Hard Work Won't Save You: The TRUTH About Success in America

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What I think is dangerous about this mythology around hard work. Anything is possible. Even, you know, even the son or daughter of an immigrant can ascend to great wealth and success. If it's not true, if you've been told, go to school, apply yourself, work hard, and it's not working out for you, you're going to be furious. People are not buying into the idea that hard work will save them. That is, that is the reality of.

Is My pleasure to welcome to the podcast the author of the brand new book 99% a new working History of the American Way of Life, former writer for the Atlantic, now writer for the Wall Street Journal and a whole bunch of other publications, a very good looking man, Adam Chandler. Welcome, Adam.

Thank you.

So Adam, the title of your book is from a famous quote from Thomas Edison, success is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. How did that set you on this path of writing this book over what I'm sure was many long months? If, if I know what it takes to produce a book like this.

Yeah. Over the course of a few years, I myself went through the perspiration of writing a book which is mostly just stress and procrastination. But for me, the quote speaks to a quintessential American idea about hard work and how it's central to life and how it is what will bring you success and how that's increasingly not true. Unfortunately, when we look at statistics around opportunity and wages and even mortality rates in this country, it has changed significantly for the negative. When you look at how the health of this country is and so the idea that hard work is this salvation forces for me, something that we really need to unpack. And that's pretty much what the book is about. Looking at how opportunity is central to American life in ways that is mythological. And so I also wanted to pick a little bit on Edison because he's seen as this lone tinkering genius, but the reality is that he had taxpayer benefits and government research and well placed connections and mentors and underlings help create some of his life altering innovations. And that often gets left out of the story. We focus on the individual in American culture and as a result of that, we are not focused on making communities strong. We look at success as an individual pursuit. And if you fail in America, it's because you didn't try hard enough. It turns success and failure into a question of moral worth or grit as opposed to structural obstacles. And that's a big problem. And I think it's fueling a lot of the anger that people feel right now.

Yeah, it's one reason why I was happy to read this book and interview you is that as you can imagine, as maybe the most prominent proponent of universal basic income, I encountered all sorts of versions of this. And one of the things I was fond of saying, when people be like, oh, it's socialism, I'd say, no, it's capitalism, where income doesn't start at zero. And capitalism works much better if people have money to spend. And, you know, if, if you make everyone a participant, then markets get stronger. No, it was something I was glad to do in the sense of trying to broaden people's understanding. But one of the things that, you know, that's made me sad, it's challenged me over this last number of years, is that I grew up in the 70s, I was born in 75, and there was like a fairly positive sense that, hey, if I bust my ass and work hard, like, things will work out okay to great. And over the last number of years, it seems like Americans don't really buy that anymore. And they don't buy that as much for good reason. I think you had a poll or a statistic where a certain percentage of Americans thought that hard work would improve their lot. And then that percentage has declined over the last 20 years.

Yes, there was an economic opportunity poll in 2002, and Pew does this every few years where they ask people, are you getting ahead through hard work? Essentially. And in 2002, 23% of Americans said, I'm working hard, but I'm not getting ahead. And that's, you know, that's a big number, but it's not that big compared to 20 years later when 39% of Americans just two years ago said that I'm working hard, but I'M not getting ahead. And in a country where you're told that hard work is the thing that will get you ahead, applying yourself and being focused in your career as a pursuit will get you the American dream. That's a calamity, that's an existential crisis, that's a spiritual crisis, that's a social crisis. And so that is very true. And if you look at the statistics around how the economy has grown since 1979, the economy has doubled in size, and workers of color and people without college degrees are making less money now than they did in 1979. That's insane. That's a problem. That's an enormous problem. So the fact that Americans are 64% more productive but are getting paid 17% more in the last 40 years is something that we need to unpack because it is causing people to fall into traps of extremism and xenophobia and all of these negative forces that we're watching unfold in real time right now.

So obviously, Thomas Edison is a part of this founding mythology, but you have other figures in your book that kind of give rise to this. Work hard, get ahead. And, you know, in all fairness, I mean, my parents immigrated to this country for that sense of opportunity. But you have founding myths of America. You have even the way it was discovered. Go ahead and walk us through, like, a few of the generative figures and narratives.

Yeah, sure. Well, if you look back to.

You.

Know, the Pilgrims are these American founders in a very broad sense of the Protestant work ethic and the idea that you view jobs as callings or vocations. There's almost a religious quality to the work. And for them, through the frontier, settling the west, it wasn't done because individual brawny pioneers with their taming plows cut down forests and killed a bunch of people. It also happened because there was government investment, because we had troops putting down rebellions and fighting the frontier wars. We have all of these moments where opportunity has emerged and happened and progress, if you'll call it that, in some instances, has happened because of community investment and focus, as opposed to individual grit. And those kind of stand out to me because they're so encoded in our mythology about hard work, about individuals. And you can. You can look at. It's not just political figures. It's not just someone like Benjamin Franklin, who's a founding father who came from nothing and has a great story about becoming a wealthy person, but did it in the context of a country where slavery was everywhere. You know, that was not something that he did on his own. The country didn't boom as a result of that. And he, as a publisher, profited from posting, posting about enslaved people who'd run away. He profited from that because he lived in the Northeast, where cotton went north and, you know, fueled the textile mills. So going back throughout history, there are all these stories of individual aspiration that again was caused and turned into success only because of economic forces and lucky breaks and privilege. And it's not a bad thing to reckon with that. It's not a bad thing to admit that we're a work in progress. And the idea that we were always united around this American idea that the founders all magically agreed on everything is a bad lesson for us to teach people. We worked through compromise. You're in New York right now, which was a loyalist hotbed during the Revolutionary War. They all just wanted to remain English. And elsewhere in the country, there were people who wanted to break free and there were other people who didn't want anything else to do with what was going on with the revolution. And we all worked together eventually to form a system of government. The Articles of Confederation failed. We had to form another one. But it's all a work in progress. So there's never been this idealized time where everything has worked. And that's such a big part of the story that we miss and is a better story than all of us just worked hard and America was built.

It was.

No, we compromised and we found ways to work together. The Pilgrims needed the indigenous tribes around them to teach them to farm and fish. So there's so much in all of these stories that I try to get into in the book that kind of lay out a clear way for us to look at success and opportunity over the years.

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Absolutely. Yeah, I appreciated that aspect of your campaign, because people are not buying into the idea that hard work will save them. That is, that is the reality of it. People aren't. They're not buying it anymore, especially younger people who are, you know, inheriting this terrible planet and this terrible economy. You know, you're. You're a few years older than me. I graduated from college into the Great Recession, where I just kind of watched everything get hollowed out. And you know, what I think is dangerous about this mythology around hard work. Anything is possible. Even, you know, even the son or daughter of an immigrant can ascend to great wealth and success, is that if it's not true, you are frustrated and you're furious about it. Because if you're doing everything right, if you've been told, go to school, apply yourself, work hard, and it's not working out for you, you're going to be furious. You're going to be furious at institutions, you're going to be furious at media, at expertise, at policies, and you're going to be open to all of those negative forces we were talking about before. And so what I appreciated about your campaign is that you were able to say, listen, we need to protect people against what's coming and what's already here in a lot of instances, to make sure that they can live a normal life or have some measure of success and some measure of protection. And that's really what I think is guiding a lot of the rage and frustration right now, is that during the pandemic, in the early days of the pandemic, we had this moment with the, you know, extended child tax credit and a lot of the pandemic protections that gave us a measure of safety that is normal in all the countries that we compare ourselves to, but for us, felt extraordinary, right? And then it all went away. We couldn't extend the child tax credit because Joe Manchin apparently said that people are going to use the money, parents can use the money to buy drugs, or that we couldn't have paid family leave because they're going to use the time off to go hunting like it's the most ridiculous shit in the world. So what are we supposed to do with that? How do we. How do we process this information and how do we. You know, you talk about feedback mechanisms in the book, which I think is really interesting. How do we actually solve what's wrong with us if we can't have honest conversations about where we are?

Yeah, the child tax credit was the greatest thing we did in recent memory. And the fact that we undid it so quickly Breaks my heart. I mean, it shows just how incoate and irrational our policy has become because all the data said that it have child poverty. And it all went to clothing and books and food and fuel and kids started learning better. And in the scheme of what we're spending, like this was a no brainer. And when it was removed, I thought to myself, I remember this vividly. It was January 15th of 22 where it stopped happening. And I waited to see whether there would be any outcry or protests or anything. And there was nothing. Because if you're working poor and we take away the lifeline, then you just go back to being really poor. And you don't exactly have a lot of bandwidth or time to figure out, you know, how to organize or any of that. It's, it's bleak. Like that stuff makes me super sad and frustrated. So where I want to go with you on this and so that this is here are a couple of things I think on this. It's one reason I'm so glad to have this conversation. I consider myself a pretty hard working person. I think hard work is good. And I used to make some Asian jokes about on the trail sometimes. Whereas like some people thought I like didn't want anyone to work. It's like, I love work. No, I like hard work work. No, I have a fortunate position where the, you know, the work I'm doing is quite white collar or whatnot. You know, it's like, it's, it's like not, not as difficult and arduous as a lot of the work other people do. I do not think that my success, you know, is something that. Even though in the scheme of things, I mean, you know, I will say it's not like I had like tons of nepotism going on in my life or anything like that. Like I genuinely did it. But, but, but still there are like so many things that went into it, including happenstance, including the fact that in my case it was that the founder of a company wanted to start a charter school for underprivileged kids and so enlisted me to be the incoming CEO. And if he is just a greedier person, then that opportunity never rises. So, you know, like I've always had, I think, some context for anything I've accomplished or, you know, when we talk about the presidential campaign, it's like, hey, I worked very hard, but I would give most of the credit to the Americans who actually decided to get behind me, you know, like donate 20 bucks. I mean, like that wasn't me. It was very much other people. So the tough part is that. And you referenced young people. If a young person says, like, oh, man, my hard work doesn't make a difference, so I might as well stop trying like that. That stuff also breaks my heart. It's like, look, you should be trying really hard. Even though I'm not going to bullshit you and say, like, you're trying really hard means that you're going to accomplish, you know, all of your goals that you know or the rest of it. But we still need you to be positive and work on whatever it is, whether it's, you know, like something in your community or an artistic endeavor or at your job or whatever. It's like a both and. Or a nuance thing. It's like, I do not think that hard work is going to be the path to accomplishing your dreams as much as we've been selling it. But we still need folks to act like them. Showing up and working hard will be at least helpful toward increasing their chances.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, these are all, these are all really important points, I think, because, yeah, the alternative, the alternative of having people completely disengaged is disastrous. And we're seeing in a lot of instances. But part of what I'd add to that is businesses would benefit if they invested in people. The studies that they do about attrition and turnover at big companies and small companies will blow your mind that over a trillion dollars each year in profit is lost in American, in America alone from people leaving their jobs because they can't make their lives work or they're burnt out. And if you, if you. A trillion with a T, if you invested that money into making life sustainable and having people take time off and have lives outside of work, you could still work hard. You would find people would be more productive, more creative, loyal to their companies if they were able to have better separation. It's. It's a boon to innovation. It's a boon to the economy. It makes us more durable and more dynamic as a country to invest in workers. And that is really what I think is missing from the, from the conversation. It's. If you pay people more, it's not that people are entitled or don't want to work. It's that they want it all to work. They want people in this country do love to work. It's embedded in our DNA in ways that it's not in other countries. I go to France in this book, and one of the things that really stands out to me is when you go to a museum in France and tons of cultural institutions. There's on the admissions board of ticket counters, it says if you're a job seeker, you're unemployed. There's a lower rate of admission, you pay less. Can you imagine that in the States where if you are unemployed, you could.

Walk, get out of here?

They want you to have a life outside of work, even if you don't have a job. That is a cultural norm in other places that I think is so meaningful that we could never fathom introducing here, even though it just sends a message that there's more to life than work. And I think that that would make work seem less daunting and terrible to people if it wasn't so all encompassing.

Yeah. You cite various studies about how Americans see their work and career as more a fundamental part of their identity than other cultures do. And it is true, even though I tried not to do this, but when you meet someone in America, you know, one of the questions out of your mouth eventually is like, oh, so what do you do? And yeah, like, it is a deeply American phenomenon. You should know too, that I randomly watched some Emily in Paris episodes. So I understood your references. There's a chunk of a chapter on Emily in Paris and it was fascinating how, you know, they made Emily this like, scrappy, super workaholic type. And then the French around her like, oh, like, you know, why are you working so hard?

Right, right. And then, you know, you can look at that. It was funny. What was funny about watching that show is I'm writing a book about work and then this amazing show comes on. And it's not amazing in that it's the best made, most brilliant show. But it really, it really, it only works because you have an American culture that is notorious for being so careerist, and you have a French culture that is so notorious for being about leisure and time off. And it makes for good comedy. My wife disagrees with me. She wouldn't watch the show. She'd walk out of the room. Anytime that we would watch it, I would turn it on.

It's usually the opposite. Adam. Geez, man.

I know. And her name is Emily. So we go to Paris and I'm on an Emily in Paris tour because I want to hear about the show's interaction with, you know, French culture. And she, she very kindly and politely says, I'm not going with you. Have a great time. But what I love about this also is when you look at French culture and again, they have a 35 hour workweek with tons of loopholes in it. It's not. It's not bulletproof and it isn't like solving all their problems. Neither is the right to disconnect where you don't have to respond to work emails or slacks or text messages after certain hours. None of these are perfect things that make life perfect or, you know, more productive or I guess, successful in France the way that you would hope them to. But they create boundaries. And so in social and cultural norms that we could stand to benefit from if we thought about it, because French people are living longer than us. They have their five years longer life expectancy. They have an hour more of sleep than us, they have an hour more for leisure every single day. They work hundreds of hours less than us.

It.

And all of these things add up to a life that I think a lot of us are missing out on. And it's again, it's robbing, it's making us lonely and it's making us angry. And I think learning from that is important. Just to see what other places are doing. Even though France is a very extreme example of it, they're still very productive. They're one of the top 10 countries in productivity just behind us. So it's not as if they're not working hard. They just have these boundaries that studies show make them more creative and more productive ultimately to have these breaks kind of etched into their day and time away from the office. And again, not the utopia, but ideas that we could stand to look at without sneering at them for being, oh, these lazy French.

The US is certainly somewhat pathologically industrious. And one of the reasons why I was for four day work week was because of studies that have shown that you can get just about the same thing done or more in some cases, but also just experience. It's that, you know, work just kind of expands or gets compressed based on the schedule. I mean, if you give me four days to get it done, I'll get it done in four days. You give me five days to get it done. To get it done in five days, you know?

Absolutely. Yeah. What I love about that also is there's not a perform when you, when you condense the time, it takes out the performative aspect of work. This is something in, you know, Denmark's another example where if you are at the office at 7 o' clock at night or 11pm at night, cranking out a long day, it doesn't make you seem loyal or like you're committed to the cause. It makes people wonder, are we understaffed? Is there some kind of inefficiency here. What's wrong with this company that somebody is working this late? It. It's a problem. It's not honorable. It's a. It's an issue. And for us, this work theater and this sort of performative staying late and devotion to cause is part of how we prove that we're getting ahead. But again, if we condense the time, we would still get the work done. And we're not judging the work based on whether it's actually good. It's all these other sort of ancillary things, like the. Oh, the person shows up late or goes to all the happy hours. You know, there's this great Onion headline that's, you know, most incompetent worker shines at the office holiday party. Once again. You know, it's. It really stands out how the things that have nothing to do with work, but the performance of work matter here in ways that other places kind of don't adopt or don't. Don't buy into.

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So your book, in many ways, is arguing for, like, different work culture, a lot of policy measures that you're. And you don't, like, come out and be like, hey, we should do this, this, and this. But there's certainly a suggestion that. That, like, America maybe should be approaching some of these problems a little bit differently. Most. All of which, by the way, I agree with. And so it does seem, though, that neither our culture nor our policy are trending in that direction. It seems that we're heading more, and this is something I think a lot about. So check it out. I run for president, and I'm like, look, guys, AI is coming. We should think bigger. We should have, like, a better, more abundant approach. We can afford a thousand bucks a month a person, by the way. Now GDP is going. Gone up even since four or five years ago, where it's now approaching 80,000 ahead. So if your GDP is 80,000 ahead, you probably can't afford, like, an income floor of a thousand bucks a month. And even when I was running, there was a better attitude towards some people being like, huh? Yeah, that makes sense. Like, let's maybe do that. And then I think today there is like this, like, the anger you're talking about is already, like, taking hold where, like, there's like this negativity. And I'm going to use Elon as an example. Like, you know, four years ago, Elon endorsed me. He was much less political. And I joke now that if he was in Iowa giving away a million dollars a day on my behalf, I might have done a lot better in this case. He was at the time very technocratic, removed, like, oh, I gang. But he wasn't like, you know, and then now, you know, he obviously campaigned very hard for, for Trump and moved a lot of resources in that direction where like four, four or five years ago, like the tech folks in Silicon Valley were very, very open to a, a positive, expansive solution in the form of universal basic income. And then today there's like this anger about how, you know, much crap they've had to deal with. And the approaches is different. I think we're in like, a nastier general frame of mind, in part because of COVID I think Covid ended up accelerating institutional distrust in various ways. And so now I'm still working on trying to make these good things happen, including reviving the enhanced child tax credit, which, you know, you reference in the book very heavily. What do you see as the path forward? Like, how can we, if you believe what I. What your book seems to very strongly suggest you believe, which is that, like, we should try and evolve. What does that path look like in your mind? And what is the feedback you've gotten, even in, you know, the book events you've done thus far?

It's a great question. I obviously think that ubi, or even just the negative income tax, where, which is much cheaper than a ubi, where if you are at poverty line or below, they raise your income up to, through a negative tax, income tax to 150% above the poverty line. And that's a couple hundred million dollars. You eradicate poverty. That's doable. Like, why not, why not do this thing that would just stabilize the most vulnerable people in this country?

Amen. Yeah, I love negative impact.

So that's, you know, that's a simpler, more measured approach than ubi, even though I think we need ubi and I think the, in it, I think the payback that we would get in innovation in people not having to cluster in cities, expensive cities for jobs, we could have all of these different places, all of these innovation hubs and, you know, brand new centers of growing exploration and the tinkering that we used to love. The garage narrative would come back. You know, there's a program I'm going to Tulsa next week to speak and they have this great remote Tulsa program where a philanthropist is basically bribing people to come work in Tulsa for a year. $10,000, no strings attached. And it's working because people are interested in seeing if they can make their lives work in a new place with a little boost. And that's again another example of something that is really working to undo the narratives. It's reframing all these things.

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So I'm from Texas. I grew up in Texas. I live in New York. I traveled all around the country for this book and if you got a lot of people together from places like Texas and New York to have a conversation about ambition and aspiration and opportunity, there would be so much overlap. That is one of the biggest problems that I think we have is that we live in a country where people are kind and caring and our chosen policies are not kind or caring. But on a basic level, people tend to agree about a lot of things. We're just kind of it's hard to talk about what a basic common sense solution would be when someone's talking about annexing Greenland or renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America There are all these distractions and all these bits of subterfuge that get in the way of us having reasonable, rational conversations where there is so much overlap and agreement. And I think national service is something that I bring up as a potential solution for the future, but it could work in the here and now. If you bring old and young, rural and urban, wealthy and poor, together in all of these ways, with all of these benefits, you would see the social cohesion return that I think we very badly need. We live in these very polarized environments, not just politically, but economically. There's fascinating studies about how you could live 30 years ago in a neighborhood where people were lower income and higher income and they still went to the same schools and they played hockey on the same street or whatever it was. And now that separation exists in all the neighborhoods, politically and economically. And in our basic experiences, boarding an airplane, going to a baseball game, there are all these red velvet ropes and VIPs that separate us from having interactions with people that are different than us in ways that are troublesome. The third places that where we used to congregate and gather have gone because we're either working too much or we have these other things that are occupying our time and energy that are keeping us from interacting with people. So just talking to people will make a huge difference because it shatters your expectations of what. Of what people are and who they are and what they're going through. So it's a little Pollyannish. But, you know, I live in New York as well, and I was just asking a Lyft driver the other day about congestion pricing and how it's affecting his. His, his. His life. You know, we just instituted this ostensibly good thing to make people hopefully use their cars less. And if you are a driver, every time you go in and out of a congestion zone, you get charged $9. And apparently not everyone is getting that money back. If you're a driver, that's a huge problem. But there, I would never know that unless I had a conversation with someone about those kinds of things. I always would love. I was a bartender for a lot of years, and so talking to different people and hearing the stories about what it means to work sick, you know, if you don't have paid sick leave or your rent is due, is something that everyone goes through in the hospitality industry. 25% of our workforce has a disability. And that's very complicated. That is something that, again, we don't have real meaningful conversations about because we're not having real meaningful conversations about a lot of things. So this is part of what I appreciate about your approach to politics and policy is that it encourages thinking that transcends party affiliation because it's the only way we're going to get out of this message.

Oh, I certainly agree with you there. And you know, my first job was as a busboy at a Chinese restaurant, the Imperial Wok. And I, I still try and tip well as a result because there were a lot of people that were better at that job than I was. The folks they used to make fun of, like how when the, when the bowls and plates came out of the steamer, it was too hot for me to handle. I had like, the, those, you know, like the Chinese restaurant napkins I was using to handle. And they were like, scoffing at me just because their hands, I guess, were very calloused and heat resistant in a way that my soft suburban hands were not. So I, I certainly appreciate the, the fact that, again, there are a lot of people are working very, very hard in circumstances that are not giving them sick days or any of that jazz. Like, none of the people I worked with at that restaurant, I don't think got a single sick day. We just all did our thing. But in my case, I was a teenager trying to make some extra pocket money. But I got to say, the experience does stick with you. Adam, congratulations to you on this book. I think you're kickstarting and continuing a conversation that America really would benefit from a great deal. It's 99% perspiration, a new working history of the American way of life. And if people want to follow you, I think you have some events even like there's a book tour going on. How can they keep up with you and your work in addition to grabbing this book?

Well, I'm trying to spend much less time on X for obvious reasons, but Adam Chandler.com is a great place to keep up with my work. And my last book was about fast food. So I have a newsletter called the Crunch Wrap that again, I sort of use as a, as a way to tell people what I'm up to. But I'm, you know, I'm so grateful for your, for your time and for the work that you do. Because it is like I knew going into this that this would be, and I mentioned this before, a different kind of conversation than I, than I normally have when I'm talking about work and opportunity and how hard work can be meaningful and good. And that's, again, surprising in a lot of ways. But so thank you very much for taking the time and for reading the book and for letting me interview you for it, because you really add an important element of how ridiculous some of the disparities are.

We have to get there, Adam. I'm still working on it, and you are, too. You know, we need more and more people to see what your book says and say, hey, guys, you know, like, this isn't working so hard for a whole lot of us. And maybe it's not because we're somehow of weak morals or lazy. Like, maybe we're being set up. Maybe these structures could use some modernization and evolution.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, thank you again. I'm really grateful for your time.

Oh, could this vintage store be any cuter?

Right?

And the best part? They accept Discover.

Except Discover in a little place like this? I don't think so, Jennifer.

Oh, yeah, huh? Discover's accepted where I like to shop.

Come on, baby.

Get with the times.

Right.

So we shouldn't get the parachute pants.

These are making a comeback, I think.

Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide, based on the February 2025 Nielsen report.