I have a not-so-new theory of income inequality: The upper income classes work harder than the lower income classes.
Even President Barack Obama recently acknowledged what every sane person knows to be true: the best anti-poverty program is a job. Obama said this at a recent conference on poverty.
But he continues to repeat a falsehood over and over. This is the claim that the poor work just as hard as the rich do. Well, yes, many people in poor households heroically work very hard at low wages to take care of their families. No doubt about that. Yet the average poor family doesn't work nearly as much as the rich families do. And that's a key reason why these households are poor.
The most recent Census Bureau data on household incomes document the importance of work. Census sorts the households by income quintile, and we will label those in the highest quintile as "rich," and those in the lowest quintile as "poor." The average household in the top 20 percent of income has an average of almost exactly two full-time workers. The average poor family (bottom 20 percent) has just 0.4 workers. This means on average, roughly for every hour worked by those in a poor household, those in a rich household work five hours. The idea that the rich are idle bondholders who play golf at the country club or go to the spa every day while the poor toil isn't accurate.
The finding that 6 in 10 poor households have no one working at all is disturbing. Since they have no income from work, is it a surprise they are poor?
As for rich households, 75 percent have two or more workers. For the poor households that percent is less than 5 percent.
Now, of course, hours worked doesn't account for all or even most of the gap between rich and poor. But it does account for some of it. One of the more pernicious concepts is the notion of "dead-end jobs." No, the surefire economic dead end is no job at all. There's no climbing the economic ladder if you're not even on the first rung.
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http://www.creators.com/conservative/stephen-moore/work-is-the-first-step-to-ending-poverty.htmlSecondly, your income as an employee is pretty much proportional to the value of your work as an employee. I just finished a 36+ year career as an Electrical Engineer in the computing field. I was earning a six figure income - and I emphasize "earning" - even after my own technical education was stale, by teaching younger, fresher engineers the design process and the work ethic I used.
Note that in 36 years, I never had to compete with anybody without an Engineering Degree. Most of the modern professions are that way. YES you absolutely can earn a higher income without an education, by working LOTS harder.
Education plays a vital role in your value, both perceived and actual. I paid for undergraduate degrees for both my wife and daughter, and there were month-long stretches where all three of us worked before the kid left home, and years-long stretches after that when all three of us were working, and paying mortgages, and buying cars and tech toys. Then the daughter married, and worked along with her husband.
It is sometimes hard to relate sitting in a windowless temporary classroom in Virginia, discussing Melville who is writing about whale blubber, as a necessary step in earning a living. But it is that, as is Algebra and Chemistry and other topics I do not doubt, you didn't understand the need for when you studied them. Not understanding why you are studying is a poor reason to drop out of school and drastically curtail your income earning potential.
