WSJ Blogs

Real-time commentary and analysis from The Wall Street Journal
The Wealth Report
Robert Frank looks at the culture and economy of the wealthy.

Do the Wealthy Work Harder Than the Rest?

    • Oh, come on. How much of “working time” includes business lunches and dinners? These may not be leisure, but they certainly aren’t hard work. How much time is spent doing business on the golf course? You cannot compare that to the blue collar worker in a factory or a bus boy in a restaurant who are on their feet for 8 hours.

    • High earners probably do work harder, but the reason is likely that work is more rewarding for them so they do more of it.

    • Does the fact that one has less leisure time necessarily imply they are working more? I guess only if you define work as everything but leisure, but Im no sure its quite so black and white.

    • Doesn’t take a brain surgeon to know rich/smart people work more than dumb/poor people.

    • Many (not all) high earners, especially extraordinarily high earners, tend to spend more time working because they love what they do. Work, for them, is play – something they’d rather do than most anything else. Its misguided to think that work must be ‘hard’ or something that ‘must’ be done rather than something one is inspired and naturally motivated to do. Some (not all) low earner spend a lot of time working because they love what they do. Its just that what they love to do isn’t well compensated. Yet their quality of life in terms of happiness and satisfaction is far greater than those who work long hours for high incomes at careers that provide little in the way of fulfillment or meaningful purpose.

    • Working hard is important measure, but how much harder a $40,000,000 earner works than a $40,000 earner.

    • If a blue collar worker or bus boy can bring millions of dollars of deals to the table, like managers do on business lunches and dinners then we can compare them.
      Sometimes I would also like to have 9-5 job, spending weekends with family instead of evenings spent in company of boring people at dinner.

    • A key component of increasing earnings is working smarter, not harder…

    • This should be pretty obvious to most people: overtime often pays off — and when it does, people will take it. We’re only talking about 5 hours between top and bottom groups here, so this is not much additional effort.

      I know lots of successful people who work a 9-10 hour day. I also know successful folks who stop at 8 because there is no reward for them, either in OT or career advancement. Labor follows rewards and stops when there is nothing to gain.

    • Oh come on, it is almost impossible to compare who “works harder”. It isn’t always the amount of time you spend “working”, it is how you use the time. Being a busboy (with only a high school diploma) rilfor 8 hours a day and then spending the rest of the time sleeping, hanging out, not doing much of anything else doesn’t necessarily compare to a PhD who works 80 hours a week, then reads up on his/her field at night or the weekends. Or even a lawyer or business person who knows how to invest or build shopping centers or building and can wheel and deal.

      The other rule that is generally in play is the more risk one is willing to take, the potential for greater rewards. Being a busboy or a 9 to 5 clerk is virtually no risk and you don’t do anything else with your time except watch TV and sleep, there is no way you are going to make much money. But someone who decides to go to college and work and has THE INTELLIGENCE to work in a very technical hard field is taking a risk that he/she will have a high-paying job in the future.

      I really really doubt that a person who only aspires to be a clerk or busboy would even be able to handle being a CEO if they even had enough brains.

    • I think there are different kinds of wealth and therefore different answers for each. For example if wealth came to someone as a result of inheritance I would say they don’t work very hard at all. If someone if self made wealthy then in my opinon they do in fact work harder. The saying that it’s better to work smarter than harder probably comes from someone that doesn’t have wealth. I think wealthy people, at least the self made folks, are simply smarter. Furthermore, every successful business owner I know works really really hard.

    • What about risk? High earnings are often related to the career risks that a lower wage earner does not take.

      I would think that’s where education and intelligence come in. A high earner may understand the value of an education and/or the value of a big name school. They may then have the intelligence and classroom education to take well considered risks that have a better likelihood of paying off. Lacking these insights (or advantages?), a low wage earner may take their risks playing the lottery or going to Vegas.

    • What makes harder work better than easier work? What should we abandon the car for a litter carried by four or more coolies? Should we like Sisphus carry a rock to the highest peak every day for no reason at all. I thought man was results oriented. Why not propel aircraft carriers by man power like the gallies of old. Go to the river to fetch water etc.

    • Why does this study use education as a “proxy” for income, instead of just income? Come on…

    • Question is flawed. “Harder” means what? What are you working at?

    • Thirty years later I still remember nothing was ever harder than swinging a pick into clay in 100 degrees (when 70 was normal). A nurse I once dating said she had to get a stillborn out of the freezer to show the parents. I can’t imagine anything harder than that.

    • they pit higher income labor (professionals, doctors, lawyers, even CEOs) versus capital.

      Rich are not the ones who work. Rich are the ones who sit around making music DVDs and living large (ie. Paris Hilton)

      Republican’s justification is that let’s not penalized the Doctors.

      But reason why Doctors and high income profesisonials pay so much taxes is that super rich refuse to pay their fair share.

      And SUPER RICH are NOT working hard. IN fact they don’t even WORK. They let wall street work with their money to make more money.

      If you work and get paid, you are labor…NOT rich by any means.

    • Rich choose to work hard or not. Doesn’t matter, mommy and daddy bought them a nice luxury condo anyway and grandparents paid their college costs in full.

      Not rich HAVE to work….and most work hard or get fired. How many people think they can keep their job if they slack off for a long time? Only really low paid jobs where nobody wants that work….

      Plus rich work hard in fun stuff like politics and other bs “work”. Poor are kept in productive work, and garbage collection, and fixing your plumbing, and chicken factory jobs. LACK OF OPPORTUNITIES due to their parent’s background.

    • Capitalism is all about getting the timing right. buy low, sell high. basically getting lucky.

      Nothing about product quality, hard work, socially benefitting work applies in getting wealthy.

    • Wealthy gamble.
      Non-wealthy produce.

      It was easy for Bill Gates to work hard at Microsoft when he knew if he failed he had million dollar trust fund waiting for him.

      Everyone else are FORCED to work hard because they have no safety net except those provided by the government. Get rid of safety nets, you will have only rich idiots doing stupid startups.

    • Wealthy work like Bush Jr. worked. Screw up everything they touch and other people’s lives.

      Society would be better if wealthy just stopped working so hard in screwing things up. Just enjoy the trust fund and work on shaping America’s culture not sticking their nose into business they know nothing about.

      It is like the CEO coming to your desk and telling you how to do your job you have been doing well for last 5 years. No matter how idiotic his advice may be you are forced to listen and do what he says against your own experience and expertise. Then he blames you when things do not work out. That’s what it is to be like in America today.

      Get off the high horse!

    • I think that both rich and poor work hard. I believe that the wealthy think and work differently (and have stated so in earlier posts on this blog). It has nothing to do with your education level — I know lots of PhD’s that have nothing and some that are wealthy.

      You need a combination of intelligence and street smarts. The people that we know who are wealthy have both. You have to be willing to sacrifice to become wealthy. You have to save money to become wealthy, and you have to invest that money in something that will grow in value. There is no magical investment that works for everyone. If you start a company and love what you do, you can work long hours and never work a minute of your career.

      Everyone we know that got rich quick, conversely got poor quick. I can’t name a since person who did so and remained wealthy. They all thought that they had “The Midas Touch” and pissed their wealth away on future ventures.

      You need to listen to become wealthy. The world is full on information floating around for free. You have to listen to what people are saying/in need of, and make that product or invest in the companies that do. How many people knew that they needed an iPhone or iPad 10 years ago — NO ONE. If you bought one share of Apple in Oct of 2002 for ~$8, it would be worth ~$600 today.

    • In my experience, you work about as hard for $10/hour as you do for $200/hour. The difference lies in how productive you are, not in how hard you work. At a $10-per-hour job, you might process files and correspondence for a small part of an enterprise. At a $200-per-hour job you are expected to build whole divisions. That is, you create the enterprise. Both are valuable work, but common sense and the market say that one is more valuable than the other.

    • It’s about working hard and smart…whatever your station in life.I just don’t see a clear division here.

    • The study’s conclusions sound about right; the noted differences between the two (four) groups are likely explained on the basis of the degree of physical and/or mental “work effort” expended to “pluck” the “low-hanging fruit” from the “high-hanging fruit.”

    • I’d just like to say that busboy’s are getting roughed up quite a bit given that, and this might be to the poster’s point, they are not read blogs on about wealth. So to be fair, I’d like to simply say that “hard work” and the corresponding work ethic that accompanies it can be equally seen both at the top and the bottom of the pay scale. The problem with most of the posters on this blog is they seem to be seeking to rationalize their career choices and worth by noting their working weekends and ambition. Just because you are paid a lot doesn’t mean you add value to the world, yes you may create money in the short term, but the test is whether your effort created long term value, as measured both in dollars and cents and in the increased quality of life of the human race. Investment bankers and lawyers are not Thomas Edison, bringing light to the world, they are getting a paycheck and, too often, nothing more.

    • I assume it is partly due to that more higher-earning people run their own business. They have a stronger will to work for themselves, which has also been well trained over their college times. If you even perceive yourself as a loser about to end up in front of TV, you certainly cannot be bothered to drag yourself through an obviously dead-end toil. Self-perception matters a lot.

    • The path to wealth is looooooooong. Usually these people study very hard at school and end up in economics/finances, medicine, engineering. Those that take less traditional pathways like no-education, fashion or become writers or artists THAT become wealthy, also know that to make a business succesful they have to work long hours.

    • Doesn’t matter whether wealthy people work more hours. Democrats will continue to claim that what they do is not real “work”, so more hours of it is irrelevant.

      One thing about the Obama’s campaign against business and wealth is that it has caused a lot of silly thinking about the wealthy to emerge. It’s not hard to understand why people who hold such simplistic views about the wealthy — ex., it is all inherited — are not themselves wealthy.

      They obviously have no idea how wealth is actually attained.

    • It’s not about working harder. It’s about working smarter. And that’s where the rich do well ….

    • My wife and I are both engineers.. we have not had a real vacation in over 10 years. Just taking a friday off with our vacation time is a god send.

    • As someone w/ family in Europe, all I can say is duh! My kids working summer jobs and after school jobs, college internships, have European young adult cousins who take yearlong sabbaticals from work to sit around on government dole bc they are “emotionally” exhausted, or a couple decide to travel around when they both lose their jobs at the same time (oh how opportune!!), and/or taking months-long summer breaks, etc etc etc. They of course love to come here for long visits, and really enjoy their American family’s hospitality and watching — and scratching their heads — while their American cousins leave early each morning for work and school. And you know what, when we look at the attitudes and conversations and even body language of these young adults, our children and their European cousins, starting out on life, the ones looking stronger, more optimistic, positive, happy, looking forward to life and future, are the Americans, our kids here in the US. I am not saying all this to gloat, but it is a fact that we have always noticed.

    • One other reason the well-off may be working more hours is because there is a shortage of people with skills and experience in certain industries (like mine). Also, it makes sense that someone who perseveres under pressure and gets results is going to be successful. A strong work ethic, money management skills, and intelligence are a winning combination in life.

    • The word leisure suggests lots of lounging and playing card games, like cribbage. If someone is forced to take part-time work, their leisure would go up!

      People are simple animals. They respond to cues and rewards. If someone feels confident that they would get some reward ($) for working harder over a duration of time, they probably would if that amount of money was enough. For someone who is poor, the prospect of killing themselves for a couple more hours per day at $8 per hour would probably not the best motivator. If it was $200 per hour, and you felt that this effort would pay enormous dividends in the future, you’d probably work those few extra hours per day. Does this mean that rich people are harder workers? Not really. It means that they may work more, but they have different rewards.

      Also, hours have been cut in this economy for many segments of the workforce. Being forced into part-time work, when you want full-time, does not mean that you are suddenly less of a hard worker. You have no choice. You can’t work more.

    • Thought there was an article which concluded that the working rich actually slept less than average. Thus a longer working day.

    • Maybe there is a bit to this … but just counting hours does not mean a whole lot. I’m fairly well to do right now, indeed, own a corporation … but have worked at every level of society (have been a busboy, a cook, even a deckhand on a Mississippi towboat). The work/leisure balance, measured strictly in hours, has actually remained pretty consistant over the years (I’m a workaholic … I’m just used to working a lot of hours.

      I make a lot more right now – but the biggest difference has nothing to do with hours worked. The towboat was extremely hard physical work … and what I’m doing now is probably a bit more pleasant … but … BUT! … I now am making daily decisions that can make or break my company. And I do not even know what “leirsure time” is. Yes, I can take a vacation whenever I want … but I’m never actually completely on vacation. Doesn’t matter whether I’m in my office, or on a beach in St. Barts … I’m probably still going to be working on a proposal for a client.

      Having done everything from minimum wage work, to running a company … I guess I’d have to say that – subjectively – II’m working immensely harder right now. But economists measuring leisure cannot even remotely capture the reason why … indeed, it tends to bias towards hourly work … because there is a bright line between work and non-work hours. When I was a cook – I punched in, and punched out. And when I was punched out … I wasn’t even remotely thinking about the restaurant. Right now? I am actually never really “off work” no matter where I am or what I’m doing. There’s no lione between work hours and leisure hours … and the risks and responsibilities are an order of magnitude greater.

      The study here is mildly interesting … but really only captures the tiniest piece of reality.

    • Not only does the unemployment business make a difference, but what about working lunches, working golf games, working weekends on the boat with the clients, etc? The higher you go, the more your life and your work are intertwined.

    • Mr Crocker — well stated. I couldn’t agree more. It is not how hard you work, but the way you work.

    • Please, get real. Successful people work 24 hours a day. Even when I’m on vacation, my mind still goes back to reviewing problems, answering emails, responding to problems from the office.

      Sometiimes I wake up at 2 in the morning with some idea/response to problems & dilemmas. Truely successful people dream of their work, there’s almost never a moment that one is not engaged.

      The Obumbles supporters and socialists are nothing but shiftless, lazy losers.

    • Yes, we work 24 hours, around the clock. The successful people who make the top earnings work extremely hard. Sometimes they manage to have a staff of hundreds of people, yet it took forever to get there. We work, sell, research, spend the hours of the morning, up till 4 am emailing on the weekends, 7 days a week. I know I work at least 18 hours a day for 7 days a week. That’s 127 hours a week at least. There are those who don’t work as hard at 40 hours a week.

    • I hate this discussion of how “hard” successful people work versus unsuccessful people. Life and business are not about the effort put in but it’s about the results attained. Self made successes are all where they are due to varying combos of balls, brains, and hustle. Yes, unless you inherited millions, you will have to work hard to be successful, but hard work does not equal success. You have to know what risks to take (risk, especially career risk and strategy is a concept unsuccessful people just cannot seem to understand). If you bust your butt as an entreprenuer and make it your potential payout will be much larger than an employee working 8 hours a week even though both of you worked just as “hard”. Your risk and potential to lose everything are also higher as an entrepreneur. If you want to be rich and successful, you will have to do more than just punch the clock and follow conventional wisdom. You will have to have the smarts to recognize good opportunities, weight risks, and work like hell to make things happen. Not everyone is built for that and that’s fine but don’t whine and complain that ALL people who have more zeroes in their bank account, better dating options, etc got where they are due to being predatory, lucky, etc.

    • sorry meant 80 hours a week, not 8

    • It’s hard work inheriting millions. Just think of the constant worry that the free marketeers might remember why we had an estate tax or Daddy might find a new bimbo, let alone the effort in keeping up with the latest tax shelters or figuring out which PAC to support to ensure that the residuals keep flowing from that “intellectual property,” the govmint keeps buying the company’s products, the Feds keep paying for the insurance that allows us to take risks without risking the family fortune, the dollar stays high and union organizing remains effectively banned. It’s a 24/365 day project just supervising the lobbyists.

      How I envy those welfare bums who sit around spending their unemployment check to pay for cable TV and cheap beer.

    • @ 11:19 — I guess that we know for sure that you are not wealthy and probably never will be. I appreciate your sarcasm.

      Folks — over 80% of the wealthy are first generation — as we are. You have to work differently to become wealthy. Contrary to the snake oil sales people on TV and books, there is no guaranteed way to be wealthy. You have to find out what works for you. It might be investing in real estate, or investing in the markets, or starting your own company. It is a journey of thousands of steps. It is up to you to decide you are going to do it and take the first step.

    • The waiter analogy is crazy. If a waiter serves the wrong drink to a client, it gets sent back. If a Doctor serves the wrong medicine to a patient, the patient can die. The waiter does not have the MENTAL work that a professional has. Same thing goes for a business man. If the business man does the “deal” wrong, it can cost the company millions of dollars. Does the waiter have that cost as a burden? What a joke.

    • Leisure time doesnt include sex?

      Most rich guys pay for it, so its probably considered business.

    • @ 10:36 $ — I think you are confusing Tiger Woods for all rich people. Look at the trouble it caused.

    • another excuse of riches for not feel guilty. Poor deserve being poor, because they are lazy. And black people deserve being jailed. because… oh, yes they are black, and that’s is bad.

    • This weeked, I was over at water tower place in chicago, and there was a long line of taxis. I asked for one to take me about 1 mile. I had luggage with me. The cabbie was mad because he said that he isnt going to take me since he wants a big “airport fare”. And kicked me out of the cab. I was willing to pay. I have never experienced that from a doctor or lawyer or business man with a client and kicking them out even if they can afford to pay, and when the customer wants their product. Obviously a different education level and work ethic. The cabbie wanted to work the least for the highest fare.

    • Mentally? Yes. Manually? Not even close. Being ensconced upon a leather-wrapped, thickly padded office chair for hours does not compare in the slightest to, say, construction or an 8-hour shift working the grill at a fast food restaurant. However, complex business decisions, etc., do take a modicum of specialized knowledge and intuition. That said, many manual trades are far from being “unskilled” – try getting the average MBA to wire a simple light switch – dollars to donuts most wouldn’t be able to do it.

    • A hamster thinks he works hard, but he doesn’t get anywhere. Working smart is a better judgement of success.

    • I think you’re conflating income levels with jobs that have ‘flexible’ hours. Someone who works a ‘fixed time’ job (e.g., construction) has a defined work period, after which there’s overtime. ‘Flexible’ hours, found in managerial or professional positions, usually require more than 40 hours/week (if you’re not underemployed). Fixed time jobs, I would argue, disproportionately are those that don’t require a college education, while the flexible hour jobs do. Given the wage premium for the college-educated, I think this could explain the pattern.

      The real test would be to compare high-wage and low-wage hourly workers (and also ‘flexible’ workers too). I’m guessing the gap disappears.

    • One of my multimillionaire friends was a janitor for 33 years before he retired. As I have said before and will say again, you have to think/work differently to become wealthy. You will work more than 40 hours a week to become wealthy. You might work 40 at a “job” and then additional hours for the passion that is going to make you wealthy. There is no simple formula to get there.

    • It is way too simplistic to be able to make the argument that higher earners “work harder” from these findings, even if the study was not intended to prove this. While I have not yet read the study for myself, my initial reaction is that there is a big difference between “working harder” and “working more hours”, which the lattar seems to be what this study examined. There is simply no easy way to compare how hard a construction worker doing physical labor for 40 hours a week, works when compared to an auditor doing mental labor for 60 hours a week (for full disclosure, I am an auditor). Additionally, there are an enormous multitude of factors that may contribute to working more or less hours, as well as the wage you earn for those hours. My point is, I believe it’s an unfair and gross distortion to deduce that higher earners work harder simply by examining the quantity of hours one reports as work.

    • Well Duh. You make your living from 9 to 5. You make your fortune from 5 to 9.

    • You made me laugh with that hamster reference Anonymous. A lot of doctors would like us to think of them as waiters when torts come flying.

    • In my 5-year study on the daily habits of wealthy and poor people I discovered that wealthy individuals do work harder. But it’s where and how they spend these additional hours that’s determinative. Weatlhy individuals spend about 10% or more of their workweek engaged in networking-type activities. They volunteer more than poor people at religious institutions, civic groups and business groups. Before and after work hours they spend time reading career-related material (books, periodicals, newsletters etc). Before and after work hours, they write articles specific to their trade for their company or for themselves in: industry trades publications, regional and national magazines, newsletters. Some write trade-related books.. Before and after work hours they do speaking engagements, seminars, presentations. I call this extracurricular activity of the financially successful career-related self-improvement activity These activities expose them to more opportunities and, in effect, they create their own luck.

    • Tom — I read your book. I wanted to see if you had come up with something else besides what we already do. I liked the chapter about the car dealer.

    • Old news. We know this already. I have taught this fact in my social stratification class for a number of years. Numerous studies in several disciplines corroborate the findings-rich people work harder. Old news.

    • The rich don’t work harder, they work more productively. Their skill-sets allow them to generate more productivity than others do. Viz., If a waitress can figure out how to handle an entire restaurant by herself, then she will reap a much higher income than those that toil as usual, and she may become wealthy selling her new waitressing system to others. Anyone who can generate more productivity in a way that also generates more wealth will gain wealth for themselves. Of course, they then need to save and invest the gains they earn in order to become wealthy.

    • All of this idea of working to create wealth presupposes that working is necessary to create wealth–but this in not true! The absolute wealthiest people on the planet never worked– they inherited their money and have been doing so for generations. While many hard workers are growing in wealth, no one is coming close on any level to the wealthiest. Do you want to know why? Basic principles about wealth have never been taught to you! They have been hidden from you for hundreds of years by those with a specific agenda. Would you like to know how you can become irresistible to wealth? Check out awaken to wealth . org (one word), a site by David Adelson.

    • The affluent I know seem to work long and smart not hard. They went to the right schools took the right classes and had the right connections to get these great positions in life. I know a 28 year old who’s wrist are shattered from swinging a hammer, not yet thirty. He works hard.

    • Kind of a stupid question because there are too many variables.

      Yeah, I know many wealthy lawyers, doctors, accountants, wall street and corporate types. With few exceptions the most successful in each of these professions works very long hours. The hours are the price you pay to get to the top and stay on top once you have a business to run or clients that demand immediate results. Now do these people work longer hours than somebody working 2 jobs at minimum wage? I don’t think so. And I didn’t see any data showing how many people work 2 jobs v. the number of people who earned their wealth by working. So kind of useless data.

      Similarly there are wealthy people who inherited their money (lucky sperm club) or who got pre-IPO jobs at a tech company that didn’t go bust (lucky job club). These people don’t work hard at all. Compare to the guy who didn’t get an education because his family didn’t have any money, and he now works as a minimum wage laborer. Who works harder?

      If anything I’d rephrase to say that the most successful people in any profession work longer hours than the less successful ones, and with that they tend to get the rewards.

    • Where is the link to the paper? Who was included in the study and who was excuded? Did it account for income from wealth verse work? Something tells Me this study has serious flaws and is biased.

    • Boraxo — I take it that you have never started a company or worked at a start-up pre-IPO. You don’t get to only work 40 hours a week when you do this if you want to become wealthy. As the owner, you reward people for the product that they produce. You will not survive, let alone get any options to speak of if you aren’t burning the proverbial candle from both ends. You have to work very hard, but it is not how hard you work. You have to work and think differently.

      Anyone can get an education if they really want one. All you have to do is to join the US military and go for the GI Bill. You will have to work hard and probably borrow some money, or go to my alma mater where there is a scholarship that only veterans are eligible to receive — wife’s scholarship recipient does not have to be a veteran. Oh yeah, I was drafted.

    • Hello,

      Being rich, Becoming rich & wealty isa peace of mind . The rest are just peaper made of trees.

    • Different people have different thoughts on work efforts so it is really difficult to judge what is one’s perspective about it.

    • this is a no brainer. except for the very few that live off of large trust funds, all do. i am not the super rich but schooled 13 years after high school before beginning my medical practice, read and studied a lot, went to required meetings 3-4 tmes a year for 1-4 days at a time for my license and was on call and up at night 25-33% of my living days and nights, including holidays, from age 24 until 58. put the calculator to that. horsefeathers to those who dont get this.

    • Absolutely the rich work longer, plan more and spend more time keeping up in their field. Work includes the years of education, years of working longer and smarter to rise in ones field and staying on top of the field. I spend hours during evenings and weekends studying to keep up. Most of my poorer friends have not been so work dedicated or as ambitious.


    • I worked a job for 10 years almost, in the summer 16 hour days are common. The reason poor people work two jobs is so they can stay afloat, trying to keep them selves out of debt. To claim wealthy people work harder simply because they work more is utter BS. Poor people take more leisure time to offset their frustration of knowing they will have a crappy retirement. Wealthy people work more now, because for every hour they put in extra now, its a month added onto early retirement, there is no early retirement for the poor.

    • A couple of observations. The main reason why most people are poor is they live beyond their means and they fail to realize the situation they are in and fail to plan how to get out (via more education (both academic and self; finding out where the opportunities are, showing initiative, be more goal oriented, practice more self contol etc). When poor people compain they need to work two jobs to stay afloat you have to ask yourself do u have cable tv? cancel it. Do you smoke or drink beer? quit. Do you know what other jobs you might strive for to make more money? plan for it. etc.

      I grew up in a poor family and that is what i saw and how i got out of the situation.

    • As a professional (with a Masters) that has served the “rich,” I have a major question: what income classes is this article referring to? What is the definition of “rich” in this article? Because it seems most of the people being educated at the college level are middle income and do work more hours only to remain middle income their entire life. However, it has been my experience, the rich make their money by owning things, not by working.

      I also agree with the comment about the “rich” working hard to retire early, whereas poor people don’t often have the luxury of retirement.

    • The rich do not work harder – are you serious? They own everything

    • @ cigarbat Anyone who works that much will regret it when on their death bed

    • This depends on how the person makes their money. Some people have inherited wealth.

      The people who are wealthy and work for a living tend to work longer hours. They are smarter, more driven and more success oriented.

    • The high earners most likely have more responsiblity and decision making tasks than the lower wage earners.

    • I wonder how hard does Chairman Ben Bernankee work to hyper-inflate the dollar…

    • Define wealthy. There is a class of wealthy that simply don’t work and indeed feel work is beneath them. There is a poor class that simply don’t work and feel work is beneath them. Both of these classes are a drain on the economy and the world’s resources and neither better than the other.

      Define hard. Is hard represented by return on effort. If so, the middle class works the hardest for the least return…and if this continues, we will see an economic crash.

      I can tell you this though; “getting to wealthy will be some of the hardest work of your life”

    • How hard you work is so irrelevant to how much you should be paid. The relevant factor is the degree of difficulty to learn and be able to do that job well. To become a doctor you go through years of schooling and training. To be a janitor you do nothing. Any person today could spend one day and become a perfect janitor, not vice versa for doctors….

    • what a stupid question? are you a POAG?

    • The real issue is WHEN those leisure hours are enjoyed. Among native-born Americans the difference between a youth spend hard at work gaining education, skills, other credentials, and early professional ascent and a youth drifting around gettting paper thin diplomas and enjoying being young. It’s not fair to compare a 50 year old working as a cashier at 7-11 40 hours a week a with a 50 year old working as a partner at Cravath, Swaine, and Moore. While they work the same hours now, who was working all night every school night at 16? Of course, some percentage of the working poor had heart-rending obstacles toward their sucess, but generally speaking a good education is available to anyone who would toil for one – and it is toil to become educated. It’s the same work be it William McKinley Public High School in Columbus, Ohio or Exeter in Massachusetts. Where were they at 16, at 20, at 24, at 28? The partner in the law firm was working 60 hours a week then, most of it unpaid and underpaid.

    • According to teabonics:
      30 minutes in the corporate write-off learjet with corporate write-off 1985 haut brion, plus another 30min in the corporate write-off chauffeured limo is labeled “work”, and two hours drive to the janitorial job is labeled a “commute”.
      3 hours of two ceos at the in-house/on-campus country club penciling out how the merger will most efficiently sc#w shareholders is “work”, and a day laborer’s 30 minute lunch break between roofing tear-offs is just a “break”.
      The biannual 3 day Bahamas tax evasion conference is “work”, and your family’s 4 day weekend at Disneyland eats 2 days of your week of vacation ‘allowance’ (after your second year of employment).
      (end teabonics)

      “Any person today could spend one day and become a perfect janitor”
      Not anybody. You can’t be significantly disabled.

      Also, superbly boring stupid work tortures your brain.

    • It isn’t what you do, it is what you do to become wealthy — it is a state of mind. As I mentioned above, one of my friends is a multimillionaire retired janitor. It isn’t what you do for a living, it is what you do to become wealthy.

    • How much you get paid depends on your productivity–and nothing else.

    • it is not physical hard work alone it is like a martial art student skill without power is useless same as power without skill but the combination of two is resultful. a combination of mental strength, good working culture to attract contacts from pontential clients, combination of strategies,mind set towards your desires or set objectives and above all displine which is very important, without displine you cant achive people have is.poor peopl have self conviction that the cant attain certan success leding to self defeat mentality .when rich play golf or go for dinner it is to attract business deals not for leisure . school does not stand alone it goes with your inner ambitions what about people who have no school dropout who employee degree holder. we all have the pontential it is what you do with it that matters. if you read about all these people with alot of money the used what the had at that time not what the did have and worked very,very hard to attain their objective try to find out how many hours they worked to have what their have you will be shocked and their just now harvesting, they are just connecting growth to their business when the play golf or go for dinner. look at what you have & use it to advantage,work hard you become one of them & other will complain too and feel that you don’t work hard, you just go for leisure, play golf and dinner and yet you don’t publish the amount of hours you work & stressful sleepless night trying to consolidate your ideals

    • I’m tired of generalizations. I have barely any leisure time. I work over 50 hours a week for six months a year and and sat and sudays for the other 6 months of the year and then with my “spare time” I do another 84 hours a year and then research and self training for whatever skill I need to master. I invest a lot of time …like working two jobs to someone who works a typical 35 hrs work week. I don’t get pd for lunch..I get paid for billable hours….no time to bullshit over coffee or the water cooler nor make or take personal I have to take vacation time to do when I get sick I eat into vacation time too.

      Ps why the heck would Obama call someone making over 125k rich ??

      I work to hard for my salary. Everyone else is welcome to do the same. I don’t have a pension waiting for me either and I had to pay back 200k in student loans and credit cards to get thru college….and that was eating Ramon foods and pizza and chinese food. Didn’t start saving money to buy a house until I was 42.

      I never had entitlement issues. I had an abusive childhood. Never got any assistance Fri the govt. I got off my mass and made sure I could support myself. Worked fulltime and went to school full time.

      Stop feeling sorry for yourselves and do something ..stop looking for pitty and handouts.

    • Yes, rich people may work harder, no question about it. But the payscale is definitely rigged far in favor of the rich. A CEO may take home 150-times the median pay (not even including bonuses, and other corporate benefits). Do you think the CEO works 150 harder than his/her average employee?

      To add insult to injury, CEO pay is not even tied to company performance. Often, the highest paid CEOs do the most damage, but they parachute out rich and unscathed.

    • Comparing earnings to number of hours worked per week is like comparing a little leaguer’s efforts to a pro. Our society rightly values certain labor more than other labor. The heart surgeon who spends eight hours on a heart transplant operation can’t be compared to a utility meter’s eight hours of work. Both offer society value, but not the same value. The marketplace will determine the proper level of earnings each should receive. If earning a lot of money is important to a person, then they should pursue the skills that will result in a job that pays a lot of money. If a person elects not to put in the effort required to get a high paying job, that is fine, of course. What is not fine though, is when this person, abetted by politicians, points to the rich and blames their miserable station in life on factors other than their own poor choices.

    • There is no linear relationship between work and wealth. I have been writing about this for a long time here. You have to think about money differently. You need to find what people need, start your own company and fill that want. Sometimes it is not obvious — look at Apple and the iPhone, etc.

      The second way is to invest to become wealthy. It would take more space than is here to explain it. Suffice to say, buy stocks of companies that you like to do business with. Look at the information, learn about stocks, and buy when these stocks are at a good value. Then hold on to them for a while and sell to make a profit. Do not day trade — you will lose your shirt.


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    • Two things about this article need clarification. What does working “harder” mean—–physically more difficult? mentally more difficult? longer hours? What does wealthy mean? Is it someone who has $1 Million, $10 Million, $100 Million……………$100 Billion? My own definition would be longer quality hours——-a special knowledge applied for a long time—–that would be working harder. I’d say someone worth $100 Million is wealthy. It may be that someone with $20 Million is also wealthy but it depends on the quality and liquidity of the assets.

    • This article is completely misleading, and just like Romney’s recent comments trying to apply irrelevant statistics to make an argument. Even when rich work more, do they earn proportionate to their efforts. It looks like there are only few hours difference between the amount of time rich and poor work, YET rich are 100 times richer.

      Also, education seems to be a huge factor. So do poor people work less because they simply make less to begin with? I hear one investment banker telling me that 5 min meeting with him costs him $30k. Of course he will spend every waking hour on the job.

      So rich work 2 – 3 hours a week more, but 100 time richer? This article needs to study earnings per calorie burned, but then again, that would cross into some fussy math territory for so many conservatives.

    • While all this talk about entitled 47% of the country, conservatives are the biggest whiners on this this forum. “Oh we work so hard” “Oh we are so responsible” “Oh if only these moochers left us along” “Oh poor me!” GET OVER IT! ever one works hard, and the government is there to keep us from go back to barbarian ages. Taxes should not be too high, they should not be too low. Current debt level is clear indication that tax cuts went too far. Bad economy does not help, but these entitlements are there so that this country can still claim to be a part of “developed” world, which we are so behind. Socialized medicine, infrastructure, meaningful regulation, just like national highway system, are desperately needed to have any chance to compete with the rest of the world. We need to find the way to take business back from China and India, not to cut more taxes and hope that trick down economy somehow will translate into jobs.

    • I work about an average of 60 hours a week and im middle class.

    • I work about 60 hours a week 12-14 hour days usually

    • My bad, web glitched and I thought it failed to post

    • Kiki/Luki — Education and the amount of hours you work are not good measures. If you read my old posts you will see that I talk about being educated and being smart — they are very different things. I know/had many Phd who worked for me that never became wealthy. I know a 50 year old retired janitor who is very wealthy.

      You have to work differently. You can be an engineer or flip burgers, but if you only work 40 hours a week and never do anything to improve your life/wealth, then don’t expect things to get better. I think, from experience, that business owners work continuously. You are never really “not working”, even when you are on a vacation. That is not true for a salaried or hourly worker.

      You are mistaken about whiners here — the Democrats are whining because they don’t feel that they are being fairly paid for the hours that they work. When was the last time a poor person gave you a job? I know very few Democrats who own businesses. Some were Dem’s when they started, but most have become Repub’s after becoming an owner and dealing with the government. The US tax rate drives companies to do manufacturing overseas. There are thousands of US companies who have subsidiaries overseas with hundreds of billions of dollars. The money will not be returned to the US because the tax rates are too high. You cannot create jobs here when the money is somewhere else.

      Taxes are a big problem for businesses. It is called “cash flow”. Anyone (and there are lots of people on this forum) who says taxes don’t matter is either BS’ing you or owns a company with only a couple of people. The US has the highest business tax rate in the entire world — 35%. Taxes are paid off of the bottom line in business. Sure, you can buy something and get a tax break — another foolish suggestion, as you only get the benefit for the tax rate percentage of the purchase. You still have to pay the delta.

      We whine about the US infrastructure, but almost any country in the world would be ecstatic if they had our infrastructure. Gasoline taxes are in place to maintain roads, bridges, etc. There would be more than enough money if the government didn’t steal it for something else. We have too much regulations in place in the US. I do not want socialized medicine, as is sucks everywhere in the world that it is in place, big time.

    • Pleased to be here and see this. Many thanks for sharing.
      Meat processing

    • Units would be helpful in this article, but I will assume you mean “hours per week,” and I am leary of the notion that a drop from 34.4 hours per week to 33.2 could be defined as a burden. It’s only 1.2 hours. Maybe the highly educated tend to have longer commute times? Maybe they are more likely to eat lunch and bill it to the office? It’s true that they probably have more emails to deal with in their jobs, which may explain the difference the best, but 1.2 hours a week seems worth all of the extra money, savings, retirement funding, paid vacation time and general security.

    • Most of this is extremely silly! I might spend more hours than some low wage earners, but I definitely do not work harder than laborers! That kind of work is really, really hard. My vote for the most difficult work is those persons who work for a moving company. Compare your soft cushy job with that!

    • Another Question would be the quality of leisure time. Sitting at home watching TV vs. sailing on your private yacht.

    • Operating my first business, a 36 year old friend had a heart attack. In a subsequent discussion, he said, “I have to start working smarter, not harder.” Additionally, one might inspect their focus and generate a goal based action plan to obtain the economic benefits they wish to achieve. Traditionally, long work weeks do correlate with additional wealth, this does not appear to be disputable.

    • harder or longer or both? took me 7300 days of study and training to age 34 before hanging out my shingle,including military service. and 32 years of working about every third to forth weekend, holiday. is that hard.? who knows. retired now. yawn!


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    • I do not think that the wealthy work more than the middle class. I am a college student and last year I averaged 60 hours of work a week, part of which was grave shifts. On top of that I went to school full time. I know others who have rich parents that will pay for their school, and others who are taking out lots of loans to pay for school. I work pretty hard to be able to pay my way through my bachelors degree. When I go to graduate school I will most likely have to take out lots of loans and end up in debt, but I doubt that people from wealthy families have felt the pure exhaustion of working 48 hours straight, and then going to class all day and trying to do well in school. (for me school is my way to move up the economic ladder). I can almost guarantee most of those who came from wealthy parents have never had to work 2 or 3 jobs while trying to go to school full time. (I have a coworker who is currently doing that.) So to say they work “harder” seems a little unrealistic to me. Sure now that they have a great job they might work more hours, but compare how they got there to someone else who came from a poor family and you will quickly see that the poor person has worked harder his entire life. While the person from the rich family got to sit back and have their parents pay for things. Hands down the middle class works harder than the upper class. I would love to meet a CEO (who came from a wealthy family) who had to pay their way through school, while working multiple minimum wage jobs/and taking out debt. I bet I would have to search far and wide to find that person. Yet I could easily go down the block I am on right now and find people who have worked their way through school, taken out debt, and still work 60 hours a week to just get by in the “middle class”. The middle class work themselves to death in this country trying to reach the almost unattainable upper class.

    • Maybe,self employed business owners take their work home with them. As a small business owner myself,I know that my mind is always there. My life work experience says a CEO picking out the color to paint the toilet is easier work, than painting the thing. I spent many hours on the golf course,with executives.They count that as work too.The boss is only as good as his employees.The guy I feel for is the mid-level execs. These poor folks are always at the BECK AND CALL of the bosses. Modern technology has created a new kind of slavery.

    • I don’t think they work harder. They work smarter.

    • NPR once broadcast an interview with a Merrill Lynch broker who bought and sold McDonalds stock. As an experiment, the broker had worked for half a day behind a McDonalds counter. He told the interviewer that working at McDonalds was dramatically more difficult than working as a stock broker selling the company’s stock. He was very happy to leave the store and return to his desk.

    • Do you think higher earners work harder?

      Yes I do. I think the most successful ones love what they do, that it is more fun than leisure to them. And others are so driven by a goal that it is very difficult for them to slow down even for a little bit – they feel off time is wasted time.

    • You work differently when you are wealthy. You have to make your money work for you. Money will work 24 hours a day without rest. It never gets tired. You can start with a small amount — a few hundred dollars, but you have to start. After you do, the results are slow at first, but they will come if you did a good investment. Hang in there Tyler.

      There is an old saying “You make your living from 9 to 5. You make your fortune from 5 to 9.” Many people stop working after 8 hours.

    • Wealthy do work harder because they want to become wealthier and this study shows this in the article. However, I think that anyone can work hard based on motivation and where and what they want to be in life no matter what socioeconomic class you are in.

      Jamie Scharf, Tulane University: Freeman School Student

    • I think the wealthy WORK SMART and sometimes they read a lot of things. they read blogs like the freakonomics, naked capitalism. wsj, books of seth godin, francis kong, vivek sood. books like the 5-star business network, marketing lies are the thing that keeps these wealthy people in the top of the wealthiest on earth

    • I grew up on a council estate in a dysfunctional family, so I think I definitely qualify as working class. It is POSSIBLY true that the rich work longer hours, but I am certain that they do not work harder. For example, I did a cleaning job for a few years in a solicitors office, and anyone who has ever cleaned for a living will tell you how back-breaking this work is. I think the jobs that the rich do are more to do with ‘mental capacity’ (lawyers, psychiatrists, bankers e.t.c.). Working class jobs are ‘physical’ (builders, painters and decorators, and CLEANERS)! Also, there is another VERY good reason why the rich PERHAPS work longer hours. MONEY INCENTIVE. The rich get paid handsomely for the jobs that they do. If I was to tell you the pittance that cleaners get paid, you would not believe me.

    • Better educated people tend to make higher wages. This increases their cost of leisure. Therefor you would expect a “leisure gap.” Better educated wokers make more money; leisure costs them more so they consume less leisure. Less educated workers earn less; leisure costs them less, therefor they consume more of it. My brother-in-law is a radiologist, he makes a pile of dough. He works all the time. I would too.

    • Yes, unless you were born with it, you need to work your a$$ off to get rich. What do you think I was born making a six figure salary? I had to work 70 hour weeks and travel around the country on a moments notice working for a big consulting firm. People in the investment banks and big law firms work even longer hours. Sure, the work isn’t as physically demanding as working in a warehouse or construction site. It just wears on your soul.

    • 生まれ付きとか受け付けたことがないのでアルバイトや長期働き続けている。貧困への解決案です。叶えられるように設定可能である？改革？ですね！１００倍でリテラシー、コミュニケーション、バッチリ？報酬？欲しくて！(笑)応援して下さい。根拠のビジネスモデル！お初ですのでよろしくお願いいたします。確実に有効活用ガイド付きのビジネスチャンス大特集するように設定方法です。ずっと

    • Let’s include the scope of this to include people who work hard at saving too. My wife and i are 68 and have accumulated 15 years of income in liquid assets. And our Social Security income will be 50% of our income because we refused earlier instant gratification and deferred hers till 66 and mine till 70. Yes we worked hard but always lived well beneath our means in order to max out our retirement accounts. We are not bazillionaires, but are “rich” compared to many others in our income bracket. But we might be guilty of doing something wrong, as there are Democrats out there who want to do means testing and punish us for being “lucky”. They would tax of our money and give it to others who vote for Democrats, just like what they would do to the hard working earners who also were “lucky”.

    • We were born poor. We are now fairly wealthy. It has to do with working smart and probably different than the average person does. You have to research what you are going to invest in if you are going to become wealthy. You can invest in anything — stocks, real estate, private company, whatever.


    • This article smacks of justification for why “rich” people should get so much more money than “poor” people It’s because the “rich” people work 5-10 more hours per week than a “poor” person. Really? That’s your justification for the disparity in earnings? A totally dishonest reason in my estimation.

      Just pay people a decent wage and be done with it already.

    • In my opinion, this research is not only full of gaps itself, but serves no purpose other than to continue developing anger between the wealthy and the poor rather than trying to help address the wealth inequality issue in the US. I have one question – Did anyone measure the number of those working hours (on either side of the coin) spent on the internet watching cat videos?

    • Leslie — wealth inequality is not an issue as there is no set amount of wealth in the world — no one gets poorer because someone else gets richer. It movement varies as new products come and go. Read about the Tulip fiasco in the Netherlands in 1637.

      Something like 80% of the people who are wealthy are first generation as we are — source The Millionaire Next Door. People continually come into and go out of this set of people.

      We are currently listing to political spin in the news — notice how the Hollywood set who complain about this are themselves very wealthy. When is the last time you saw one of them give away all of their monies? Never. Michael Moore and George Clooney are my favorite hypocrites here.

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