No point in working hard if the system is set up so that there is no bare minimum standard for quality of life in return for that hard work. Yes, someone working full-time for minimum wage should be able to afford a studio apartment on their own. There is absolutely no fucking good reason that the cost of a roof and four walls in the shitty part of town should be in excess of 30% of what a full-time worker is making on minimum wage. You want to know why people aren't working hard anymore? Because working hard and being a good employee just means you get more hours for the same fucking pay as somebody working less than you. It means that if your boss finds out that you have something going on outside of work, he will deliberately schedule you so that you have to miss it. It means that you will be treated worse than the lazy employees. Our culture is completely fucked up with how we treat our workers and how we treat the people who keep the entire fucking system standing. People work like dogs to get less than table scraps while somebody who basically lives like a parasite on society gets to make out like a fucking bandit. Where's the incentive? There's a lot of disincentive but not really much good reason to actually work your ass off. The name of the game is to work smarter not harder now