I've always had a lot of trouble with the idea that success come more, or at least as much, from hard work than from luck. If success is an outcome of effort, then that suggests that success accrues to individuals with some sort of relative advantage in how hard they work. But I'm pretty successful, and it's certainly not that I work harder than the guys fixing my street in 30 degree weather, or the folks at Muddhouse coffee who arrive at 6:00am every day to start the grinders, or the women who are at the Mt. Pleasant laundromat six days a week. Indeed, I'd find that work a helluva lot harder than my own. But since we justify income inequality by understanding success as an outcome of virtue, there's a tendency to ascribe achievement to diligent effort rather than the market's amoral decisions to attach high value to certain spheres of labor and low value to others. The important variable for success, however, does not seem to be hard work but profession. If you're in a high-value profession, hard work can do you a lot of good. If you're not, it may not do you much good at all. And though anyone can work hard, we're mostly able to admit that not everyone has the specific constellation of opportunities that lets you go to law school, or spend your time goofing off in amateur political punditry. Occupation is rather more useful for understanding why someone's hard work pays off than is their relative level of toil, but since occupation is more clearly contingent on circumstance, and high-value occupations have more obvious barriers to entry, they also raise questions of justice in outcome, and thus have fairly uncomfortable answers for those atop the pyramid. So hard work it is.
