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Comment by tlb | Hacker News Reader

The author avoids an obvious arrow of causality: some people like work, which causes those people to work hard, which is more likely to make them rich.

There are lots of interacting causes and feedback loops around behavior and wealth. But trying to understand a subject while omitting an important arrow of causality can make anything seem like a paradox.

It's weirdly taboo in liberal American journalism to suggest that one's industriousness might be a major cause of one's economic status. Or maybe not so weird: journalists work hard and are terribly underpaid relative to their contribution to society, because the structure of the industry makes it hard to monetize.

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It's not difficult to understand why anyone might not want to argue that "poor people are poor because they're inherently lazy" from a strictly political perspective.

In addition, thought, how many children of wealthy families really turn out poor out of laziness? How many of those wealthy families were impoverished in the previous generation? If your explanation were as important as you seem to be saying, maybe those questions shouldn't be easy to answer.

> It's weirdly taboo in liberal American journalism to suggest that one's industriousness might be a major cause of one's economic status.

One way to see if industriousness is a major cause of economic status is to look at social mobility. Unfortunately for the argument, the US has lower social mobility than most other countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the...

> However, in recent years several large studies have found that vertical intergenerational mobility is lower, not higher, in the US than in comparable countries.

Now it is the case that this might still be true - and there might be factors making different socio-economic classes of people work hard. However, generally speaking, absent those effects, if some people like to work and that makes them rich, that would be seen in a lot more social mobility than appears to be the case.

You ignore the obvious arrow of causality, it's hard to be motivated about cleaning toilets relative to other jobs.

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