> Nope, he says this because Americans have a thing called the Protestant work ethic, whereas many Europeans have exactly the opposite of this.

This divergence is greatly exaggerated. Where do you think those hard working Protestants came from?

The main reason European countries are not as wealthy as the US is that they are all much smaller, and linguistic, cultural, and bureaucratic differences make pan European business much harder. You generally have very few large companies that operate in multiple European countries, in comparison to the US.