Do countries succeed because they work hard? Is it that simple?

[Hypercop]

I noticed a while back that of the top countries in terms of GDP, all of them are known for having a culture of hard work. America has the protestant WASP work ethic, Japan has "juku" cram school culture (and had 6-day school weeks until very recently), and China has 996 work culture which we all know about. I tried to think, "Are there any countries on earth known for their strong work ethic", and all that came to mind is Germany, which wouldn't you know it, is #3 on the GDP list.

I also get the feel that America used to be a much harder working country. Like conjure up a mental image of your white, working American man of the 1950's, and you're thinking up some guy in a trenchcoat and felt hat who spends his entire day out at the factory or office, and mostly gets home around the time his family goes to bed. Some days they have dinner without him.

Is it strange to think that America is only a global superpower because it used to have millions of capable men working really hard every day? I feel like this is a very "boomer" talking point that younger conservatives rarely want to dip their toes into, and if pressed they'd mostly want to address it like, "Okay, it's true that we used to work harder, but we stopped working harder because XYZ". But they struggle to deny the idea that countries improve to the degree that their citizens work hard. What do you think?

 

[The Blue Morpho]

The work ethic is part of it. So are pro-social attitudes and behaviors. Things like being on time and keeping your word, in contrast to the hereditary dishonesty exemplified by things like Jewish treachery or Indian Izzat.

These factors all descend from a different, common factor: race. Western/Northern Europeans and, to a lesser extent, East Asians are the secret civilizational sauce. Trying to abstract what makes a society work from demographics ultimately just leads one back to demographics with extra steps. For example, you point to 1950's America as being especially productive and prosperous. Compare the demographic makeup of the USA then to now and tell me I'm wrong.

If you have a country made up of high-IQ pro-social white people everything works better. You replace them with mud-people who are 15-30 IQ points lower and have no connection to the norms and values that define the country and it goes to shit.

 

[One Winged Pear Farmer]

No it has zero to do with it, countries that take care of their workforce succeed. If hard work created success you wouldnt see decades of sweat shops in the developing world. Germany, Japan, and the US arguably have the most serious work ethic in the developed world and they are all facing demographic and economic crisis

 

[Hypercop]

You replace them with mud-people who are 15-30 IQ points lower and have no connection to the norms and values that define the country and it goes to shit.

I've gotten bored of this whole "mud people" obsession. It's true, but I think it's only part of the truth. For example, the right loves to suck off Scandinavia to a pretty intense degree and I've never understood this. 1000 years ago they were busy raping and looting the most civilized part of Europe, and even now they contribute hardly anything to the world outside of a few big companies. They're peaceful and wealthy, yes, and they don't burn down their own cities, but that's a low bar. If we want to talk about why the United States is a global superpower, the answer is not that we had people behaving like Swedes and Danes. We had Anglos, who are very obviously different.

 

[CAPTAIN HAPPY]

Bullshit.
'Hard work' is your nigger protestant faggotry to keep the lower classes sweating their ass off in shit jobs while the elites reap the shit and demand you say thank you to them for having your wagecuck job with no real benefits.
Working smart, as in, maneuvering industry where you need to, guaranteeing your low classes good wages and good benefits so they'd live where they're at and spend their money withing your own economy is the real shit.
You also need a functional political system that's not a bunch of retarded populist niggers like in America or NPC coded bureaucrats wasting time and money on ecological bottle caps and other ridiculous, useless shit like in the EU.
What you need is a system of efficient dullards and autists who can maneuver and compromise between a societies' ideological differences and make sure it's working efficiently at its own pace, not at the pace of some lunatic faggot robber barron gigalionaire leech.

There's a Jewish saying, that the Jews don't uphold themselves tho, that you can judge a society by how it treats its lowest members. If you stomp them down and be smug about it, get ready for relentless unrest and your system to explode in your face. If you manage your society well, everyone benefits. That is until the retarded degenerates overtake culture and institute pornographic mandates and lunatic troon bullshit or whatever.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

"Hard work" is too blunt.
Hard work is not by itself prosperity and neither is GDP. GDP is an aggregate spending statistic that can be inflated or made misleading by state spending, debt, monetary distortion, and activity that does not represent genuine wealth production.

I noticed a while back that of the top countries in terms of GDP,

That is, if your question is "why do high-GDP countries have high GDP?", the framing is already broken.

The better question is whether human effort is being converted into real value.
For instance, a man can work hard in a sweatshop. A slave can work hard. A Soviet worker could work hard. A bureaucrat can work super hard producing obstacles and red tape for everyone else. None of these things by themselves tell you whether the work is productive, voluntarily chosen, guided by real prices, amplified by capital, disciplined by profit and loss, or directed toward actual consumer demand.
Not saying hard work doesn't matter, but it is a multiplier and not the root cause of prosperity. Hard work multiplies the structure in which it operates. In a productive order, discipline, punctuality, skill, thrift, and long-term planning compound into wealth and prosperity. In a bad order, the same effort gets burned up by predation, regulation, inflation, bureaucracy, corruption, make-work, and political allocation.

Ultimately, countries do not succeed simply because people work hard.
The reality is that individuals act, entrepreneurs allocate, workers produce, savers defer consumption, capital accumulates, and prices provide coordination. Property rights let people plan beyond the next confiscation, and voluntary exchange turns specialized labor into general prosperity. Without such a structure, "hard work" is just exhaustion with better PR.

 

[Unredacted TND]

No, countries succeed if their people have high IQs.

Having natural resources or other geopolitics advantages help, but IQ is the most important component.

Of course, having a small portion of "very high IQ" people in a generally medicore Q population may give the country a boost it otherwise would not have.

 

[Hypercop]

For instance, a man can work hard in a sweatshop. A slave can work hard. A Soviet worker could work hard.

...but do we know that most sweatshop workers and slaves actually work hard?

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

...but do we know that most sweatshop workers and slaves actually work hard?

If they weren't, I would have replaced the overseer by now.