What happened to rewarding hard workers- Autumn Statement

kabayiri

gadgetmind wrote: »

Think that if you want, if it makes it you happy, and it gives you comfort.

Why on earth should it make me happy? Central heating is more likely to give me comfort too.

A simple example. I can think of 2 barbers in a typical Northern town. One charges £5 for a gent's haircut, the other £16.50. I've tried both. They are both competent, it's just one is a bit more swish inside.

You're not telling me the £16.50 barber is working harder are you? Product positioning, and sometimes sheer front gets you more.

Loughton_Monkey

J_i_m wrote: »

It seems though that you assume that everyone starts off on equal footing with the same attributes and capacities or as you put it "smarts". And that their success in life is directly related to "how hard they work".

They don't and it isn't.

Everyone is born different with different capabilities and to different environments.

Opportunity isn't directly correlated with effort or "smarts". Some people are born with learning difficulties or differences and thus start off in life at a natural disadvantage. Whilst they are usually as "smart" as the next person and in some cases smarter their opportunities are limited through no fault of their own either through a condition they have no control over or by the general ignorant prejudice of society.

Some people are born into 3rd world poverty where the same facility and opportunity simply isn't available to them no matter how worthy they be.

Furthermore.. people are selfish and society is rife with prejudice and discrimination (as it always has been). There are plenty of examples of where merit or "smarts" are not the deciding factors in someone being offered a job or securing career advancement. Social factors play a huge role whether you want to acknowledge that or not.

People who are successful may indeed work very hard to achieve it, but that doesn't mean that someone who is less successful hasn't worked equally as hard or even harder for their lot.

I would argue that successful people are very prone to forgetting how privileged they really are and this leads to very distorted ideas on value and entitlement.

A well reasoned argument, with a lot of truth in it.

I happen to think that 'smarts' is a good word for it, but your own concentration seems to be on 'hard work', which I think is a wrong focus. A surgeon can swan in and perform a 20 minute hernia operation and earn the same money as a supermaket cashier earns in a 40 hour week. The concept of 'hard work' is totally alien to a discussion on the rights or wrongs of that example.

Where I part company with your thoughts is that we are born with "different capabilities". Leaving aside a small proportion of definitive congenital conditions, I'm not sure on that. I tend to think it's 90% the 'environment' to which you also refer. I'm a strong believer in the theories that tell us that large parts of our brainpower and personality are formed between birth and the age of about 2 or 3 years. It certainly is as consistent with what we see in practice as any alternative theory based upon genes or being born with (or without) a certain brain power.

Education and continued parental influence throughout school then 'finishes the job'.

But either way, we end up with a school leaver population every year which we could easily put into some sort of categories. At one end, we would have people who, we can state with 90% confidence, could not do any job worth more than, say, £20K/£25K, and at the other end, we could have 90% confidence of these being very likely to earn £70K or thereabouts. Within each category, there will doubtless be a few anomalies and exceptions, to do with opportunity, luck, or hard work. But the uneducated 16 year old leaver is never going to be a brain surgeon, and the 18 year old off to do Physics at Cambridge is unlikely to end up working in a supermarket.

But I don't know where that takes us [short of some quirky system in which we extract every child from its mother and give it a 'state standard' upbringing and environment....].

If, in any way, you would agree that (for whatever reasons) we end up with this "spectrum of education, brainpower, and personality" I wonder what you think we should do differently from now.

If, for example, you take a bunch of brawny lads all of whom failed all their exams, do you not expect that they are, as a group, destined to earn much less than an alternative group who have A+ A levels, or a huge talent in Music, will get a University education, and come out with a good degree?

This, I would argue, happens now, so what's wrong with that?

And then within each group, there will be those who work harder or smarter, who are more articulate than the others, who can charm their boss, or who decide not to have 350 tattoos and bright green hair. These will thrive more than the others, despite all the others having extremely similar environments and opportunities.

Our society, rightly or wrongly, currently allows each of these people to develop in their own way, and earn what they can. Those that can't or won't do much have a quite generous state handout to fall back on.

Is anything wrong with that?

As someone from a very poor background who 'made good', I would argue that I do feel privileged [without knowing exactly what/who to 'blame/thank' that on] but my main interest in your argument would be to ask what exactly is distorting my ideas on value and privilege as in your last paragraph? How should I (and people like me) think differently?

danielanthony

Note how no-one is slagging off celebrities or sports stars who earn millions a year for doing not very much (Jordan, for example).

Ricky Gervais put on Twitter yesterday that he earnt $100k in one week working from home. Fair?

But lets not let that get in the way of slagging off those who worked hard at school and university over many years to earn £75k per year. Sigh.

J_i_m

Ok, there needs to be a structure in which skill and responsibility is rewarded. For example; an engineer who develops a system should be able to command a higher fee than the mechanic who maintains it.

But values are distorted.

A premier league footballer could earn almost as much in a week as a firefighter does in a year. Is this really a fair reflection on the value of skill and "smart" between the two?

And jobs aren't simply awarded to the people who present the most "skill" "qualifications" or "smarts". Ideally they are awarded to the best fit and factors such as experience, location and likelihood of fitting into a team are also strong contributors.

There is also a lot biased activities. People give jobs to friends, do people a favour, people do discriminate on prejudice grounds even though legislation forbids it.

Yes, some people have a knack of creating opportunity for themselves and then exploiting it and that effort ought to be rewarded. Yet plenty other people put in the same effort using similar "smarts" and find the door firmly closed.

Loughton_Monkey

J_i_m wrote: »

.....But values are distorted.

A premier league footballer could earn almost as much in a week as a firefighter does in a year. Is this really a fair reflection on the value of skill and "smart" between the two?.

I believe such footballers are overpaid. A lot of them live around here. But in their defense:

1. Whilst 99% of professional footballers could be trained to be very competent firefighters, at least 99% of good firefighters could probably never have become first class footballers.

2. Rightly or wrongly, the public do not attend and pay £60 a pop to watch a fire being put out. Whilst many of the public pay this to go and watch the footballer, there is a strong argument that they are getting their "rightful" share of the value of their 'product'.

I can just envisage Johnny Hotspur. Nice bloke. Earns £27K a year as a plumber. Probably sees every home game, and most away games. Takes both of his teenage lads sometimes. At the end of the season, he adds up the total cost of £5,000 out of taxed income. I can just see him down the pub complaining bitterly that he can't afford to put a penny into a pension.... why should he? They're a rip off innit?

N1AK

J_i_m wrote: »

A premier league footballer could earn almost as much in a week as a firefighter does in a year. Is this really a fair reflection on the value of skill and "smart" between the two?

It's the market value for the work they do and their ability level doing it. Get people to go to stadiums in crowds of 50,000 paying £50 a pop to watch two teams of fire-fighters race to put out fires and you'd soon have superstar firemen paid £100k a week.

I don't care that Rooney is paid a large fortune because ultimately that money came from people who chose to pay him a small fortune: The people who pay for sky sports to watch the football, who go to premier league matches and who buy the kits.

kabayiri

So it seems that market value and taking advantage of opportunity is just as important as hard work/endeavour then ?

Lest we forget, before Jimmy Hill got involved footballers were earning relatively modest amounts. Timing is clearly working in favour of the modern footballer.

It's the same with all these reality stars and associated C-listers. The 24/7 media industry has given them airtime. Go back to a time of terrestial only telly, and these people would still be boring the inhabitants of their local boozer.

J_i_m

danielanthony wrote: »

Note how no-one is slagging off celebrities or sports stars who earn millions a year for doing not very much (Jordan, for example).

Ricky Gervais put on Twitter yesterday that he earnt $100k in one week working from home. Fair?

But lets not let that get in the way of slagging off those who worked hard at school and university over many years to earn £75k per year. Sigh.

I'm desperately trying not to "slag" anyone off. It's quite difficult though

And you're absolutely spot on.. there is a plentiful supply of celebrities who are vastly over privileged for seemingly minimal credit of having earned anything, (skim down to the meme below for a prime example).

I'm not trying to point a finger at anyone here and say that they aren't worth or don't deserve their salary.

But I am trying to illustrate that this very topic of discussion throws up a lot of narrow perspectives and equally as many double standards.

It could be very comfortable to sit on a £75k salary and scoff that that the next person wouldn't deserve it because they didn't achieve good grades at school.

We as a society should be very careful on how we perceive effort and "smarts".

It's very easy to deride someone else as lazy, stupid or clumsy. For example a child who struggles with attention, spelling, hand-writing, copying off the board etc might appear very thick without "smarts". What they might actually be is severely autistic and for all you know they might actually be putting in significantly more effort in than anyone else simply to get by. That person is working with a substantial disadvantage... but are they really less deserving or valuable than someone without those difficulties?

Civilization, society, culture and market conditions make reality what it is. But that doesn't mean that it's fair, equal or correct.

Some might think from a Darwinian point of view that life is very much survival of the fittest or as some here put it "smarts".

But as danielanthony infers, and this meme suggests..



Nothing could be further from the truth, and if people really think that the only thing that makes a difference is effort and "smarts" then they are in many ways deluded.

Loughton_Monkey

J_i_m wrote: »

.......

It's very easy to deride someone else as lazy, stupid or clumsy. For example a child who struggles with attention, spelling, hand-writing, copying off the board etc might appear very thick without "smarts". What they might actually be is severely autistic and for all you know they might actually be putting in significantly more effort in than anyone else simply to get by. That person is working with a substantial disadvantage... but are they really less deserving or valuable than someone without those difficulties?

Let's leave aside the Hilton woman and her ilk. Luckily there are only a tiny percentage of these oiks.

But moving to your example above, you are reverting back to disabled people again, which I strongly feel is a different debate completely from a debate about honest pay for an honest day's work.

We can easily (if you agree) run with an example of a similar person who is not disabled by any normal definition, but happened to be low in his school class and finds he can only earn £12K a year stacking shelves at Tesco....

Then what exactly would you like society to do differently from what we already do? Tesco can really only afford to pay £12K because that's the market rate and if this lad doesn't want to do it, there are 973 others on the list.

If he does overtime, he can earn £15K.

If he does his job well and can demonstrate he could do something better, then surely Tesco would, in time, put him on the fish counter at more money or whatever.... If he can't, then they won't.

If he continually works at half the pace of others, or keeps stacking the toilet rolls where the kitchen foil should be then after due process he might lose his job.

If he loses his job, he'll get benefits.

If he keeps his job, he will almost certainly qualify for some sort of supplementary benefits.

J_i_m wrote: »

Civilization, society, culture and market conditions make reality what it is. But that doesn't mean that it's fair, equal or correct..

So I'd really like to get at the heart of what you think is unfair, unequal, or uncorrect about this type of scenario. Even assuming the Tesco Branch Manager where he works is earning (say) £55K.

I sense you have an issue with all this but I honestly can't grasp what it is.

gadgetmind

J_i_m wrote: »

Some people are born into 3rd world poverty where the same facility and opportunity simply isn't available to them no matter how worthy they be.

Yes, and those are the people for whom I reserve my sympathies, not those born in the affluent 1st world with free eduction and numerous opportunities who squander the lot.