Is there a morally relevant distinction between mental illness and bad work ethic? There is a lot of research to suggest that things we associate with "bad work ethic" (e.g. lack of impulse control) appear extremely early in childhood development and aren't things people necessarily have much control over.
We need to stop moralizing things that people have no control over. We've realized this in a limited way--it is no longer acceptable to make fun of people with intellectual disabilities (IQ < 70). But there is still a weird doughnut hole were it is perfectly acceptable to make fun of people with 70 < IQ < 90. Your mental abilities are mostly an accident of birth, like having rich parents. There is no moral dimension to it.
There is a kernel of something I agree with in your post, though: social structures can add a lot of value in helping people who might not be that bright or might have problems with impulse control to lead productive lives. That's a major shortcoming of our current approaches to fighting poverty, which emphasize individualism.
However, poor work ethic as a mental shortcut plays into the just world viewpoint. Where lead poisoning contradicts it which is IMO why so many people think in terms of work ethic.
As can the effects of traumatic brain injury and chronic abuse or neglect.
I agree that what we call "bad work ethic" is just something that happens to people in that IQ range.
Now the problem is, what are we supposed to do with these people?
If I were to start a small business, I would probably like to avoid having such people work for me.
The only entities that can afford to hire these people are large corporations like Walmart and McDonalds, but because they are large and powerful, they also get to abuse these people.
A solution could be that the government offers help for people who struggle finding jobs. Training courses can help them finding (and most important, keeping) a job.
Some European countries already have courses like this and underemployment there seems lower than in the US. But crucially, free mental healthcare is an important part of this so that those who need help can get it.
I want to very clearly point out, that the fact that you agree doesn't in any remote way make the statement any more factual. This again is an unsubstantiated claim, presented with zero evidence.
I don't know why you assume the claim is unsubstantiated. I think it makes a lot of sense that people with lower IQs will have a lot of trouble in life.
Maybe it's not due to bad work ethic but merely due to them not having the cognitive ability to function properly in society in such a way that allows for the positive exchange of value.
I maintain that people with low IQ have this problem that makes it incredibly difficult for them to climb out of poverty, and I think this claim is very much substantiated, but I am not a scientist so I cannot back this up, but I have heard it on multiple occasions from people who I consider authorities on the subject.
I have pretty high IQ and a mediocre at best work ethic. I don't think these things are linked.
Been burned by your underpaid workers' flakiness much? Citation, please.
> In the end the wealthy and the poor both have to make changes to end poverty. It's a team effort. It's not up to a rich savior class to come and fix the dirty people from the outside.
Is anyone saying this? My impression is that most poor people want jobs, and are begging political figures to come Bring Jobs! How do you interpret that as poor work ethic?
(Meanwhile, I'm eyerolling at the "the dirty people" comment. Are you trying to virtue signal your superiority over those people here?)
A lot of folks in the UK have a view that if they lost their job they can just do 'any-job' until they find something else.
These 'any-jobs' either are not available in the way people think they are or they fall into the category outlined above.
Note, I was usually in _relatively_ affluent parts (the south) of the country. However after that I've always felt that should things go tits up I could always go back to 50+ hours a week on min wage...
Worth noting, even if I could do that I sure as hell wouldn't have the motivation to job hunt in my downtime.
If you want to frame it in terms of choices, what is it about the modern work world that is so intolerable that a person would willingly choose poverty, homelessness, etc., over work?
If so many people are "bad," how can you say the system is good and it's the people...
Sometimes these are good points to tick away when you are trying to identify what your problems are.
I really like the metric that downvotes should be for comments that are uncivil and/or don't add anything of value to the discussion.
1) "This person is struggling, and part of the problem is their work ethic and poor executive functioning."
and
2) "This is a moral failing and thus we can't help them too much, as they will take advantage of it."
I think some people automatically associate the second idea with people who express the first, when in reality they don't have to be tightly coupled. I personally think that (1) is a legitimate dynamic in some cases (I have no idea the exact extent).
On the other hand, (2), while touching on a worthwhile consideration (any help given should be effective, etc), frames things in an inflammatory and unproductive way, and on the net implies an inaccurate and harmful overly pessimistic sentiment.
Another huge reason for the trickiness is that the concept of "work ethic" is fairly nebulous and complex. For example, sometimes people can have a huge change in work ethic with a small change in perspective (of course, perspective changes are difficult in and of themselves) or environment.
(1) and (2) form the sort of classical belief spectrum on the value of social-welfare programs. (2) just doesn't support these programs, for the reasons stated above. But (1), although supporting such programs generally, doesn't seem to support the kind of programs that would properly line up with their professed beliefs.
If the problem with a lot of homeless people is that they have "poor work ethic"... well, we've medicalized that, it's called ADHD and you can throw medications at it. But there are no social-welfare programs to get homeless people into psychiatrist's offices where they can be given free Vyvanse samples.
Instead, such programs seemingly only ever consist of 1. paying the homeless person's basic living costs—through free housing, or free meals; or 2. giving the homeless the opportunity to work and job skills training to potentially begin earn money for themselves.
Programs in the first category might indeed help people who are stuck in a temporary rut, and just need the details of "where food will come from" and "where they will sleep at night" handled for them until they escape it. People who are homeless because they are in the depths of a major depressive episode might find value in these, for example.
But the programs in the second category seem to serve nobody effectively. If you don't have any work ethic, teaching you how to do some particular job isn't going to make you start doing it; nor is lining up interviews; nor is even shoving you forcibly into employment.
The people who have some level of work-ethic escape homelessness eventually whether they receive any social assistance or not. The people who have a persistent lack of work-ethic will not escape homelessness no matter how many "free things"-style and "work opportunity"-style solutions you throw at them.
Those claims sound oddly more like what people on the (1) side of the argument claim, doesn't it? But this is the "steel-manned" version of (2): that people who fail to attempt to gain employment do not do so because they're irredeemably flawed; but rather because they need solutions to a work-ethic problem they're having, before any solutions to their poverty problem would have any potential to stick.
3) "This person is struggling, we can't help them in ways that are too paternalistic or agency-denying, because that will ultimately just end up harming them".
E.g. You wouldn't tell your child that his economic outcomes are completely unconnected to his own choices or work ethic.
If a kid has trouble at a task, we don't just tell them that the task is stacked against them and that they can do nothing to alleviate their failure. Telling a kid that over and over would border on child abuse.
Yet some people seem to think that telling the poor this overall - that they have no control, that their choices mean nothing, that the locus of control is 100% external to them - is somehow good. It's bizarre.
See also my other comment here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14590486
Your remarks are incredibly ignorant and are being downvoted because it is the sort of attitude that allows privileged peoples to wash their hands of dealing with very real systemic problems that are an excess burden for the people whose lives come so unraveled that they wind up homeless.
This is flatly, verifiably wrong, as well as reprehensibly paternalistic and self-indulgent.
And all this after I specifically talked about mental illness in my original post.
I don't disagree with some of your assertions that we should treat such people as if they have agency and can make choices. But your framing is incredibly hostile and in the vein of "We don't need to do anything for such people because they made these choices and did this to themselves."
No one makes choices in a vacuum and, currently, an awful lot of people have no good choices available to them. Blaming them so you can wash your hands of responsibility is rather ugly behavior. You don't personally have to do anything for someone like me, but posting comments on a forum where you are basically publically advocating that no one should do anything for them -- well, I feel pretty well entitled to rebut that. Feel free to do nothing and feel that my problems are all my fault and I am just not trying hard enough. But if you post that to HN, I can rebut it, and likely will if I see it.
Talking about work ethic is valuable after other existential and economic anxieties have been alleviated and a person is in a position to make choices - not just select from expiring alternatives - about what sort of life style and goals they wish to pursue. Offered without regard to the situations that marginalized people find themselves in, it's mere pablum.
Actually it's both inflammatory and untrue; spoken by someone who's obviously never been poor or known many poor people. Being poor is not a choice nor due to people simply being lazy, regardless of any anecdotes you might come up with. Anecdotes have no place in such conversations about systemic issues.
The absolutism of your statements makes it clear that you are convinced morally of your arguments, not factually. You believe intensively in what you're saying because you think it's good, not because you've got an airtight case that it's universally factually correct.
Don't let your moral convictions bleed into your understanding of the world; it makes you an ideological zombie who can't handle statistical nuances or proportionality arguments.
I haven't found the right word for it, but it seems to be loosely related to a personality attribute:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control
Which if true, would mean nobody's changing their mind. It would be like an argument between a staunch introvert and extravert arguing over whether or not socializing is exhilarating or draining.
Except unlike that case, there can be studies to measure impact of environment on people's success outcomes. And there have been. It's a valuable topic to discuss, with accurate date - not repeating the same bootstrap fallacies that simplify the world for people's comfort.
> We found that Asian-American women performed better on a mathematics test when their ethnic identity was activated, but worse when their gender identity was activated, compared with a control group who had neither identity activated
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9280.00111
Could it be that given the right priming, people can improve their lives? What's the effect size of society vs individual? And even if it's 90% environment and 10% the person, it's often easier to change ourselves than our environment, so shouldn't we encourage people to work on themselves?
Of course care must be taken not to make it seem like a moral failing for not "trying hard enough", I think that's where people find the "pull yourself up" crowd distasteful. But there must be some way to give people the confidence to try to work on themselves without discouraging them by making it seem like it's their fault. Does that make sense?
When you stop reasoning by anecdote, you'll look back and see how absurd your views actually are and how not based in reality they are. It is you who is making the moral argument, not I, and you've done it based on your anecdotal impression of lazy poor people, and you do so because you suffer from the just world fallacy which is again because your reasoning is based on your morality rather than on the facts. You've quite literally projected your own deficiencies onto me, you're suffering from exactly what you just told me not to do.
Poverty isn't caused by laziness or lack of work ethic, your assertion that it is so is not grounded in reality and not backed up by any evidence, it's merely a moral position you've taken because it makes you feel better somehow.
I for one, know that I don't function at all well in the mornings.
1. Most homeless people have one or more intractable personal problems, such as a medical problem, mental health issue or learning disability.
2. They end up homeless when their intractable personal problems finally cause them to run out of all resources and options and causes their social safety net to fray and come undone. When no one will let you sleep on their couch one more time while job hunting again, etc.
3. There is a huge and deepening affordable housing shortage in the U.S. This goes back decades. Homelessness is a growing trend nationwide because a growing percentage of the population simply cannot afford housing. It is too expensive. Addressing this piece would go a long way towards easing the burden on people with other unsolvable problems. But there is no real will to do so.
Many people on the street do have an income. They just don't have enough income to afford a middle class lifestyle. I have actually studied this space in school and everything.
They also have their own project with their own Patreon that hopefully will go somewhere:
Why is it so unacceptable to think that they are simply humans, like you and me, with agency and power over their own choices, with responsibility for the outcomes of their choices, who are simply choosing to do a thing that you and I believe to be a really bad choices?
A pattern of such choices is labeled "bad work ethic" but at the end of the day, bad work ethic is just a long series of individual choices to do something besides working.
A depressed person is simply not "choosing" to feel the way they do. Every single thought in their head could be marshaling their instinctual brain to resist the downward spiral but they could still lie in bed all day.
Not to say they don't have agency, but some do have a LOT less than others. Some people can go their entire lives without having a crisis of agency or wresting power over their own choices, and some can be battling to do what they intend to do on a daily basis.
People have "responsibility" for the outcomes that happen for them. We still lock up people who murder, or steal from others, even though it can easily be argued that people don't do those things if not in a bad mental state (desperation, mental anguish, etc). But don't conflate that responsibility with full healthy agency and bad morals.
We should instead focus on the outcome we desire - which in my opinion should be to reduce the amount of suffering people go through, and to have a society that takes care of its most vulnerable. If you disagree and think that everyone should fend for themselves and might makes right, I'd say the person with "bad work ethic" has better morals.
But if you're suggesting that this phenomenon is somehow common, then you need to back that up, since it flies in the face of prevailing research on the subject.
All I said was: Some people have bad work ethic. This means people they decide to not work when they should work, which causes them to end up in poverty. Therefore, to reduce poverty, part of our strategy should be doing things that improve work ethic (in addition to doing other things to solve mental illness, etc).
Nothing about that implies or requires any conclusion about whose absolute fault it is that some people are poor.
And it can't anyway, because as you've noted there is no objective answer to such a moral question.
In multiple child comments you've now claimed things like what you say here:
> All I said was: Some people have bad work ethic
No, that's not "All you said". The proof is right there in your original comment. You actually said
> a huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic.
and
> Work ethic is a huge part of the problem,
And the point people keep making to you is that this is false. And I can't speak for others, but the reason why it bothers me so much to see people repeating it is because so frequently the people I've seen who are the loudest at saying it and repeat it the most, often have just as bad and often worse "moral failings".
I don't know you, and I won't judge you from what you've posted here - however I do have to say that the fact you keep attempting to shirk from and minimize away from your own comments isn't exactly breaking that trend to my eyes.
Society is complex - and the claim that the reason the poor are poor is mainly/mostly/primarily due to moral failings is flat out false.
And to you that restatement constitutes "attempting to shirk from and minimize away from your own comments". Seriously? It's the same thing with a difference in degree. The degree word "some" overlaps with "huge amount".
So my great crime is replacing "huge amount" with "some", and connecting it to poverty?
Meanwhile, you go ahead and restate what I said as "the reason the poor are poor is mainly/mostly/primarily due to moral failings."
Which is an utterly different, wild, moralistic, absolutist statement that I obviously never made and don't believe. And hypocritical, given how sensitive you seem to be about accurately re-stating what someone has said.
Let me disabuse you of the anti-charitable notion that you've invented in your head implicitly attributed to me: Just because someone has bad work ethic, doesn't mean it's their fault. I've specifically said in this thread that work ethic is changeable by policy and cultural factors. And, I think bad work ethic often isn't the fault of the person with it, but is rather the fault of people you who gaslight the poor into believing that all they can do is wait to be saved by Wise Rich White Leftist Social Engineers.
A huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic. A huge proportion of that bad work ethic stems from the cultural effects of messages like yours.
Neither of the previous statements present any moral attribution - they are simple statements of objective, measurable cause-and-effect. (Yes, work ethic is measurable; the effect that your messages have on it could in principle be estimated via survey or experiment).
Honestly, you really seem to want this to be about morality. You want to see evil in people with whom you disagree because it makes you feel more secure in your own beliefs - a world where good people question your morals with powerful arguments is just too uncomfortable. You continue to apply the exact opposite of the principle of charity. It's unfair to others, and unproductive.
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-wrong-me...
There is generally a misalignment between your value system and the output your are expecting. In simple terms its called 'Hypocrisy'.
Even if you had proof (you don't) that bad work ethic makes up a "huge" (not clearly defined) proportion of poverty (it doesn't), the symptom is not the stem.
Poverty stems from poverty, and a lack of a support structure to help impoverished people become "upwardly mobile". This is easy to see, and easy to prove, as most people in poverty simply do not have access to enough resources to overcome poverty. Work ethic often doesn't even factor into it because simply being able to work is a big problem, not a lack of will.
> the wealthy and the poor both have to make changes to end poverty. [..] It's not up to a rich savior class to come and fix the dirty people from the outside.
It's up to the whole society. In the US, the issue is systemic. If the people willed it, their elected representatives could simply pass laws to put the support structures in place to end poverty as we know it in 10 years.
Over half of our national budget is spent on a military that loses nonsense wars in broken countries. We imprison more people than the two other biggest imprisoning countries combined. We don't care for our poor. We don't care for our veterans. We don't care for our mentally ill or drug addicts. We don't care for black people, trans people, women, etc. We just don't care.
We don't need a wealthy elite to fix our problems. We need to join the rest of the developed world in giving a shit about our people at all.
Manual labor jobs are generally unforgiving of slack. Workers are punished quite severely for minor offenses that are not even noticed in a techie or white-collar environment. Showing up five minutes late? A minor uniform violation? Not performing well for one day? Calling in sick a few too may times?
I get my stuff done and have the same work ethic I always have, but I have a lot more flexibility as a white-collar worker.
- The event that precipitated the problem
- The best place to intervene to correct or prevent the problem
- The moralistic cause; the person to whom responsibility may be assigned
Always be aware of which one you're using. If your goal is to actually solve the problem, make sure that it's the second.
While there is certainly a small minority of such folks around half a percent of the US population in fact the threadmill between not bothering to come to work and homelessness is so short that not many people are en route at any given time. On the other hand around 14% live in poverty in contrast. Looking at the houeshold income anyone in the bottom quarter is barely scraping by given the cost of health insurance and house costs.
Your perception is an elaborate fiction informed by no actual data. Most of the people in poverty are working hard to stay in one place.
What proportion exactly? How do you know it's "huge"?
I mean, what you describe definitely happens to some extent, but I'm curious as to how you reached the conclusion that it's really common.
Because I have counter-anecdotes. The most common scenario I personally witness is that an unemployed person finally lands a job, and they work their asses off to make sure they don't lose it. They arrive early, leave late and generally jump at every opportunity to prove their worth.
So I'm very skeptical that poor work ethic is a significant root cause of poverty. Of course, if you have actual numbers, I would be interested to read more.
I recommend the book. It's not directly about this mainly, but the work ethic decline is statistically identifiable and localizable to a specific class of white American (who are also a class that people like you and I have essentially zero personal contact with).
I'd be interested in more quantified data in this point, as I know many people who hold this as a foundational principle in their life.
I find that people that make the work ethic argument are the ones that don't want to acknowledge that they didn't exactly earn their place. They think they rose to their position purely by their own work ethic and that makes them intrinsically special and possessing traits that others are deficient in.
Such thinking is the problem, it's juvenile, simplistic, and wrong.
But a huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic.
Some of the places in the USA with the highest underemployment are also places where employers are offering decent unskilled jobs and can't find enough workers. The worker gets hired, shows up for a few days, and then starts just not coming to work, randomly. Or he comes in later and later each day, arriving hours late. Or he takes breaks that extend to hours long.
Work ethic is a huge part of the problem, and the constant denial that many poor people (not all) do have everything they need to lift themselves up, and simply choose not to do so, is itself a denial of their human agency and ensures that the policy/cultural changes that could lead them out of poverty are not made. Ultimately, it's staggeringly harmful to them.
In the end the wealthy and the poor both have to make changes to end poverty. It's a team effort. It's not up to a rich savior class to come and fix the dirty people from the outside.
(I'm convinced that many wealthy people don't understand this because they really can't imagine what a true lack of worth ethic looks like; they've just never been at close range with it for an extended period of time and had to face up to the fact that it is a real thing and it is harmful. Ultimately that's a consequence of the closed social bubbles we live in now; we just don't know the other classes because we're so isolated from them.)