Australian billionaire Gina Rinehart recently made headlines
for saying rather than envying the rich, the poor should drink less and work
more. The problem is in the real world there is no correlation between hard
work and material rewards. I plan to be rich someday, but not through any kind
of mental or physical exertion. Getting ahead has as much to do with hard work
as the price of oil has to do with whether or not you trim your pubic hair. Seriously,
though, buy some clippers. The Saudis are getting nervous. Doing your best is
as likely to result in poverty as prosperity, and putting down the bottle and
throwing yourself into your job won’t change the odds. Nobody ever became
teacher of the year by staying sober. Yes, some people who work hard become
rich. Some people who work hard also get mauled to death by roving packs of
abandoned gerbils. In both cases, one doesn’t necessarily cause the other. Rather
than being the pathway to wealth, working hard is simply an indication you made
the critical mistake of not being born rich. Better luck next time.
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| Correlation does not equal causation, but sometimes it looks pretty suspicious anyway. |
Generally, the poorer you are, the harder you have to work.
If you roof houses for a living, people are going to notice if you slack off
all day watching YouTube clips of a pudgy Eskimo woman folding paper cranes with
her feet. First of all, the house you’re working on won’t have any shingles,
and secondly you’ll have a really noticeable erection. Your pay will be
adjusted accordingly. For a middleclass cubicle dweller, however, slacking off
is virtually undetectable. Nobody is quite sure what your job actually is. As long
as you show up and refrain from headbutting any coworkers, everyone will leave
you undisturbed while you download origami fetish videos. If you maintain this
level of effort for the entire year, you’ll likely get a satisfactory performance
review and a 3 percent raise. If, on the other hand, you work three times
harder and browse one third as much porn, your raise will be 3.001 percent
instead. Your performance is linked to your pay increase about as strongly as
gospel music is linked to intestinal cancer. Your modest salary bump isn’t much of a reward,
but it’s better than what you get if you’re stuck at the bottom of the totem pole.
If you’re in the lower class, all working harder gets you is a herniated disc
and a trip to the glue factory. The health plan is the same for poor people and
horses.
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| Poverty is a sticky situation. |
Once you make it to the executive level, however, the
relationship between hard work and compensation becomes clear: They’re
inversely proportional. If you’re a landscaper and instead of reseeding someone’s
yard you kill their dog and burn down their house, you will likely be paid less
than the agreed-upon rate. But if you’re a CEO and instead of increasing the
stock price you drive a multibillion-dollar conglomerate into bankruptcy, you
can expect a sizeable bonus. Ruining companies takes skill, and corporations
are willing to pay a premium to retain it. Compensation committees agree to
these payouts because every member of them wants to be a CEO someday. Besides, the
CEO in question only tanked the business because he wasn’t properly motivated.
If he received the $50 million he deserved, he would have done a great job, but
for the paltry $45 million he was paid, he spent all day watching origami
fetish videos instead. Clearly, the incentive system is broken at the highest
level. To fix it, the risk needs to equal the reward. If you’re a CEO and the
stock price goes up, you should receive a massive bonus, but if it goes down,
your entire family should be fed to feral gerbils. Without those metal wheels to
distract them, the only way rodents exercise is by eating human flesh.
The CEO of a tech company makes about 10,000 percent more
than the typical blue-collar worker, but it’s hard to believe there’s a 10,000
percent difference in effort between the two. There are only 168 hours in a
week. Even if a corporate executive puts in a rigorous 100 hours while a coal
miner coasts for a breezy 40, it’s impossible to argue the pay gap is in line
with how much harder one works than the other. Clearly, what you do is much
more important than how much effort you put in to doing it. The hardest working
social worker in the world still makes less than the laziest barista. Doctors
and lawyers earn even more than coffee shop employees, but even among their prestigious
ranks effort seldom leads to rewards. Exhausted emergency room doctors make
considerably less than specialists who only treat anal warts on left-handed
albino pygmies, of whom there are exactly six in the world. There were seven,
but the gerbils got to one of them. Similarly, lawyers who spend 80 hours a
week handling adoptions and family wills earn much less than the ones who make
two 30-second TV commercials a month and then sit back like slumlords while shantytowns
full of paralegals do the real work. Among the professional class, working hard
is a sure sign that you’re somehow doing it wrong.
Hard work also goes unrewarded among the self-employed. Nobody
sets out to put in ungodly hours to achieve little more than financial ruin,
but that is exactly how most small business owners end up. It takes more to succeed
than working more and drinking less. Your business plan, market conditions, and
luck all play a role. If you open a bistro specializing in artisanal cheese and
high-end whores, even the best work ethic won’t save you if the next two
businesses to open on your block are Hookers with Swiss and Cheddar Ho. Similarly,
your brilliant idea could be ruined by circumstances beyond your control like a
nationwide Viagra shortage or a sudden surge in lactose intolerance. Even established
billionaires are vulnerable to these types of changes. If you run a coal empire
and natural gas suddenly becomes cheaper than air, you’ll have to spend a lot
of money to convince Congress natural gas should be illegal. A lot of factors determine
whether or not you business will succeed, but how hard you work is the least among
them.
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| String cheese tastes best with a side of copulation. |
The idea that hard work somehow leads to tangible rewards is
a twisted fairy tale, just like Snow
White and the Seven Deadly Sins. She found her prince, but only after she
opened the box. Deep down, even Gina Rinehart knows this. She didn’t work hard
for her money. She got most of her wealth the honest way: by waiting for her
mining tycoon father to die. She was smart enough to be born rich. If she can
do it, we can, too.
