In the past weeks, some politician or other has claimed that
47% of the American public pay no taxes and have no appreciation for the value
of hard work. He didn’t use the
phrase “shiftless and lazy” explicitly, but many of us heard those unspoken
words. Oddly enough, that 47%
figure corresponds almost exactly to the proportion of Americans who have told
pollsters they’re voting for the other candidate. Of course both candidates have supporters who pay high taxes
and supporters who pay none. In truth,
we should probably attribute only a small fraction (closer to 4% or 7%) of the
non-payment of taxes to the laziness and faulty character of the poor; some is
due to old age, low incomes, illness, disability, or even to the greed or faulty character of rich who
exploit loopholes and off-shore tax havens to avoid paying the taxes they owe.
Without getting into a political discussion, I think we
should consider this question of why some people might not know the value of
hard work. The truth is that
many of us, including middle class people, never learn the value of hard work
until late in life, if ever. Why
is that?
Consider the young person who devotes hours to perfecting
jump shots, back flips, double Axels, or guitar solos, only to receive no recognition, or to
be excluded from the team or the band. Consider
the student who puts hours of effort into every school project and extra credit
report and still doesn’t get grades as high as classmates to whom straight As
come naturally.
Consider the workers who have two or three minimum wage jobs
and see little of any rewards for their efforts. Suppose your mother gets up to catch a 6:00 bus every morning so she can ride across
town to spend all day scrubbing floors, yet she still doesn’t bring home enough
money to pay the rent on a decent apartment, plus utilities and health
insurance without using food stamps, and she can’t afford to buy a functioning car
or even good shoes for you and your siblings. Suppose that what she does bring home is an
aching back, chapped hands and knees, and stories about these other women she
works for who can spend all day driving around in their SUVs shopping, who have
closets full of shoes, and who can’t be bothered to scrub their own
floors.
Consider the family with a two hundred year legacy of
working involuntarily without pay
for a paternalistic master who kept all the wealth they created and never
recognized them as adult human beings or allowed them to pursue dreams of their
own.
Consider the child with parents who have never encouraged
him to work hard nor acknowledged his efforts. Consider the child who never has the opportunity to get his
or her own way, even at winning a game or choosing a favorite dessert.
One need not be economically disadvantaged to lack drive. Indeed, some of the most diligent among
us are people trying to overcome hardships. Often children who grow up with all the advantages are the
laziest among us.
I have recently come to the realization that my own parents
didn’t particularly help me
understand the importance of working hard. My mother (who worked very hard at a low-paying dead-end job) frequently told me I was uncommonly clever, which
only taught me to believe I was somehow more entitled to rewards than people who were
merely average, by virtue of who I was and who my relatives were. Yet studies show that in
countries where children test higher in math than American children do, they
learn to value hard work (http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/11/12/164793058/struggle-for-smarts-how-eastern-and-western-cultures-tackle-learning, http://www.tdl.com/~schafer/Asian.htm). Children were given impossible problems
to solve, and instead of giving up right away and saying “I quit. It’s too difficult for me” they saw it
as a challenge and kept working on it for a long time and trying to figure it
out.
Perhaps we need to remember that what matters most in life is not who we are,
which is something we cannot control, but what we do with our lives, which is
something we can control.
Better yet, perhaps we can impress that on our children by valuing their
efforts and their achievements.
