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SaidAchmiz comments on On not getting a job as an option - Less Wrong Discussion
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Note that you seem to have a huge and invisible to you gender assumption :-)
Have you also thought about the possible connection between your observation and the fact that the US is a very wealthy country?
You certainly can. There are a whole bunch of people in the US who do precisely that. Unfortunately for your argument they don't look to be ultrahip vagabonds who travel the world in between TED talks. On the contrary, they look to be poor, severely constrained in what they can do, unhealthy, stuck in bad neighborhoods with high crime rates, etc. etc.
Life is a series of choices. You can make a choice to drop out and I know people who've done that, both recently and back in the 70s. But there is a price, of course, and for some people the price is worth paying and for some it is not.
There are intermediate stages, too. For example I've met a guy who works for one month per year on an offshore platform and that gives him enough money to travel low-budget in Asia for the rest of the year. He doesn't have a house or an apartment, he is either on the platform or traveling. He stores his stuff at his mom's.
If I may make a generalization, dropping out works much better for people who are young, single, healthy, adaptable, and can quickly find a reasonable job if they need to (aka have sufficiently high IQ and some marketable skills). That's not an iron-clad rule, of course. One somewhat popular way of dropping out is to buy a cruising yacht and go off into the oceans of the world -- and that is occasionally done by full families with kids.
One other point is the uncertainty of the future. Because of it you want to both retain some flexibility and have resources to deal with whatever it throws at you. A vagabond style of life tends to be very flexible but very low on resources.
Seconded. It's almost a cliche for Americans to visit (various parts of) Europe and Latin America, observe the less stringent work ethics, the far poorer standards of customer service, etc., and shake their heads, noting the ostensible causal link to lower levels of wealth... but that link does seem to exist.
The existing link is a correlation, not necessarily causality.
For example, imagine a country where the government can (and once in a while does) decide to take away your savings. In such country it wouldn't make sense to try getting more money than you need to survive this month, unless you are ready to use it now (e.g. you are building a house). Imagine that you are smart enough and you could make more money than you need, but the money would probably be taken away, so you don't want to do this. So instead of higher salary you will optimize e.g. for less work. If enough people do this, work ethics goes down.
Or imagine a country with such strong egalitarian ethics, than even if you do 10× more work than your colleagues, your employer just wouldn't give you even 2× higher salary, because in their opinion, no one deserves twice as much as the market rate. Again, the usual response is to slow down to the level of average (sometimes even more, because the average people usually consider themselves to be above-average, so they slow down too).
There are countries where stronger work ethics would be a lost purpose; it would not improve the life of the given individual, on average. Sure, some people are strategic enough to find a way to do it, but most people are not. (For example, if you are 8× faster than your colleagues, but your employer insists on paying you exactly the same amount of money, you could try convincing them to let you work from home, then do in 1 hour what your colleagues would do in 8 hours, and spend the rest of the time working on your own projects or just having fun.)
And of course it's equally a cliche for Europeans to observe the US's wealth, long hours, short holidays, low taxes, extreme inequality, etc., and shake their heads, noting the ostensible causal link to various forms of societal dysfunction (see, e.g., http://moses.creighton.edu/jrs/2005/2005-11.pdf which is ostensibly about correlations between religion and societal health, but a lot of the clearest correlations are driven by the fact that the US is both very religious and badly messed-up).
Whether the US's unusually severe work habits have anything to do with this is anyone's guess. Quite likely they don't. If they do, they might be effect rather than cause. But I don't think the connection between those work habits and the US's great wealth is at all obvious, either.