If you’re wondering how the recession is affecting today’s young adults, a new paper (abstract only) by Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo may have the answer. The authors found that people who grew up during a recession “tend to believe that success in life depends more on luck than on effort, support more government redistribution, but are less confident in public institutions.” [%comments]
The Recession Mentality
TAGS: recession
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I’m a firm believer that you make your own luck. So maybe someone should tell them that it takes effort to be lucky in life.
Effort will contribute to success incrementally – luck contributes exponentially. The most successful people in the world were lucky enough to catch the right breaks, but also put forth the effort to sustain their success. See ‘Outliers’ by Malcolm Gladwell.
Well, Stephanie, we *have* been told that. It’s just that our effort has resulted in long hours in school to secure good grades, followed by living at home with our parents without health insurance because there aren’t any jobs, despite assaulting the entire corporate world with resumes and networking as much as someone with little-to-no experience can. So you’ll forgive us for being skeptical of you telling us that we need more “effort” and we’ll be “lucky.”
“The harder I work…the luckier I get” Wasn’t that recently on the quote uncovered…Always seemed to hold true to me.
Stephanie, I would be very wary of interpreting this as saying that young adults don’t want to or aren’t willing to work.
They may hold this believe as a result of watching friends, parents, and coworkers work hard, save money, do the right things, and lose anyway. I think after this recession we all know a couple of stories like that. Effort may get you where you want to go, but a change in fortune can always pull you down.
Informed opportunism and effort are certainly important, but even within that, bad things can happen through no fault of an individual.
Health shocks, chronic illnesses, economic shocks – coping with these events can take a long time for an individual or a family to work their way out of, if they ever do.
We look so much at economic statistics in the aggregate. Maybe things are looking up, but at the same time, some families who get hit hard economically just never recover to their previous levels of financial security.
Outliers puts far too heavy an emphasis on the persons situation. Yes, Bill Gates was lucky to have access to the computers he did, but it was the sheer effort he put into it that made him a success. Gladwell’s books all oversimplify and twist the facts to fit his thesis.
I haven’t read it, but I thought the idea was that both are needed, and while hard work alone can take you pretty far, nobody gets to the top of the heap without luck?