.

Back in the 50's maybe!

Now everyone are just 'temporarily impoverished billionaires', which is why the whole scam continues to hold itself up.

>'temporarily impoverished billionaires'

The Steinbeck that your are (mis)quoting is from the 30's. Misquote because Steinbeck was talking about how the majority of the ""socialists"" at the time were "most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?'"

So the feeling of entitlement is much older and across political lines.

I'm actually repeating/quoting my rejig of Steinbecks quote. I assumed the original quote is so well known as for that to be clear.

Hence, thanks, but looking back to the 30's isn't relevant here.

I think thats another facet of the dream. The theoretical starting point of the American dream is probably the immigrant who comes to the country and has nothing. So that would be an achievement compared to that starting point as well.

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