What issues do you think are most important

[Chaerophon]

I don't think that a "wack of subsistence agriculturalists" would have built a country out of a wilderness, and gone on to settle a region that, at the present, is larger than all Europe combined.  And, if I remember my history rightly, industrialization *followed* colonialization in all regions, so the lack of fear of working hard appears to have been a characteristic of those colonists before the agency you suggest induced it existed.

Well, I suppose that it all depends on what you're referring to as the "American work ethic". The early colonization of both America and Canada were pre-industrial, yes. They had to carve out their own plots and clear their own land, yes. But so did most other cultures in the world, at some point. What made the process of American development, and the development of former British Colonies in general, different, was the result of social factors rooted in the formation of an early industrial consciousness in Great Britain, a thought revolution that had gone on years before America began truly to develop what I would call a unique ethic of work.

If all that you folks are talking about when you refer to the American work ethic is the capacity/desire to clear some trees and build some farms along the frontier, then I'm afraid that the French had you beat by a good hundred years in the Seigneuries to the North. Seems to me that the desire for free/cheap land and then, upon arrival, the need to survive on it would mean that yes, hard work was required.

However, what makes that particular brand of work so quintessentially American? It happens all over the world! When I think of a defining American ethic of work, I tend more to think in terms of the early development of America's industrial cities and the rise of industry in what was to eventually become the world's largest industrial producer. In the early to mid 20th Century, American society rose to prominence under the banner of these values, and these values are not the result, I would argue, of early 'survivalist' modes of work, but of socialized industrial processes. Survival work goes on all over the world every day. What was different in America was the social heritage of a different kind of work and a different kind of progress.