It's one of many mutually reinforcing factors. I'm not trying to assign blame here (of which there is plenty to go around), but observing a dynamic. That dyna

It's one of many mutually reinforcing factors. I'm not trying to assign blame here (of which there is plenty to go around), but observing a dynamic. That dynamic is essentially that success begets success. If you have a population that has the experience, from an early of age, of teams where everybody works hard at an uncertain goal and accomplishes their objective, it builds more than just the objective. It also builds trust among the team and the population in general; it builds a number of ancillary skills that were necessary to accomplish the objective; and it builds courage, and the belief that even if obstacles look hard, they can be surmounted. If you set out to build & market a computer game by yourself and fail, you've accomplished a lot more than failure. You've also taught yourself to program; taught yourself game design; taught yourself graphic design; taught yourself marketing and differentiation; taught yourself how to listen to early users and make decisions; and taught yourself perseverance. And conversely, if you have a society where corporate leaders habitually throw young employees into the meat grinder, burn them out on busywork, and pay them little, there will be very little incentive for these employees to do anything other than put in the bare minimum amount of work and spend the remainder of their workday on Facebook or HN. They build no ancillary skills; they learn distrust rather than trust; they learn that perseverance is a waste of time; and they learn nothing about how to break down big goals and make them achievable. Say that a nation full of the former has to compete (either economically or militarily) with a nation full of the latter. Who do you think is going to win? There's nothing wrong with "Work smart, and look after yourself & your family" from the perspective of an individual. There is something gravely wrong with it from the perspective of a nation, which has effectively disintegrated at that point. We're talking about national currencies, which are an abstraction of the national economy as a whole. If there is no national economy, but a bunch of independent producers who search for whatever personal advantages they can get for themselves, that national currency is not going to be worth much.