>the idea of working day and night to earn "a lot more" feels like game theory.

Yeah because it is a prisoners dilemma type situation. If everyone starts working harder but people don't start consuming harder there is less work to be done which consolidates work to the hardest working members without actually helping the overall economy.

The economy wants 10 cars (aggregate demand), 10 people build 10 cars, 5 decide to build them twice as fast which means 10 cars are being built which means the last 5 don't have to work but they also didn't get paid and cannot afford the 5 extra cars which means aggregate demand is now 5 cars and some of the hard workers also get fired. If everyone built one car then nobody would be worse off.

https://youtu.be/EKd6WURBqOY

That example is too simplistic.

The root cause of working day and night is to maintain or increase your socioeconomic position so that you are able to obtain scarce (demand greater than supply) resources when you want to. This can apply on a tribal level (family all the way to country and alliances).

For example, large amounts of people around the world want avocados all the time all year round, but there are insufficient avocados to go around. How are the limited number of avocados allocated?

Wrong. It's not a football match. There's no upper limit. If some needs are fulfilled, new ones (that used to be unimportant) appear. No enough cars for everyone, you produce cars. If the demand is fulfilled, you produce personal planes, etc. ad infinitum. Wrist watches were once unaccessable and kind of unnecessary for the majority, too. Just like stockings and other things that were once considered luxurous. EVeryone will find their niche.

> last 5 don't have to work but they also didn't get paid

The last 5, being uncompetitive in car building, ought to choose a different field for which they are competitive. If they don't work, they don't eat and thus drop out of "the game".

Look I think “work to live not live to work” is a great philosophy, and one that probably makes for a fulfilling life. But virtually everything you take for granted about modern civilization only exists because of work-obsessed lunatics.

At the very least if someone chooses to work day and night to build, society should be celebrating them— not discouraging them. It may be bad from their perspective, but civilization as a whole cannot advance without people like this. All of the rest of us are free-riding off people like this both past and present.

I think it’s really great the European culture of la vita dolce. But the reality is virtually all new products and companies come from places with less cultural aversion to working nights and weekends than The Continent.

A fun point that I would also temper a bit by saying those work obsessed lunatics do what they do with lots of support from the plebs around them (friends, family, employees).

Work-obsessed lunatics are like that even without 'unreasonable' amounts of profits.

Greed-obsessed lunatics is a different subset ( with overlap ) but play a very different role in societies.

Your view of innovation on The Continent is likely 10% true and 90% PR. You just don't think about innovations as European because we don't put faces on companies.

But your standard of living largely comes from people who step out of that comfort zone, work hard and take economic risk… Your local pizza guy or startup founder, are those the people you call “meat robots”?

>Your local pizza guy or startup founder

Won't someone spare a thought for the minimum-wage, physically-risky lifestyle of the startup founder?! And you need your own car! You know, it's a more dangerous job than being a cop!

...oh, oh wait, that's pizza guy, sorry, I too get those "jobs" confused all the time!

The pizza guy and the startup founder does have some things in common though: they live outside the comfy Swedish 9-to-5 mainstream, and could both be seen as “meat robots” I guess, if you are so inclined.

>> You know, it's [amoré]

FTFY

> your standard of living largely comes from people who step out of that comfort zone, work hard and take economic risk

Citation needed for the above.

Maybe their standard of living largely comes from the high taxes imposed on the rich. Or maybe it comes from decades of free education, or maybe from the oil reserves of some scandinavian states.

Or maybe we just don't know; and that's ok too. I'm just saying that we shouldn't be so sure that the protestant work ethic is the necessary and sufficient thing for a good standard of living.

Soviet had all of those, but didn't allow risk taking founders. So far not a single country which doesn't enable risk taking founders to create big companies has succeeded in creating a good economy. So the data is really in the risk taking founders favor.

Virtually all improvements in living standards occur from the creation of new, more efficient products. Virtually all new products are created by risk-taking entrepreneurs, or very close equivalents inside larger corporations.