Hard Work

I was talking to a woman on the phone, complaining about how things weren’t fair, they weren’t right. I told her that I knew of a fellow who scored low on his ACT, didn’t receive higher education, didn’t do much of anything that I could discern, yet he has a high paying job, a car, a house, and a family; meanwhile, at least I got two college degrees and have tried to make something happen in my life, yet I live in a studio apartment by myself.

The woman on the other end of the line said, “Well, I don’t know the young man you’re referring to, but he must have worked harder than you did.” I couldn’t believe it! If she didn’t know him, how could she know how hard he had worked?

How hard could he have worked to have scored a 20 on his ACT? He certainly wasn’t working hard on his studies in high school! And I believe he himself told me that the only college education he ever received was a pre-business degree. I have two liberal arts and sciences degrees, and he has a pre-business degree, but he’s worked harder than i have?

Even if we were to grant that he had worked harder than I had — and maybe he did, only because he was given the opportunity to work at all by society, and I was not; I am still not going so far as to concede the point entirely just yet, but we’ll say so for the sake of argument — how would that make any of this right? I’m tired of this Calvinistic hogwash that says that you have to work hard to earn your keep. We’re past that. We need, as a society, to grow up past that. Or, that woman I talked to on the phone needs to grow up as a person beyond that.

Whether in an ethically sense we should work hard for what we have, it’s not even empirically the case the people who work harder have more resources than those who don’t work as hard, at least when it comes to physical work, and probably mental work as well. Consider an extreme example that is only somewhat hypothetical. The person who led a design team that developed a tablet is worth tens of billions of dollars. Across the globe in the third world, working in a sweat factory, is someone who is assembling those tablets for pennies a day and living an existence so miserable that the factory he’s working in is equipped with suicide nets to catch him when he just can’t take it anymore.

The truth is that the economy isn’t fair. It would be far better if everyone could have good wages and benefits and a home and at least a few luxuries, and there’s plenty of wealth to go around to make this so, if only our economic systems weren’t rigged, exacerbated by flawed criminal justice systems that handicap often innocent people and assume that someone who may really have once committed a crime is forever a damned, irredeemable man. And it would be best if each job went to he who could do it best, and if we recognized that everybody plays a part and deserves to be rewarded for filling whatever niche he or she fills.