Reddit mentions of The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present

> In reality its all just people expressing preferences regarding how they want to spend their time, preferences that are as rigid as our DNA.

That is an extremely bold statement you just made, and it's at best an oversimplification.

One, preferences for work over leisure or vice versa is certainly not a biological constant determined at birth. The culture of labor and leisure has differed drastically in time and place. If we just restrict our view to Western Europe, Jan de Vries's Industrious Revolution documents a substantial shift in patterns of consumption, leisure, and labor from the late 17th century onwards, predating actual industrialization itself. Cultural attitudes shifted towards favoring capital intensive consumption over idle leisure, and hence implicitly increased the relative priority of labor over leisure. Similar shifts are also documented in Song and Ming China, and in early industrial Japan, and are probably an ongoing process even today, particularly in developing countries. Unless you can somehow demonstrate that such shifts are due to spontaneous shifts in the underlying genetics of homo sapiens in time and place I'm not sure how your statement can possibly hold.

Second, a preference for work alone is not a decisive determinant of even middling success. Two equally dedicated workers, even if they had the exact same innate abilities, can have different outcomes based on how they work. And how people work and otherwise interact with the world around them is a function of imperfect information and environmental influences in addition to innate tendencies. Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods for example documents how poor parents fail to equip their children for upward mobility, not out of laziness, but because of inferior child rearing strategies which are not at all obvious to them. For example, poor parents are more likely to discipline their children sternly, rather than engage them in debate like middle class parents. The subtle but substantial advantages imparted by the latter are not at all obvious to the former, who only know to raise their children the way they themselves are raised. Human beings operate in a world of extremely limited information, particularly predictive information, and they also operate in a world governed by irrational social norms. It's silly to think that work alone can create success. For work to be productive it requires social support, quality education, material capital, i.e. things beyond any one individual's full control.

Third, the kind of success on display here, the $100 M / yr kind, is beyond the power of any single person to achieve without a significant element of luck. If you are born in a upper middle class family and go to all the right schools and get all the right jobs, you might be able to guarantee yourself a 1M / yr income, say as a trader or surgeon or lawyer. There is enough liquidity in high income labor markets for anybody with the right preparation to find a place, but this is far beyond that. Genuinely spectacular wealth like this can not be taken for granted by anyone, no matter how well informed or well prepared.

I know it's not the point of your post, but this is a (widely appreciated) revisionistic theory of the industrial revolution:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Industrious-Revolution-Consumer-Household/dp/0521719259