Lemix

2022-01-08 19:36:56 A separate study from Princeton revealed that the stronger your belief that you can rise through the income ranks, the more likely you are to defend the status quo.

While an obsession with efficiency and productivity is found all over the world, nowhere is it more evident than in the United States, where nearly 70 percent of citizens believe they will achieve the American Dream and that the most important factors in achieving economic success are hard work and personal drive.

John Swansburg, senior editor of the Atlantic, wrote about his father’s pursuit of the American Dream and the myth of the self-made man (and woman) and ultimately asks an important question: “Is it a healthy myth that inspires us to aim high? Or is it more like a mass delusion keeping us from confronting the fact that poor Americans tend to remain poor Americans, regardless of how hard they work?” I tend to think it is more mass delusion than healthy myth, especially since as a younger person I fervently believed that someone somewhere would eventually recognize how hard I worked and reward me. I ultimately had to recognize my efforts and reward myself.

This belief in hard work as a virtue and a life philosophy started on the door of a church in Germany. Over the course of a couple hundred years, the religious notion that working long and hard makes you deserving while taking time off makes you lazy was adopted as an economic policy, a way to motivate employees and get the most out of them.

So, after the industrial age took hold, workers put in more hours, became less likely to own their tools, and were less invested in the end product than they had been at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Also, the Calvinistic belief that work is virtuous and idleness is sin had been transformed into a faith in capitalism to reward those who worked the hardest and the longest.

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2022-01-08 19:36:37 Once again, we see the changes in the language that reflect an evolution in philosophy. For example, the word bootstrapping was originally used in the early 1800s. It meant “to pull yourself over a fence using only your bootstraps”; in other words, doing something ridiculously improbable. An article in the Madison City Express from 1843 mocked an official by saying, “His Excellency is certainly attempting to lift himself up by his boot-straps, or, what is much better, is ‘sitting in a wheel-barrow to wheel himself.’”

In the ensuing decades, the satirical implications were lost and the word came to mean going from rags to riches through only individual effort. It became a compliment. This mirrored the opinions of a broader society that, both in the United States and in much of Europe, admired not the idle rich but self-made men like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.

It was no longer ludicrous to try to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps; it was a solid life plan. Even today, despite the income gap being higher in the United States than in almost any other nation, many Americans believe they can rise to riches through honest labor, and that belief fuels a willingness to work too much, even when we’re not reaping the profits of our labor.

The psychologists Michael W. Kraus and Jacinth J. X. Tan studied American views on social mobility for a paper published in 2015. They concluded, “Beliefs in the American Dream permeate our parenting decisions, educational practices, and political agendas, and yet, according to data we present in this manuscript, Americans are largely inaccurate when asked to describe actual trends in social class mobility in society.”

Inaccurate is a mild word to use here. In truth, your chances of becoming a millionaire in the United States are less than one percent. The likelihood that you’ll become a billionaire is about the same as the chance that you’ll be struck by lightning. But we are not very accurate even when gauging less dramatic changes in income. Kraus and Tan reported that participants in four studies vastly overestimated the possibility that someone could move from low income to high income. Открыть/Комментировать

2022-01-08 19:36:09 Celeste Headlee, «Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving»:

In 1904, just as labor unions were gaining strength and the push for eight-hour workdays was gaining ground, the German sociologist Max Weber published a book called The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

He argued that the Protestant work ethic was largely responsible for the growth of capitalism and the success of northern Europe. In the book, he quotes Benjamin Franklin’s now famous advice: “Remember that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he hath really spent or thrown away five shillings besides.” Translation: If you sit around, you aren’t just lazy—you are also wasting money.

Max Weber points out that before the industrial age, farmworkers who were offered a higher wage would work fewer hours. They would work long enough to earn what they needed and then spend their extra time at leisure. The Protestant work ethic, though, viewed idleness as immoral and hard work as virtuous. So employers could convince devout employees to work long hours regardless of the wages paid. Even the janitor and the plumber are doing God’s work, according to Martin Luther, and no job is unworthy in the eyes of the Lord.

The idolization of hardworking people began in the United States with good old Ben Franklin and the like-minded. It grew in strength during the nineteenth century. In 1859, Frederick Douglass first gave a speech that he would repeat multiple times in the ensuing years. It was a lecture on the “self-made man.” “There is nothing good, great, or desirable,” he said, “that does not come by some kind of labor.”

This vision of a man (let’s be honest: it was almost always a man at that time) who achieved great things solely through toil and grit became an essential part of the American Dream, and some version of it took hold in many parts of Europe as well. “My theory of self-made men is, then, simply this: that they are men of work,” Douglass said. “Whether or not such men have acquired material, moral or intellectual excellence, honest labor faithfully, steadily and persistently pursued, is the best, if not the only, explanation of their success.”

His argument is that the success of someone who achieves great things is mostly due to blood, sweat, and tears. Conversely, someone who is unsuccessful is obviously not working hard enough. Открыть/Комментировать

2022-01-08 09:39:01 Октябрьский патреонный текст: https://nonidealstories.ru/compensation/ Открыть/Комментировать

2022-01-05 20:34:49 Открыть/Комментировать

2022-01-05 20:34:45 Писательские советы от Джен Кэмбл: Открыть/Комментировать