I’m not saying thall everyone who follows the Protestant work ethic is Protestant, I’m just referring to it by its common name.
If TV’s and cars are produced in enough numbers to be cheap, the poor may still have them. Poverty is about lack of power, opportunity, and autonomy, more than about material culture.
When the Europeans came to the US, they were fleeing “divine” kings in Europe. They brought their fairy tales full of princesses, their racism, & their (to coin a phrase) class neurosis. Today Americans lionize the rich and hate the poor. I don’t expect Americans of European descent are as a rule culturally or intellectually prepared for a progressive democracy even now.
I think this is probably fair. Spain maintained a sort of kleptocracy in the Americas, & eventually saw it break into local quasi-nation-states, rather like Rome before, or the kingdom of Charlemagne. (Not that Charlemagne was a kleptocrat. Agh, too many half-parallels.)
Canada was under the protection of the English Crown from 1763 on. And while Canada as such was French, Newfoundland and BC were “founded by Brits” and grafted on.
Métis are French-Canadian, though.
And being treated like small children is better than being treated like Grendel.
Also, Qin/Curtis, you’re repeating self-congratulatory stereotypes put forth by Protestantism-boosting Anglos in the last two centuries. I suspect the lionization of the Protestant work ethic suffers from perspective bias.
incidentally, I suspect that pinguin is forgetting the role of German immigrants in the formation of Chilean national character as we now know it. I don’t know how disciplined were Spanish soldiers back in the day, but in 19th century Germans played an outsized role in Chilean industry and the military. Draft-based military can have quite an impact on psychology of generations of men subject to it, for good or ill. And late 19th century military of Chile seems to have been well-run and popular, especially thanks to their 1871 successes against Peru and Bolivia.
I know that’s true, why else would anyone pick up help from the parking lot at Home Depot; but from here it seems to Americans, rightly or wrongly, that for some reason Mexicans don’t work very hard in Mexico, obviously they don’t, because Mexico is such a shithole.
Of course, there are many parts of the world where people break their backs working and yet remain poor all their lives. Perhaps the “Protestant work ethic” is merely an unquestioned and untrue cultural assumption that hard work will always be enough to make things better.
as the saying goes, “work smarter not harder”. Or, be like the Germans and do both simultaneously. Then you will not need to make any “assumptions” about things getting better since everything will be great already in a country like Germany.
Of course, if you would rather prefer the sort of leaders who put up big heroic murals and battle evil schemes of various nefarious capitalists, then you end up with a country more like Mexico. Or maybe like certain other country in the Western Hemisphere where heroic murals are coming into vogue as well.
I don’t think there’s any ethnic or cultural group that has a monopoly on a work ethic. Every group is going to have some ambitious go-getters and every group is going to have lazy bums.
The United States has benefited from being a desirable destination for immigrants (this is part of the arable land theory). If you were an ambitious villager in some country looking to get ahead, you would think about going to America, the proverbial land of opportunity. America is a country full of people whose ancestors were willing to make the leap to something better.
We should still be encouraging this. I figure if there’s a guy in some little Mexican village who’s willing to walk a thousand miles to get work in America, then that’s a guy who we want in America.
What makes America great is we got all the poor people from other countries who wanted to stop being poor. Those other countries kept all the poor people who were willing to let it slide.
(It works for smart people too. America has a great university system that attracts students from all over the world to come here and study. And what happens is about half of the foreign students who come to America for a college education end up staying in America. It’s like we’re stealing the smartest people from every other country on Earth.)
Germany grows slower than Brazil, Chile or Colombia. :rolleyes:
Yes, Germany is a rich country with a high standard of living, so they can take it easy now. It is harder to get from poor to rich, though, at least a country is lucky the get oil or some easy money.
However, in the long term it pays to work hard.
It is nothing genetical, but is a matter of mentality of the people. And people learn and change.
There were a fair number of German-Mexicans as well. Which gave us the great glory of Negro Modelo, one of my favorite everyday beers ( not that I drink beer every day 
).
Yes, there are many Germans, and German descendants in Latin America, particularly in Brazil and Argentina. And Germans are master beer makers. They make locals to love beer, sausages and kuchen. But you are wrong if you believe Germans changed society at a larger scale. On the contrary, they addapted to ours.
I’d reply to this but I’m just so sleepy…
Maybe you could have your cousin Speedy Mcnally respond. I hear he’s the fastest poster in all of Mexico.
Erotic murals? Where can I get one of those?
A new OECD study just came out showing that Mexicans work the longest hours of all the countries in the study.
Ever study economics? Compensation in a free market is derived not from labor input, but from price negotiated. Quality of work gives you something to negotiate with. So does quantity of production (though this is dangerous; you may undercut your sector’s price & lose your job). But restraint of trade also gives you something to negotiate with, as does intimidation. Market economics is all about negotiation.
Having the guns on your side is useful. Expecting the client to spontaneously respect the wonderfulness of the work you put in is a path to disappointment. This is even more true in the anarchic realm of trade between nations.
Oh, no, save us from agitprop! Wait, are you serious?
I’d guess it’s because a significant part of the U.S. economy is being used to support crime and corruption in Mexico.
You can see a similar effect riding the El train in Chicago out to Oak Park. You cross from the Austin section of Chicago into Oak Park and you say “What happened?”
Sure, we want that guy, but if you somehow kept enough guys like him in Mexico, don’t you think those motivated guys would make Mexico better, rather than bailing to El Norte and leaving Mexico worse off?
I keep thinking that the amount of blood, sweat and tears spent by our Mexican immigrant community doing inconsequential things like mowing lawns, landscaping, dishwashing and other frivolous grunt work, could be put to better use improving Mexico.
I’m not trying to bash immigrants- far from it, but I wonder if the ease of immigration means that many Mexicans don’t bother improving things at home and just come north.
And yet Mexico remains a shithole. (Must be, or Mexicans would not be so eager to leave it.) Why is that?
N.B.: Venezuela was always like Mexico, in the ways to which you are referring, before Chavez became president.