Americans Are Losing Their Work Ethic
reason.com
reason.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I for one am never going back to the grind.
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?
Sounds like a lack of ethic by the employer instead
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?
There is no "work ethic" - just the fear of destitution and medical debts.
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.