The degree to which the United States continues to be successful even though people here, on average, don't work as hard as people in east Asia, on average, is

The degree to which the United States continues to be successful even though people here, on average, don't work as hard as people in east Asia, on average, is a puzzlement to east Asians. My take on the situation is that the founders of the United States were largely people who worked very hard indeed, and they were probably in the top rank in the world of that time in how hard they worked. Thus the United States still has accumulated resources (not just capital resources, but a society structured on the basis of sounder rule by law) that gives it a long-term advantage, allowing many Americans now to become complacent. It is a fact that most east Asian countries have been growing economically and improving socially at a faster rate than the United States has during my adult lifetime, so they could catch up[1] (and then, perhaps, have many inhabitants decide to take it easy). I shared this link, after reading it, with my Facebook friends as I waited to see if it would bubble up to the front page of Hacker News. Sure enough, several of my American-born, American-raised friends thought that the article describes a situation of east Asian toil that they don't desire to emulate. A south Asian friend of mine gave the post a thumbs up, and went back to work without commenting further. The stored-up wealth of the United States also prompted a comment from another Facebook friend, also brought up and born in the United States: "I believe the following: 1. America enjoys success today largely because of immigrant labor, not American labor. 2. American universities are still far and away the best in the world, but they are getting worse rapidly. 3. American universities increasingly serve foreign students, not American students. 4. Investing in America is far safer than anywhere else in the world because of such organizations as the SEC. 5. People hate the SEC rules and are looking for ways around them with increasing success, in large part because the investors are foreign and not used to such rules. "I am reminded of the fall of Sparta." One observation of this phenomenon I heard around the most recent turn of the century was from Christians in Taiwan: "It looks like God is blessing Americans for observing the Sabbath, as they surely don't work as hard as we do here." People grasp for all kinds of easy explanations for the difference in recent outcomes between the United States and east Asia (I refute another too frequently heard, too simple and just plain flat wrong explanation below another comment in this thread), but surely the explanation for this phenomenon, as for plenty of other phenomena of differences between countries, is multifactorial and subject to change over time. [1] http://www.globalpost.com/globalpost-blogs/southeast-asia/singapore-richest-country http://www.globalpost.com/globalpost-blogs/southeast-asia/si...