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Comment by bjornsing | Hacker News Reader

I think some alternative hypotheses should be considered:

1. Workplace culture has changed drastically over the last 20 years, at least in Sweden. Comparing the work ethic of my parents generation to that of millennials is… like comparing night and day.

2. We’ve been living in a radical monetary policy experiment for the last 20 years, with zero (or even negative) interest rates and quantitative easing. It should also be noted that the previous change in productivity growth rate (in the 80-ties) coincided with a dramatic change in monetary policy.

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> Comparing the work ethic of my parents generation to that of millennials is… like comparing night and day.

It's easier to keep a strong work ethic when the returns of work are consistent. Harder to keep when people work their asses off until their forties and still can't afford owning a house and sustaining a family in the income of one member of the couple. Just one or two generations ago most people routinely were able to achieve that in their 20s.

I worked at some very high paying tech companies, most of my coworkers could and did easily afford housing and family, and yet the work ethic was simply not there.

> Comparing the work ethic of my parents generation to that of millennials is… like comparing night and day.

Is there any quantitative data available to back up this claim?

An amusing thread on the subject:

A Brief History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore https://twitter.com/paulisci/status/1549527748950892544?s=20...

A.k.a. you can find an article saying anything if you search hard enough. And a paragraph or sentence is easier.

That is unfair. The twitter post has pictures of articles along with their sources going back to the 1800s. That is not a bar a random search comes up with. If it is so easy then use the same bar and get one sentence sources going back to the 1800s backing the thesis that people nowadays have less work ethics.

The monetary quantitative easing is keeping up with technological productivity improvements: central banks inflate currencies as much as they can get away with without getting a revolution from the working people.

Yes, I have a feeling this is how it works “big picture”, but I don’t have any trustworthy sources for that claim. Do you know of any? I’m thinking academic economists who have written on the subject or something like that.

Interest is, after all, the return on capital. While an individual borrower may be over the moon to have to pay less interest, on aggregate it means lower return, and return on all capital across the economy is growth.

This would be the radical monetary policy experiment called "avoiding a depression by preventing the financial system from collapsing"?

Maybe more like: "We have a bull market and almost no unemployment; let's lower the interest rate to below zero".

I think that the bull market was definitely created by QE - there were some bloody days on the market in 2008.

It was a massive bail out for the financial sector. Did it work - we will see, current signs are not good.

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