You don't get rich by working hard, not in America anyway

[Igel]

40. The claim is being understood differently.

"You don't get rich by working hard" isn't very well phrased.

It's usually, but not always, true. Some people do get work by working hard. It's just that most hard work can be done by anybody with the right muscles and pays poorly. But some people do get rich by working hard--if you understand "hard" right. I'm not sure anybody's gotten rich in the last 200 years just by digging ditches. Perhaps they dug ditches and invested; perhaps that kept body and soul together so they could do other things. Perhaps they got hurt while digging ditches and got compensated for their injuries. Or perhaps they even discovered something valuable while digging ditches. But it wasn't the ditch-digging itself that got them rich.

Statements that are "usually, but not always" true or false are difficult to work with. There's not a good causal relationship between hard work and riches.

Better put: "You don't get rich without hard work."

So not working hard usually doesn't cut it. Of course, you have to say that there's hard work other than tiring, physical labor, esp. under harsh conditions. You watch a researcher toil in front of his computer and papers, trying to get his math to work out and make heads or tails of the chemical reaction data he's looking at and, well, it's still "hard work."

Same for inventors. Even investors do a lot of hard work--not all, but many.

Yeah, you can be born rich. But then that's got "getting rich." On occasion somebody inherits money, but usually that was earned with somebody else's hard work. Even staying rich requires hard work (sometimes you can hire people to do the work for you).


What's funny in the OP, though, is the assumption that the increase in value when calculating net worth at market prices somehow came from somebody. Until it's cashed out, it's virtual wealth.

It's like the kids at a local high school where every student has to have a school-issued tablet PC. Let's assume that Pierre had a computer last year and, the day he had to return it, it was run over by a truck. It was fully covered by insurance, and he kept the stylus. Nobody wanted it. Over the summer, his stylus is worth $0. The new school year starts and he could sell that stylus for $5. There's some demand, but not a whole lot, so he holds on to it. Then, as the date when all the tablets have to be turned back in approaches, the value of the stylus goes up from $5 to $20 to $25 on the day the tablets are to be returned. His wealth has gone up 500%! But the day of tablet return he's sent to the principal's office and sits there all day. When he's released, he finds that the value of his extra stylus after tablet return is again $0. He's lost all his wealth.

Can he say somebody stole his wealth? No. Did he get his net worth of $25 from anybody? No. No money changed hands as his net worth increased; no money changed hands as his net worth plummeted.

So it was with my mother's stocks. She invested. She sat on them. The net worth went up $25k: She was ecstatic at making that much money. Then 2008 came and the net worth went down $35k, and she said she'd been robbed. She had the same stocks. Nobody had given her money, nobody had taken money from her. The valuation of her stocks changed. Period. Had she cashed out, she'd have gotten money not from workers but from other investors. Now that some of the stocks have been sold, the only people that made money off her were the people she bought her stocks from. She wants to claim that after the markets recovered that those who sold the stocks she earned "stole" money from her, but there was no guarantee the stocks would increase in value--and, in any event, she gave those sellers no money. It's those who buy the stocks at their higher value that provide the profit.