Most Americans don’t believe people are rich because they work hard or poor because they don’t: study

Most Americans don’t believe people are rich because they work harder than other people or poor because they don’t work hard enough, according to a new study published by the Pew Research Center.

In the results of a poll released Monday, some 65% of U.S. adults said people are rich because they had more advantages in life than others, while only 33% said it’s because they work harder than others.

When it comes to the question of why people are poor, some 71% of respondents attributed it to having to face more obstacles in life. Only 26 percent of respondents in the poll conducted Jan. 6-19 among 12,638 U.S. adults who are members of the Center’s American Trends Panel, said people are poor because they don’t work hard enough.

And people’s views of the determinants of wealth from this recent poll appear to align with other recent studies that show how income inequality and other factors such as being raised in poverty has contributed to a stifling of the American dream and upward mobility for a share of the population.

The Census Bureau found that 38.1 million people in 2018 were poor, which is 1.4 million fewer poor people than in 2017. This means about one in eight Americans still live below the poverty line — $25,465 for a family with two adults and two children.

In a recent interview explaining why working hard is simply no longer enough for many to achieve the American dream, Raj Chetty, director of Opportunity Insights at Harvard University, pointed to some of his team’s research.

“Back in the 1940s and 1950s, virtually all kids in America would grow up to have a higher standard of living than their parents did. So for children born in 1940, for example, 90 percent of them went on to have a higher standard of living than their parents. And if you look at kids who were born in the 1980s, who are turning 30 today, when we’re measuring their incomes that number is down to 50 percent,” he said.

“It’s a 50-50 shot as to whether you’re going to achieve the American dream of moving up. And so, that fading of the American dream, you know, I think is of tremendous concern from an economic perspective, socially, politically, and there are a variety of factors that I think play into what’s driving that trend.

"But at a macroeconomic level, a lot of it has to do with the fact that wage rates and incomes for people in the middle of the income distribution basically haven’t gone up over the past 30 years, so most of the economic growth that’s occurred in America has gone to the very, very top of the income distribution,” he said.

The poll data from the Pew study show that respondents were deeply divided along partisan lines.

Some 82% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said advantages in life have more to do with why someone is rich, while 86% of this group said having faced more obstacles has more to do with why someone is poor.

Just over half of Republicans and Republican leaning respondents, however, said hard work has more to do with why a person is rich, while 45% said it is because they have more advantages.

Some 55 percent of this group said people are poor because they face more obstacles while 42% said it’s because they didn’t work hard enough.

The rich are rich because they learned how to manage their money. They didn’t work any harder, if fact they probably worked far less physically demanding jobs and fewer hours than most poor people.

First, I will say that while I don't consider myself "rich," I earn a nice income and along the way, I've learned how to stay disciplined and manage my money well. I've also stayed married to a wonderful wife who earns more than I do, and we are blessed, financially.

With my job, I may not exert myself physically, but I perform mentally strenuous work that makes me every bit as tired as someone performing more manual labor. It's impossible to go home and NOT think about my job in the evening or on the weekend. People that work for me, whose lives are impacted by my work, do weigh on my mind.

I was not born into wealth; my parents were very blue-collar and financially speaking, we were among the lower middle classes. My parents always hoped that I could go to college, but they had no experience that they could guide me in the right steps.

I spent 6 years in the military, and returned to college. I went after a STEM degree before they were called that. I didn't accumulate a lot of student debt; I didn't knock anyone up; I didn't make any life choices that would put me in a hole so deep that I'd be behind the rest of my life. I never took spring breaks, fall breaks, or even breaks in the summer...I worked my butt off and made sacrifices in order to get my degree.

I do agree that poor choices are made, often repeatedly, by people who can never seem to climb out of their financial holes. They throw good money after bad, they live paycheck to paycheck, and have nothing to show for their work, even late in life.

It is a very good read. One example is a fellow who owns a dry cleaning business. Drives the same car for 20 years. He is very frugal and ends up very wealthy and no one sees it.

I have seen guys who are dead broke and present themselves to the world as very wealthy guys and the same in reverse.

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