From a reader:

Jonah,
As Ed’s friend and colleague (note the affiliation below) I will
attempt to defend him. The big fact you didn’t state was the
following: Not too long ago (say 30 years) the French did work just as
hard as us. So any cultural explanation has to rely on the two
cultures becoming that different that quickly. And, back when the
French did work as hard as us, they had tax rates near ours. Occam’s
razor seems to apply here.
You do make a good point, however. Laws do not fall from the sky.
That is, maybe the French have high tax rates because they don’t mind
them so much because they don’t want to work that hard anyway. This
always comes up in social science. When trying to figure out the
effect of, say, higher penalties on drunk driving, it’s hard to
separate the effect of the higher penalties themselves from the effect
of the increasingly dim view we have of drunk driving which caused the
increased penalties to come into law.