> Is that true? I honestly don't know, but my intuition is that it's true for a certain subset of projects and not others. Good point. I cannot offer you proof

> Is that true? I honestly don't know, but my intuition is that it's true for a certain subset of projects and not others. Good point. I cannot offer you proof, although if you polled people who have lived in multiple countries, including the US, you would probably find a majority of them agree. Also, at the very cutting edge of technology, I think even small things can kill ideas, and the US probably does the least damage to the idea while it is taken from germination to profit. Maybe it is that small subset which has a cascading effect on the rest (e.g. Google, whose extraordinary financial success in search certainly cascaded into many things which touch people's lives directly). Interestingly, I have made this comment at what is sleeping hours in the US but is more closer to work hours in many other places around the world. And till now this is the only comment which has raised this question despite HN's global audience - not that I am not glad you asked the question, I am just saying that it is not meeting with a ton of resistance (yet). On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if my point is completely refuted with a mountain of evidence in the next few hours :-) > Even if it is true, is the origin of that truth "working harder"? I sincerely doubt that. My point is that everything is a sort of multiplicative factor when it comes to the size of the economy, and a nation where people are working nearly 25% more time than other nations (or at least the ones being compared here) can be a pretty significant boosting factor, especially when it is combined with the availability of resources and the productivity associated with what is called "human capital". > If I had to guess, the availability of capital is the leading cause. And that capital came from somewhere, but it wasn't all hard work. Not to say that the US has never made mistakes, I think they have at various times abused the power of their economic and military strength for mobilizing capital to their advantage (to put it really mildly). I don't know how to account for its effect.