>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.