re: No vacation nation

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More power to you, bro. I am simply arguing that Americans, more so than other occidental people, have an affinity to work. If you disagree, that's fine.

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No, you went a step further and implied our lack of vacation time is a conscious desire on the part of Americans to WANT to work more. You also invoked "incentives" to explain this fact, apparently entirely unaware that if we incentivized working less via govt mandate American employees would immediately lose their--as you suppose--inherent predisposition towards hard work.

There is nothing ab being American that makes one work harder. Citizenship does not confer a Herculean work ethic. Americans work harder bc of the system we've set up, and if you emigrated to Finland tmrw your children would have a work ethic similar to the natives. There is plenty of scientifically backed evidence showing that working extreme hours isn't worth the social cost, and it makes for less productive and less happy workers. We should strive to change it.

BTW, America's status as the premier economy has everything to do with out abundant natural resources, our ocean borders, and our population size, not some romantic notion of out ability to outwork our neighbors.