This is completely braindead answer. Now people work as hard if not hard than before. Who exactly built the America infrastructures? The Irish and the Chinese labor. Now if you go see in Orlando construction sites. it is the Mexican labor. If you go see TSMC Arizonan chip factory, it is 300 Taiwanese engineers flown in recently.
No expert here, but my intuition is telling me this is likely wrong. Probably there is no gene for laziness. It seems more like a learned trait to me, in other words a product of one's environment.
There may not be one for laziness but there might be one for non stop work. It is not really even hard work for them, these people cant be unproductive, they feel like the need to be doing something productive nearly all the time. Someone like Elon Musk working 120 hours a week, even though he doesn't need any more money. He is at the extreme end. The rest of us have to compete with these type of guys in the workplace, and in the markets! In my last IT job there was a guy like that, a machine, reminded me of the terminator robot. I could work 50 hours a week and still feel like a slacker next to how hard he worked. It was constant week after week, he never got tired or burnt out.
That's consistent with my observations as well. Musk may be afflicted with Bipolar Disorder. If so, he could be simultaneously capable of extraordinary creativity, productivity and disastrous decisions that totally screw up his life...
%% For sure that could be a big problem. [2] Being to lazy to shoot supper , that is deer + antelope in WY; deer + or ducks in many places. [3]MOST of super rich are in business/self employed /own stocks/funds/real estate. But plenty of millionaires are employees teachers , lawyers .. that invested for 40 years[source Millionaire Mind book, by Dr Stanley+ Dave Ramsey]
Having babies at a young age without being married, committing crime, blaming others for self inflicted problems, and choosing college majors that dont pay well. All the above contributes to poverty and crime.
Central banks and money printing. Many of the answers here are good, but education shouldn't be required. Manual labor is totally fine, but when central banks print money and steal your purchasing power, you can't get ahead. A fiat based system always ends with those closest to the printing getting most of the gains while keeping everyone else is debt. What you see now is exactly how this system will always end no matter how many times you run this experiment.
Much typing much wow https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-03-assets-people-persistent-depression-covid.html