The work ethic is the most important engine of capitalist civilization. It keeps workers working long after they have satisfied their basic needs, drives entrepreneurs to found new companies and inventors to invent new things, and, in general, generates the surplus that pays for productive investment and social welfare.

Yet the belief that work is a moral duty rather than an inconvenient necessity is hardly a natural one. In most civilizations, social status has been determined by your distance from productive labor — aristocrats in Naples even lost their patents of nobility if they were caught doing anything useful — while workers abandoned the grindstone for the alehouse at the slightest opportunity.

Ever since Max Weber published his landmark The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), historians have debated his claim that Protestantism, particularly in its Calvinist form, was responsible for the rise of capitalism because it treated hard work and wealth accumulation as proof of salvation. But they have largely agreed with the basic idea that the rise of capitalism required a revolution in attitudes to work.

Which raises a troubling proposition: If the work ethic is the product of cultural change, it can be destroyed by cultural change. America is the world’s leading example of the power of the work ethic. The North was settled by work-obsessed Puritans fleeing persecution in England (the South was settled by Cavaliers who despised work and relied for...

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