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I ran across this again today The optimistic hypothesis is that it’s a timeless but empty complaint The pessimistic hypothesis is that it reflects a steady, decades-long decline in wanting to work https://t.co/1ZpkV59zjV
Some of you are interpreting this as true in a Mitch Hedbeg sense, i.e. “Nobody wants to work anymore. They didn’t used to want to work, and they still don’t.” For my purposes that falls into the “timeless but empty” category
And yes my (correct) background assumption is that disliking work as such is a pathology https://t.co/6zyyGitxV0
This is blowing up too much for an imprecise musing. I don’t really think these newspaper clippings form a proper explanandum, and I didn’t mean the hypotheses I mentioned to be exhaustive. I do think the question of work ethic over time is interesting for independent reasons.
@mbateman Theory: it has to do with the disconnection between work and value.Knowledge of the value gained has more weight than the work, because of the difficult capture mechanics and conversion to currency. But now capture costs essentially 0.
@mbateman I suspect some of it is a decades long decline in the benefit : cost ratio of work, where previously the incentives pushed you much more into work whether you wanted to or not. Wanting to work is downstream of working amd it going well for most people, not the cause of it