What issues do you think are most important

[Chaerophon]

I must say that I find great amusement in the notion that the successes of the U.S. were caused by anything and everything except for the virtues and cultures of the Americans themselves. I also find amusement in the idea that successful development is inherently impossible for some nations.

That's not the point. The point is that industrial notions of time and work arose in the general population because they were forced upon them. A whole wack of subsistence agriculturalists didn't wake up in the morning and decide "hey, I want to work from 6 in the morning until 7 at night in a factory, repeating the same motions over and over again, and I want my kids to do the same".

The enclosure movement, the poor laws, along with several other factors led to the move from the farm to the factory. From there, it was a matter of socializing workers to think like workers. That's where the 'American work ethic' came from. Mid-18th Century light industrialists in Britain, socializing workers in places like the Soho, New Lanark and Wedgewood factories. Then came Taylorism.

The point is that Americans possessed a cultural legacy of industrial work that served them well. That doesn't make them inherently 'smarter'. It does make them well socialized for factory work around the early to mid-19th Century. The presence of natural resources only allowed them to flourish after the British had already begun to slow.