Kevin Drum’s post on the value of hard work really spoke to me in so many ways. I have lots of thoughts about this topic, but I will break them up into separate posts to stay focus on this issue. I will start with income inequality.
Frankly, if you truly value the idea of hard work then you should care about income inequality for one simple reason. The huge disparity between the top 1% of this country and everyone else can not be simply explain by hard work and meritocracy. As political scientist such as Jacob hacker and Paul Pierson have reapetedly pointed out, much of the growth in income inequality can be explained by both the action and inaction of our federal government. And even though income inequality is a problem that nearly all western countries struggle with, the situation in the US is on an entirely different level.
How does income inequality affect hard work? In an unequal society, you create a situation where hard work will eventually start producing diminishing returns. As Drum pointed out, for some people there will be a limit on how far they will be able to advance in our society, and that won’t be because they were lazy. The likelier reason will be that they were simply born in the wrong social class to begin with. You could actually argued that we have already reached that point with the rise of Occupy Wall Street.
Frankly, the constant need among some people to keep promoting the idea that America is a pure meritocracy is just dishonest and completely self-destructive. Are only chance in tackling income inequality is to acknowledge the fact that we as a society, are currently failing to live up to our own ideals of hard work and merit. Once we finally become honest with ourselves then we can actually start creating meaningful solutions to this problem.
Note: This post came from my personal blog (http://2moneythoughts.wordpress.com/).