
Telling children 'hard work gets you to the top' is simply a lie - weatherlight
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/14/children-hard-work-social-mobility-estate-background
======
mindcrime
More straw-man crap trying to pitch the ridiculous idea that hard work doesn't
matter at all. OK, sure, you can argue that you're _more likely_ to reach the
_very highest echelons_ of society if you are lucky enough to be born rich,
etc. But:

a. "more likely" doesn't mean it isn't possible to achieve if you _aren 't_
"born right"

and perhaps more to the point:

b. "success" is measured on a continuum; it's not a binary proposition. And
there's a lot of room between "Becoming a Supreme Court justice" (just to pick
an example) and winding up as a barista at Starbucks. Like, plenty of lawyers
who make a nice living for their families, or all the thousands of local
district and superior court judges out there, or the hundreds of federal
circuit judges who don't _quite_ make it to the _very_ top.

This kind of article is boring and pointless because it's selling a dangerous
idea: that nothing you do matters at all, and, ergo, you might as well do
nothing. I mean, if hard work doesn't matter, why bother working hard to begin
with, right?

As the old saying goes: _" It is better to shoot for the stars and miss than
aim at the gutter and hit it"_. Or another take on it: _" Shoot for the moon.
Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."_

So yeah, tell your kids to dream big and work hard. They'll probably go
further than if you tell them "life sucks, you have no chance, so just go
ahead and do nothing but play video games and smoke weed all day".

~~~
maxxxxx
"As the old saying goes: "It is better to shoot for the stars and miss than
aim at the gutter and hit it". Or another take on it: "Shoot for the moon.
Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars." "

These are fine. However, there is also the belief that all people who have
reached the stars have worked hard or that people who haven't reached stars
just haven't worked enough. These are wrong. Success is a combination of hard
work and a good portion of luck. You most likely won't be successful if you
don't work hard but if you don't succeed it's not necessarily because you
haven't worked hard.

To me it's a call for successful people to be more compassionate with people
who aren't successful.

~~~
chronic940
So do you propose we give free scholarships, jobs, and tax breaks to those who
end up unlucky?

I was unlucky and had medical problems in college. I deserve some relief. But
I'm also a co-founder of a decent startup. Am I lucky or unlucky?

~~~
maxxxxx
You were lucky and unlucky. You have probably worked hard but you may also
have been co-founder of a bad startup and lost everything. Or you could have
gone bankrupt because of medical bills.

You definitely should work hard but by no means there is a guarantee you will
succeed. You also need some luck.

~~~
user5994461
co-founder of a startup, I'd interpret that as he has nothing and he lives in
the most expensive area in the world.

~~~
majewsky
What makes you think that a startup can only be founded in SV?

------
FreedomToCreate
There are two really big problems with this outlook. First if everyone
achieves a high level education, the competition for high skilled jobs also
goes up, making the higher education mean less and requiring further education
to beat the crowd. This is something millennials are experiencing right now.
Second, if employers take more risk and hire more people from underprivileged
backgrounds, it just means that someone from a privileged background missed
out on the job and just shifts the resentment from one group to the other. It
doesn't really solve the fundamental problem.

Working hard will move you forward. How forward is hard to determine, and it
varies. The reality is that some people in their lifetime won't achieve
success but they lay the foundation for their children too...ex his mothers
struggle to get from Africa to the UK laid the foundation for him to achieve
his success. Their is little chance that he will become say the Prime
Minister, but his children may...thanks to their dad being able to provide
them with a privileged life.

~~~
sp332
The job market isn't static like that. If there are lots of highly educated
people, there will be new jobs created to take advantage of their skills.
There might be more competition or there might not be, and it's definitely not
a linear correlation.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
There is a lot more to entrepreneurship than a high education level. Young
people are more educated than ever, yet small business creation is lower than
ever[1]. A business requires startup capital, which is tough to gain when you
must start your career in $40k-$100k in debt. The salaries of recent grads
have been lower, too. Cost of living, especially in housing and medical
expenses, is going up every year. With dwindling social stability and a
hobbled ability to save, the only ones who can safely risk starting a business
nowadays are those who already have capital.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-
business/wp/201...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-
business/wp/2015/02/12/the-decline-of-american-entrepreneurship-in-five-
charts/)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Your first point depends on your definition of "educated." I'm unconvinced
that young people are more educated than ever, because education includes
broad critical/creative thinking. It's not cookbook mimicry bounded by a
narrow set of choices in a common problem space.

It's the difference between "I made a new web framework" and Vannevar Bush or
John von Neumann.

As for cost of debt - yes, it gets much harder to innovate when access to free
capital is rationed. Rationing and hoarding capital is actually one of the
dumbest things a capitalist culture can do. "Hard work" won't fix this.

------
mwfunk
One of my pet peeves is when someone takes issue with an oversimplification of
something, but instead of dealing with the oversimplification, they keep the
same level of oversimplification but assume that the opposite view must be
true.

Just because something's not 100% true doesn't mean it's 0% true. In this
case, a more appropriate level of granularity would be: "if you work hard, you
are more likely to be successful than if you don't work hard." That kind of
nuance doesn't really resonate with children though, which is why we don't
tell them that.

Complaining that it's all a big lie is akin to someone growing up, realizing
that there is no Santa living in the North Pole, and concluding that the North
Pole must also be a lie.

------
anigbrowl
Quite so. Hard work will absolutely help you advance in your endeavors, but if
your hard work advances others more than it advances you - which is true for
an awful lot of people - then you are being used and when your utility is
exhausted you will be cast aside without a second thought.

This argument is not, as some have claimed, an excuse for apathy. Rather, it
argues that accepting the prevailing socioeconomic norms is foolish for anyone
who is not close to the apex of society. The level playing field and other
such political tropes are false, there is abundant evidence of this, and
anyone who tells you otherwise either lying to you or to themselves.

------
dbg31415
Is "the top" the goal? Shouldn't be for every child. Telling every child they
can reach "the top" is a lie.

I grew up in a very poor part of the country, certainly bottom 5%. And
eventually paid my own way through an Ivy League school... I would say that
the lessons my dad taught me were solid.

1) It's important to work hard. You don't work hard to get ahead... you work
hard so you are satisfied that you gave it your all. Take pride in your
accomplishments -- however small. Work until you're happy with what you have
done.

2) Be careful what you wish for -- what you choose to dedicate your life to
doing is important, but know that luck plays a huge role. You can't count on
luck, but you can be immensely thankful for it and humble accepting it.

3) The world is yours to make what you will out of it. You're the only one who
can determine what is right for you. Nobody is better than you are, but you're
no better than anyone else -- stand up for yourself, and be kind to those you
run into along the way.

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chippy
> What I have learned in this short period of time is that the pervasive
> narrative of “if you work hard you will get on” is a complete myth. It’s not
> true and we need stop saying it. This is because “working hard, and doing
> the right thing” barely gets you to the starting line

The author misses the point. It's true that _only_ saying “if you work hard
you will get on” is not enough. But it's only half the picture - working hard
will only get you somewhere - the starting line. Then you need to continue and
improve and adapt. Whether it's worth that time and effort is another
question.

But simply accepting a half truth as a whole and ignoring the whole picture is
harmful "It’s not true and we need stop saying it." is the completely wrong
thing to say. Better: "it's not the only thing that counts, and we need to
give tell our children what they really need to do"

~~~
011235813213455
I suggest you read the end of that paragraph, because he ends it by saying
essentially what you said he missed.

> _So much more is required_.

While he does not explicitly state what is required, he is obviously saying
that we need to stop using that statement alone.

------
sergiotapia
"The harder I work the luckier I get." comes to mind.

~~~
anigbrowl
People in coal mines work pretty hard. Are they getting luckier, do you think?
This is an absolutely great maxim for people who are fortunate or wise enough
to be working on developing their own abilities and position. For the majority
of people who are working hard to get paid to pay bills to have life's
necessities, but don't have much energy or idea what to do beyond that, it's a
cruel joke.

~~~
vacri
I don't know about elsewhere, but here in Australia, miners get to use heavy
equipment to do what used to be back-breaking labour, and salaries tend to
start at twice the national median. Modern miners are _not_ the poorest-of-
the-poor picture of yesteryear.

~~~
anigbrowl
Brilliant evasion of the point there

~~~
vacri
I was just suggesting you update your mental image of coal miners from the
1950s to the 21st century.

I remember one politician here a couple of years ago defending miners in his
electorate as 'battlers' (aussie slang for poor who are trying to make ends
meet)... and at a time when the national median wage was $57k and median
household income was $77k, the 'battler' he was defending made $110k...

~~~
anigbrowl
It's not so much that I have a particular image of coal miners as people still
do the more traditional back breaking labor sort of coal mining in the country
where I live. The point is that people do heavy manual labor and it doesn't
necessarily advance their economic interests, not to comment on the state of
the coal industry in 2017.

------
vacri
The title doesn't match the content ("gets you to the top" versus "get on in
life") and makes the mistake that the only way to consider yourself a success
is to become upper-middle class. It is wrong to teach all underprivileged
youth that the only thing standing between them and their own professional
practice is working hard, but it's not wrong to teach them that a good work
ethic will make other things in their life easier.

------
djschnei
Telling children 'hard work won't get you to the top' is simply a lie, also.
Success has an endless number of variables and they are all weighted
differently for every individual. Fact is, your work ethic is a variable you
control - Teaching children that is important.

Alas, teaching children (and adults) they're but one of a larger group of
victims is, and will always be, a political juggernaut.

------
clavalle
If there are equal outcomes, then we have succeeded at creating equal
opportunity. Not as individuals; but statistically.

Individually preferences, choices, dumb luck, etc. of course would lead to
unequal outcomes -- as it should be. But when taken as a whole, those
differences should disappear.

It is an ideal, but I like it because it is a measurable ideal.

------
Xcelerate
I don't think I've ever heard anyone tell their children "hard work gets you
to the top". I believe what is actually more often said is "if you don't work
hard, you won't get to the top". Subtle, but crucial difference.

------
Kenji
I think the more important insight is that what you work on is as important as
how hard you work. This is especially true in today's world of automation,
where things that took one person literally a year can now be done by machines
in a few hours.

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bunburying
Interesting to compare and contrast American and European attitudes toward
social mobility [1].

Apparently Americans are far more likely than Europeans to believe that hard
work gets you to the top.

However, these expectations are apparently quite divorced from reality.
Apparently hard work is far more likely to get you to the top in Europe
(especially continental Europe) than in the US.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-
economic_mobility_in_t...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-
economic_mobility_in_the_United_States)

~~~
user5994461
Depends where you are.

Europe and USA are large continents, comprised of many environments and sub
cultures.

------
psyc
What's needed is tons of hard work on exactly the right thing at the right
time, or some half-assed work on a different kind of right thing at the right
time.

------
11thEarlOfMar
What I tell my kids is that among the behaviors that contribute to success,
the one the makes the most impact is working hard.

Luck matters, intelligence matters, natural skill matters, social
circumstances matter, but hard work matters more.

You can be blessed with all of those behaviors and still fail, but hard work
moves the odds in your favor more than the others.

------
logfromblammo
Inculcating a culture of work ethic into the majority of the population
produces a surplus that may then be extracted and utilized by a specific class
of people who do not wish to work hard.

 _Arbeit macht frei._

As far as I am aware, every human culture has always demanded more work than
strictly necessary from the working class in order to support a relatively
small proportion of non-workers or light workers. At the band/tribe level,
that is generally very young children and very old elders. Larger organization
units tended to reserve some of the light work and non-work for administrators
and enforcers. For a while, we have had concepts such as "education" and
"retirement" that take the place of child labor and dying at your workstation,
made possible by improvements in productivity in the working class.

So for those whose hands never acquired a callus, it has long been necessary
that other people do harder work. Indeed, we even had more odious lies, such
as "you must work hard, because you are my property," or "work hard, or you
will be removed, and your family will starve."

Sometimes, the promise of promotion was not a lie. The very best of the hard
workers were elevated to encourage the others, but never quite far enough that
they might question _what is really done_ with all that hard work.

We have robots and power generators now. None of us can work harder, faster,
or more cheaply than a fully automated factory running on raw materials and
electricity. The former economic necessities are no longer required. But no
one is prepared to come out and say "no one really needs to work hard any
more, and you will only be able to reach the top by owning the most productive
capital" because there are so many people out there who have been toeing that
line their whole lives, working hard without reaching even a local maximum.
The economy isn't _entirely_ automated--not yet--and we still collectively
need _some_ people to work. No one wants to be the one chump in ten that has
to bust their ass every day while everyone else just lies around goofing off.

So we have the "bullshit job" phenomenon, to distribute and obfuscate who is
doing all the actual work, making the other 9 put up the appearance of work
for the sake of the one still actually doing the critical labor, or dividing
up the work so that 10 people each do 10% of a real job and 90% flimflammery.

What we should be telling the kids is " _own_ something now, before it is too
late."

------
wnevets
The most common way to get to the top is being born at the top.

~~~
clock_tower
That's true -- but the top is a harder place to stay at than you think. China,
the West, and the Middle East all have variations of "from shirtsleeves to
shirtsleeves in three generations"; most fortunes don't last past the
grandchildren of the people who earned them -- and this was even true under
feudalism, where new titles had to be continually granted, and the fourth
generation after the man who was first granted arms was hardly ever
armigerous, if it existed at all.

The few who make it past the third generation, generally continue on
indefinitely (the Roosevelts, who bought a 40-acre farm on Manhattan Island in
the 1600s and still own it today, should come to mind; likewise the
Rothschilds and Rockefellers in more recent times); but getting over that
three-generation hurdle is a formidable task.

------
ashwinaj
I somewhat agree with the premise, but then I read "going home to a bedroom
which you share with many other siblings" Yes, surely sharing a room with your
brother and sister hampers your chances of success (sarcasm). Did he mean a
cramped room? Even so, I don't agree.

There is no guarantee for anything in life, it's an absolute certainty that
you will get nothing without some semblence of hard work.

------
sauronlord
Who's telling children hard work will get them to the TOP?

I thought we tell children that hard work pays off and is more likely to get
you into a better position than being a slacker.

------
cocktailpeanuts
Logic 101: (A => B) != (B => A)

I don't know when it became OK to use these logical fallacies online to
support propaganda.

I also don't know at which point even the people with above average
intelligence (AND definitely know about what a logical fallacy is) decided
that they will pretend it suddenly doesn't exist.

Lastly, I don't know why the HN readers who I'm sure know ALL about all this
AND even more end up going all groundhog day and have the same battle every
time this type of article comes up.

