Politics & Power Quote by Fareed Zakaria

Zakaria’s line is a polite provocation aimed at one of America’s most durable civic myths: that national greatness is the direct product of grinding hours. He’s not romanticizing leisure; he’s trying to puncture the moral status Americans attach to exhaustion. By listing investment, education, productivity, innovation, and immigration, he shifts the conversation from individual virtue to systems that compound over time. Growth, in this telling, is an institutional outcome, not a character test.

The subtext is a critique of “workism” as policy camouflage. If you can convince people the economy depends on punishing schedules, you don’t have to talk about why the U.S. underinvests in childcare, training, transit, or public health, or why it treats immigration as cultural theater rather than economic strategy. “Brutal” is doing key work here: it frames long-hours culture less as admirable hustle and more as an avoidable form of harm, a kind of self-inflicted scarcity.

Contextually, this lands in a decades-long transatlantic argument: Americans work more hours than many Europeans, yet comparisons of productivity, innovation ecosystems, and living standards complicate the simple “more hours = more growth” equation. Zakaria is also writing against a corporate and political habit of using busyness as a proxy for merit, even when the real drivers of growth are human capital, risk-taking infrastructure, and openness to newcomers.

The intent is reformist, not dreamy: stop worshipping the time clock, and start building the conditions that actually make a country richer.