Europeans like to attach character faults to Americans, but they don’t usually accuse them of being lazy. If anything, Europeans tend to suspect that American work too hard. Statistics confirm that Americans work longer hours than Europeans. In addition, Americans don’t relax once they have made it:
Today’s richest people are both the highest-paid wage-earners and the richest capitalists. We define the homoploutic class as those in the top decile by labor income (e.g., salary), capital income (e.g. interest and dividends) and total income, and we find that roughly 30% of the top American income decile qualifies — that is, 3% of the total U.S. population […] Compare this to Mexico, where the homoploutia sits below 1% of the overall population. There, capitalism still runs on the classical pattern: the rich don’t work for a wage, and the well-paid doctors or lawyers don’t own enough property to reach the top decile of capitalists. The same holds in Brazil, Peru, Colombia. Richer countries fall in between — the homoploutic class in Spain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden all cluster around 2-2.5% of the population. The United States is the most extreme case, which makes it a case worth studying.
This is from Branko Milanović and Nils Gilman writing in Noema magazine.
