Slashdot Mirror
Baby Boomers Don't Have a Stronger Work Ethic Than Later Generations, Says Study (sciencedaily.com)
A team of U.S. researchers from Wayne State University in Detroit have published research in Springer's Journal of Business and Psychology that dispels the popular belief that baby boomers have a greater work ethic than people born a decade or two later. Science Daily reports: The economic success of the United States and Europe around the turn of the 20th to the 21st century is often ascribed to the so-called Protestant work ethic of members of the baby boomer generation born between 1946 and 1964. They are said to place work central in their lives, to avoid wasting time and to be ethical in their dealings with others. Their work ethic is also associated with greater job satisfaction and performance, conscientiousness, greater commitment to the organization they belong to and little time for social loafing. The media and academia often suggest that baby boomers endorse higher levels of work ethic than the younger so-called Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980) and Millennials (born between 1981 and 1999). [Keith Zabel, the lead U.S. researcher, and his team] compiled a dataset of all published studies that have ever used a U.S. sample to measure and report on the Protestant work ethic. Studies included in the meta-analysis had to mention the average age of the people surveyed. In all, 77 studies and 105 different measures of work ethic were examined using an analysis method stretching over three phases, each phase offered more precise measurement of generational cohorts. The analysis found no differences in the work ethic of different generations. These findings support other studies that found no difference in the work ethics of different generations when considering different variables, such as the hours they work or their commitment to family and work. Zabel's team did however note a higher work ethic in studies that contained the response of employees working in industry rather than of students.
Youth have always been lazy and disrespectful of their elders. This has been commented on for about 4 thousand years; its a wonder kids these days do anything at all.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Every generation thinks their kids are huge slackers, and nearly every successful person attributes his success to admirable qualities he has only in average quantities, when in fact it's usually a combination of luck and *consistent* work over a long period of time.
Except in my case. I derive my success from a sculpted physique and massive charm and cunning with the opposite sex.
That was always the criticism of the Baby Boomers. That they didn't have the same work ethic as their parents.
Exactly what I came here to say. I'm a boomer, but I've never heard anyone lauding us for our work ethic... that was always our parents, members of the "Greatest Generation" - the people who lived through the Great Depression and fought World War II.
Now I have heard the complaints about the millennials... but it was always in the context of "they're even worse than their parents" rather than "why aren't they as diligent as their parents?"
#DeleteChrome
Companies printed circuit diagrams on the inside of their hardware. Go open your HVAC, there's probably a circuit diagram on the inside.
Ford used to publish "This is how you fix our cars" and give it away. The knowledge was there.
That's the Great Generation that rebuilt the world after WWII. Baby boomers came later with their loud music, pot smoking and premarital sex.
I came from a working family in a poor neighborhood in Chicago's Little Italy. My dad came home from WWII and worked his ass off. My mom parlayed a "Rosie the Riveter" gig into a great job. They both retired with terrific pensions.
Yet there are fungi that have greater work ethic than me. I made it through grad school on charm and bullshit and ended up university faculty (with a nice pension). My daughter takes after her Mom and is an incredibly hard worker (she's a PhD candidate in Math and teaches kick-boxing). I will bet that right now she's busting her ass trying to get numerical simulations of viral infections working in some arcane programming language and hasn't stopped since early this morning. She's working hard because she seems to genuinely love working hard. God bless her, but I don't feel that way.
Hard work has almost no correlation to success, I've found. The ability to convince people you work hard is more important than actually working hard.
The idea of a "work ethic" is nothing more than left-over propaganda from the Protestant assholes that first settled this country. We're supposed to see "hard work" as somehow morally superior to idleness. It's just a way that the people in the very top economic strata convince the rest of us to kill ourselves for their benefit. I'm glad I was able to see through that bullshit early on. My life was much nicer due to that revelation, and I was still able to accomplish a full and happy existence and even be able to leave something to my kid without really breaking a sweat. Luck, and the ability to know which corners to cut.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Pretty sure when people talk about hard working generation they say "the greatest generation." The Baby Boomers were those slackers who listened to the Beatles, did drugs, and ran up credit card debt.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The US gave away its jobs to friendly nations. So the stability for many to find work and earn a living wage is gone in the USA.
What took a good educated 10% of the population is now a US brand as a front company with 1% needed. Even that is a global workforce invited in.
Designed in the USA, made anywhere cheap.
Everything of value that was good is gone. More new low wage jobs selling coffee, wine, beer, security every day and night?
Working for the gov/mil or been a mil contractor who enjoys no bid gov/mil work is not a long term solution given the private sector tax rates.
The US needs to rediscover good private sector jobs for its own citizens. Only the US private sector can create the kind of quality, reward and advancement that grows a nation.
Illegal workers have been allowed to flood the lower end of the jobs market to counter unions and be replaceable if any work place issues arise.
Student loans are based on every entry consideration but real merit and academic ability. Creating vast amounts of average graduates with safe, soft degrees in been "fun" years later is not what any advanced work force needs.
Good people still want to learn, study, work, better themselves, move up in society, do better than past generations when asked as always. But the option to do that has been reduced.
The few top university options based on years of hard work are been lost to very average students with no academic considerations.
Local jobs to even support a local college education are few and far between as older workers have to stay on and illegal workers are allowed to fill in.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Wat? Since when is there a popular belief that 'boomers had a stronger work ethic? Say "boomer" and I'm more likely to think "protest" than "Protestant work ethic". AFAIK the more generally held view is that as long as they weren't traumatized by the Vietnam War, they lucked into an optimal economic situation and that's why they did better.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This is purely anecdotal, but my experience is that there isn't so much a generational correlation to work ethic as there is an age-based one. Which is to say, a person's work ethic can vary significantly over the course of their adult life.
What I've seen in my own workplace is new entrants (whether at graduate or non-graduate level) entering the organisation but generally (and of course there are outliers) without making a full commitment to it and, particularly in the case of graduate entrants, trying to keep their student lifestyle running for a few more years. Over time, usually by the late 20s, this transitions into a much stronger work ethic; more time spent in the office and more "commitment" to the organisation. Eventually, somewhere usually in the 50s, this lapses into a degree of burnout. Now, all of the above is a huge generalisation and based on personal experiences only, but I've seen a couple of generations go through that cycle now.
Of course, there's a far bigger correlation between work ethic and social class. Behaviours liked to worth ethic, such as the ability to focus on deferred reward have a strong hereditary component, whether based on biology, culture or both. Again, there are exceptions, but this is where I've seen the strongest correlation. In the mid-2000s (at the height of the UK's New Labour touchy-feely period) I worked for an employer which took part in a Government-subsidised scheme to give placements to "disadvantaged" young people. This was actually a pretty cushy detail; the pay for those brought in through the scheme wasn't huge, but it was significantly above the minimum wage (almost £10/hour) and the work was white-collar administrative. Moreover, there was an expectation in place that if you did well, you would be able to turn it into a full-time job (this was in the land of silly-money before the big crash, when the UK economy appeared to be in full boom). Hell, there wasn't even much of a dress code beyond "use your common sense and don't wear anything that would actively harm our reputation".
I was involved with this scheme for three consecutive years, once as a mentor and twice as one of the "lucky" managers "given" one of the apprentices (yes, there was a degree of corporate arm-twisting). Across all three years, with an intake of 8-10 people per year, not a single one stuck with it for more than 2 months. The simple basics of being expected to get into the office at a sane time (we had a flexitime-within-reason system), to come into the office every working day and to follow the instructions of a manager once in the office were too much for the participants.
take everything with a grain of salt. Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science Study Finds: Studies Are Wrong:
The "X" generation. Another hard-working generation. [... ] Millennials have been doted over, helicoptered,
So actually you mean that the X generation was a bunch of idiots who poured vast amounts of misplaced work into really terrible ways of raising kids, right?
You know, I think about all the things millennials see. They see the Boomers giving themselsves vast pensions ands benefits, they see those people pulling up the ladders they used to climb, they see pension funds getting raided by greedy corporate types and no one lifts a finger to stop them, the boomers have used their wealth to price them out of ever being able to own a home and so on and so forth.
Why should someone sell their soul to a coproration who would lay them off next quarter so they can what? Pay exorbitant rates to a landlord who's sole bit of business sense was being born 50 years earlier? Or keep on topping up that pension like a good little drone only for a Philip Green of the world to give the entire thing to his wife as a dividend? Well it's either that or enter the "gig economy" which seems to be determined to undo the last 150 years of hard earned worker's rights because App!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I think that in most cases, if employees felt safe in their jobs, they'd do better work. That Millennial who seems to be "slacking" because they won't put in 90 hour weeks for years on end just sees what's going on. SV startups live on fresh college kids who haven't experienced what it's like to work in an unstable environment or for a hostile employer. Older Millennials are more cynical, just like older people of other generations.
Restoring the balance of employer/employee loyalty would be a good start if employers want a more productive workforce. Smart people see employers who will replace them at the drop of a hat and don't put in the extra effort as a result. Previous generations had some employers who would employ you for life...IBM had a no-layoff policy for ages and there are legions of people who worked for large employers like this their entire careers. In return, their employees were loyal, worked hard, put in extra hours where needed, etc.
Unfortunately, I can't see this happening any time soon. Back in the 60s/70s, the US was quite different. Absolutely everything was manufactured domestically, there was very little foreign competition, only 3 car companies of note, etc. And, companies needed thousands and thousands of people just to move paperwork around the organization, all of whom had stable jobs. Now, we manufacture very little, offshore well-paid technical jobs, and companies just keep squeezing harder to get those pennies out of their operational processes.
It took several generations to recover from the war. All the way up to early generation X
There was more to be done than just building fallen buildings but get society back.
Because after WWII there was the cold war which Europe was under threat. So after the Cold War then the world was able to more or less restore itself.
But when each generation looks at the next they see people in different stages of life.
Boomers who are retiring are looking at gen X who are taking the mantle and see them making the mistakes they did when they took over from the previous generation.
Gen X are looking at melenals who are in the stage of their life where they are trying to find a mate and are acting rather stupid.
There are lessons that we have to learn by ourselves and the previous generation cannot teach it to us. No matter how hard they try.
The biggest threat I see is the inability for people to parse mass media of info. Stats says violence is down but we feel like it is worse. Because we see all the worlds problems in a one hour segment every day.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Hard work has almost no correlation to success, I've found. The ability to convince people you work hard is more important than actually working hard.
It's actually built right into the word. "Success" means to come soon after. The core meaning of success as it pertains to life is inheritance. The first son was the one to succeed the father, so he was a success. And lo and behold, the best predictor of economic success is in fact your genetic succession: who are your parents?
People with wealthier parents tend to have not only superior access to education and nutrition (even here in the USA, a staggering percentage of children go to bed hungry and malnourished — affecting their brain development!) but they also likely get less of a bullshit song about fairness from their parents. Mine sold me a whole line of bullshit about hard work, because they were still operating under the impression that their failure to succeed was based on their own behavior. But when you can't get a fair shake simply because of how people view your upbringing, it makes it more difficult to remedy your situation.
the people in the very top economic strata convince the rest of us to kill ourselves for their benefit. I'm glad I was able to see through that bullshit early on. My life was much nicer due to that revelation, and I was still able to accomplish a full and happy existence and even be able to leave something to my kid without really breaking a sweat.
And your kid is statistically assured to do much better for it, because success typically results from succession.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Millennials are the most screwed generation since the silent generation had war inflicted on them. The boomers broke the economy, broke the planet, broke all the promises, made sure everything they had for free (like education) is now paid for and extremely expensive, and gold plated their pensions, made property unaffordable, left the EU...
Gen X is just kinda stuck in the middle, unable to effect change because the boomers all go out and vote to feather their nests. There will have to be a great correction at some point, maybe when enough of them die to allow the younger generations to take political control.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Are you kidding me? The millenials are so full of themselves that they take selfies ten times a day and post them to social media. Now that's the me generation.
Boomers: fucked over the millennials by massively overspending and burdening the younger generations with huge debt, impoossibly high housing prices and vast retirement programs to find.
Millenneals: take selfies
Conclusion: fucking millennials are the "me" generation.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
This is generational provincialism. The fact is most people act like selfish pricks, but each generation succeeds the last, becoming precisely the things they despised in their parents' generation.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.