The Protestant - pre-American - work ethic is, in effect, a negative guarantee: you work because you were put on this earth to work. You should be happy with anything you get for it. If you have any problem with the terms of the deal, suck 'em up or suffer eternal damnation.
Cracked's editor: World events driven by our laughably huge underestimation of effort for everything
now your,cookin.
If we can leave aside anectodes of douchebags marrying the CEO’s daughter, how exactly do we quantify “effort”, then, and apply it across employment categories? I’ve done manual labor as well as management work, and it’s hard even in my own mind to say which work is “harder.” After eight hours of dragging drywall off of a truck, I know I’m done, man. But after twelve hours of trying to herd cats, juggle e-mails and sip a torrent of information from a fire hose, am I ever really “done”? I wouldn’t mind going back to the truck, many days . . .
I didn’t misuse any statistical terms. Read it again. It parses perfectly clearly. It is completely false that there is any necessary correlation between effort and reward. For that matter, there’s no empirical evidence that there’s even a significant correlation. There may be a a marginal correlation (i.e. those who work harder are slightly more likely to reap monetary rewards than people who don’t), but that’s about it. The myth is that America is a perfect meritocracy. It isn’t even close.
I blame internal combustion and nitrogen fixation. That’s how we got accustomed to getting more “out” than we were really, legitimately putting “in.”
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
“perfect” meritocracy? Or “meritocracy”, even? I never heard this myth, much less bought into it. Where did you hear it, and why did you buy into it (presumably, since disappointment seems to have made you so angry)?
Buddhism in many countries has been mixed with indigenous belief systems. It is a religion strongly influenced by the culture in which it is practiced. That culture is not the same even among Eastern countries, and it’s a helluva lot different in the West. I believe there are over 10,000 Buddhist texts recognized somewhere as canon, written over the span of 1,000 years or so. For this reason I find it’s really hard to generalize about Buddhism or how it is meant to be practiced.
Just as some Christian sects emphasize, say, the Virgin Mary or the ritual act of baptism, some Buddhist sects emphasize the concept of reincarnation and some do not. Not all Buddhists believe in reincarnation. I don’t.
As to the thread topic, I think there is something to David Wong’s observations. I agree completely with Dio that the idea we live in a meritocracy is a complete myth. It seems this argument over what he said is unnecessarily pedantic. The bottom line is, life is unfair. Hard work is not rewarded as consistently as our societal values suggest it is. What many of us are taught the world is like is vastly different from what the world is actually like. The weird thing is, we all seem to keep buying into this delusion despite consistent evidence that it’s a complete delusion. Unfairness is viewed as more of an anomaly than a fundamental reality everyone faces.
I think the reason for buying into the delusion is that the alternative would be rather heartbreaking. As Rand Rover has commented frequently in response to questions about his belief system, ‘‘Which kind of world would you rather live in?’’ In the most fundamental sense then it seems that many of us maintain the perspective that the world is just because the alternative would be psychologically unbearable. If we didn’t earn all the good stuff we have, then our production-based identity system collapses. If that person down the street is homeless because his life was unfairly brutal to him, that suggests we might have an obligation to correct the unfairness that keeps certain people down and raises others.
I can understand that; the truth does not always set you free. Sometimes it makes you feel hopeless and sad, paralyzed, or worse–makes you feel obligated to take on more responsibility.
I think it’s an issue not just of effort shock. It’s also an issue of effort diversion. Hard work is proportional to rewards - but the rewards don’t always go to the person who performs the work.
The people at the bottom often work away, thinking that their efforts will be recognized and they will rise to higher levels. But the people at the top are functioning on a completely different system - their abilities are judged by how well they can apply the work of other people to further their goals. So you can’t work your way up the ladder - you have to figure out how to get other people to carry you up the ladder. You don’t get a promotion because you doubled your output - you get a promotion because you figured out a way to double everyone else’s output.
You don’t give the Man his cut, you don’t get yours. This is such an ingrained economic truth, and we mix up economics with spirituality so easily, that it’s coming to be a metaphysical truth: Nothing in life worth doing is, on a strict calculus of effort vs reward, worth doing. You have to put more into anything - psychically, emotionally, in terms of life energy - than you can expect to get out of it. You don’t give God, Nature, Society, whatever, their cut, you don’t get yours. Metaphysical surplus value. What do you think?
This would suggest that part of being happy in today’s society would require finding intrinsic value in the work itself, above and beyond any tangible reward.
That Cracked article was hilarious. As usual.
You’ve never heard the notion that you could be whatever you wanted to be in America? Where did you go to school, and on what basis were you told to stay in it? :dubious:
Recent references to the “American meritocracy,” however, are virtually all either lamentations of its demise, or debunkings of the “myth” that it ever existed.
“Meritocracy in America: Ever higher society, ever harder to ascend” (The Economist)
“The Meritocracy Myth,” by Stephen J. McNamee and Robert K. Miller, Jr.
Let’s say there’s a used car lot. They have five salesmen: Al, Bob, Chuck, Dan, and Ed. They all sell an average of five cars a month. The sales manager, Frank, is retiring next month and the owner is going to promote one of the salesmen into that job.
Now Al starts a rumor that the owner will probably promote the salesman that sells the most cars. Inspired by this, Bob, Chuck, Dan, and Ed all work much harder than usual and sell twelve cars that month instead of their usual five.
At the end of the month, the owner is interviewing the salesmen about the promotion. Bob, Chuck, Dan, and Ed all explain the techniques they used to sell seven more cars than they usually sold. Then the owner calls Al in and asks him why he deserves to be sales manager when all the other salesmen have sold more cars than him. Al says, “We usually sell twenty-five cars a month on this lot. I started a rumor and as a result of that, those other four guys sold forty-eight cars this month.”
If you were the owner, who would you want selling your cars and who would you want managing your salesmen?
In real life, the owner would turn over management to his douchebag son-in-law who never sold a car in his life.
You only need look at how certain celebrities seem to ‘earn’ huge rewards for very little effort.
Whilst some might be busy enough for a few years, it hardly equates to the work of a lifetime, or even ability and knowledge, just looking and being in the right place.
I think here os media stars who want to be famous for being famous.
Once upon a time, if you were famous, there was a reasonable chance that you had done something to merit that fame, I have to say there were plenty of exceptions, reward through birth is always with us.
Think of those poor suffering Spice Girls living in abject luxury, and then tell me about merit, the list is very long. Thing is, we are the fraggles who put the famous where they are.
Americans are fat, lazy, and entitled! Film at 11.
I think Americans place emphasize the individual and work ethic to the extent that other, more influential factors don’t get appreciated. Working hard does increase the probablility that you will get ahead, but it is no guarantee. Much more important to how you will fare in life is due to where and when you are born. Consider the same individual born to a wealthy Harvard educated 2 parent family, vs. an inner city single mother. The child in the inner city is going to have to work much harder than the first child just to have the same opportunities that are given to him by birth. Some people are simply handed opportunities. Others have to work and fight over them and may never get them at all no matter what they do.
Genetics also play a huge role. If you are naturally smart in the way that gets you good grades in school, you will have a much easier time. Someone who has a learning disability or just plain struggles learning to read can work much harder than the naturally smart student and still never get all A’s.
We love to hear stories of underdogs who fight their way to the top. What often gets overlooked are the opportunities or circumstances that enabled the underdog to get there that other people in the same situations did not have.
I think we should be more concerned with the idea of leveling the playing field than encouraging individuals to work harder. The idea that people deserve what they get encourages us to look down on those with less or admire undeserving people.
His hard work will likely bring him nowhere close.
Not to mention that the sales quota has been adjusted.
Nicely done.
Well, it’s certainly a good point for the sales manager - obviously you could have been selling those cars all along. In Colonial House, they’d fucked around and complained and bitched and moaned about the work, after managing to plant, like, one field and harvesting 30 spars. They’d been there months. They sent a guy “from the company” down there to punch up the output and in a couple days they’d knocked out 70 more spars. Clearly there was, er, some slack available.