Americans Work 25% More Than Europeans, Study Finds (bloomberg.com) 404
Americans are addicted to their jobs. U.S. workers not only put in more hours than workers do almost anywhere else. They're also increasingly retiring later and taking fewer vacation days, reports Bloomberg. From the article: A new study tries to measure precisely how much more Americans work than Europeans do overall. The answer: The average person in Europe works 19 percent less than the average person in the U.S. That's about 258 fewer hours per year, or about an hour less each weekday. Another way to look at it: U.S. workers put in almost 25 percent more hours than Europeans. Hours worked vary a lot by country, according to the unpublished working paper by economists Alexander Bick of Arizona State University, Bettina Bruggemann of McMaster University in Ontario, and Nicola Fuchs-Schundeln of Goethe University Frankfurt. Swiss work habits are most similar to Americans', while Italians are the least likely to be at work, putting in 29 percent fewer hours per year than Americans do.
What have they got to show for it? (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean bragging about our victory over socialized medicine is fun and all..
That's easy (Score:5, Insightful)
What do they have to show for it? That depends on whether you fit in.
If you fit in, you've got money to show for it.
If you don't fit in, you've got nothing to show for it.
Re:That's easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Those on the "outside" are conditioned to believe that, with enough hard work and effort, they'll eventually be on the "inside". However, those on the inside create policies to keep those on the outside, *outside*. Despite this, people still make decisions (i.e., voting) with the belief that they *might* become part o that inside group, ignoring the present (or even future) realities.
It's fantastic social propaganda, though. The economy exploits the increased productivity (assuming, of course, more work hours equates to comparable economic gains; we all know that person that does 3 hours of work in an 8 hour shift), while kindling hope in a population that prosperity is just around the corner if they just keep working harder.
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Nixon made changes to monetary policy so that ever since then the standard of living has been basically frozen and all improvements to productivity go to corporate profits.
Even most households going to 2 income still have the same basic standard of living despite contributing twice as much to the workforce.
In Europe, the extra productivity went to a combination of more profits and shorter hours.
A side e
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And now your life is mostly over, and the time when you were young and could have enjoyed the time off to the fullest won't come back.
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Why do you think he didn't? I did.
Americans really don't know how good they have it. A lot of them whine about how every other place is so much better. Except they've never bothered to actually visit those places.
Plus there are plenty of ways to "live it up". Not all of them are terribly expensive. Otherwise European vacationers would be screwed. '-p
Re:What have they got to show for it? (Score:5, Funny)
Americans really don't know how good they have it.
Hey Dillweed, I'm gonna call you out on that. For one whole year I expect you NOT to call Americans arrogant. Who the bleep told you we don't know how good we have it?! Of all the anti-American nonsense I hear, this one just really stands out as being daft. Of all the things we're good at, knowing that we've got it better has got to be right up there at the top.
Even a random moron living in a trailer park with no health care can tell you they've got it better than some Frenchy socialist.
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How does retiring at age 50 sound? House paid off, Cars paid off, kids in college, $1.2M in bank. Of course it wasn't easy, working a minimum 65 hours per week and going home tired as death.
Retirement sounds all good and well at age 50, unless you end up dropping dead at age 55 due to the stressful work schedule you've endured for most of your life.
Also, I can comfortably assume that at least one of the parents wasn't around much for family time and raising children when working to death at a minimum of 65 hours per week. As a parent, some sacrifices are worth it, and with $1.2M in the bank, the one thing even you can't buy back is lost time.
Re:What have they got to show for it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I like working, so I don't mind spending 10-12 hours a day at the company I helped build. The money is good, wife and I don't have kids and like to travel, so it works. I get about 6 weeks of vacation a year, although most of it is in the form of long weekends. We cut back on our pay and proportionally reduced the stress level, so a long day isn't always long hours working.
I look at my Scandinavian sister-in-law, and while I might envy the month of July off and zero-work weekends, I prefer what we have more. (Although I will need to retire hopefully around 50, I liked the retire early, retire often strategy more.)
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In our case it was just living the "European lifestyle" in a place that's not like a big European city. That means two working professionals. Except one pays the bills, and the other pays for the frills.
We didn't live life to the credit limit. We saved and invested instead.
We also didn't have to compromise too much on the fun.
As far as vacation time goes: quality over quantity.
Re:What have they got to show for it? (Score:5, Informative)
"European Lifestyle" also means single payer medicine, 4 or more weeks vacation, and an efficient mass transit system.
Re:What have they got to show for it? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but APART from single payer medicine, 4 or more weeks vacation, and an efficient mass transit system, what did the Romans do for us?
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not with mandated insurance requirements. 10% of my income is spent on insurance--which doesnt include copays, medications and other visit or operation fees. i make a decent amount of money but that is a big, big chunk.
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Of course. I forgot that Europeans were able to prevent Russia from moving in all by themselves. Oh wait. No they didn't. Russia moved in and installed puppets in all those Eastern bloc countries and the other European countries did nothing. The US was tired and left Europe to do something and Europe failed. The US left Europe to keep Ukraine safe and Europe failed.
How much has Europe been paying the US to maintain all those bases that kept Russia at bay? Only an idiot believes that the Soviet Union/Russia
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What does that tell me?
That you make up 'facts'.
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This reminds me of an NPR article about how Barilla was going to shut down it's southern pasta factory because the southern Italians can't be bothered to come into work.
Misleading results (Score:5, Informative)
Working more does not necessarily mean more productivity. It's especially hard to be productive when you're burning your limited PTO/vacation allotments for unplanned family illnesses rather than... you know... planned restful downtime.
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In this case, though, it does. Americans have one of highest productivity per person in world.
I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it's true. Personally. I use ALL my vacation and rarely work more than my allotted time (I work in internal medicine, so I do 7 on and 7 off).
http://www.news.com.au/nationa... [news.com.au]
Re:Misleading results (Score:5, Insightful)
I am very interested in how they defined the productivity per worker. The article does not state that. From the numbers they show, my gut feeling is that they simply divided the gross national product by the number of employees, which is a wildly inaccurate way of defining productivity. Norway is not significantly more productive than Sweden or Denmark - it just has a lot of oil and those two countries do not. The relative sizes of the financial sector in different countries adds a similar distortion and there are many more factors to consider. How much a worker actually contributes to productivity is very hard to measure objectively. The GDP per worker does not tell much of that story.
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I am very interested in how they defined the productivity per worker.
It is GDP (usually adjusted by PPP) divided by total hours worked by all workers in the country.
my gut feeling is that they simply divided the gross national product by the number of employees, which is a wildly inaccurate way
No. That is NOT what productivity means.
Norway is not significantly more productive than Sweden or Denmark - it just has a lot of oil and those two countries do not.
Productivity does NOT mean "working hard". Offshore oil workers may not "work harder" than, say, farmers, but they are likely to contribute far more to GDP, and are thus more productive.
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TL;DR - since ~1973, diddly-squat if you're a worker, pretty sweet if you own the place. Let's give those heroic jerb creators another tax break!
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Well, the stupid one is the one who is a worker, not the employer. Quit your job, and create your own company if you're smart. Having hired people to work for me, it isn't as easy as it sounds, and should pay more than simply showing up to work stoned and hungover.
The whiners of the world will always complain, and want government to pass laws preventing successful people from being successful. Instead of asking for government to make it easier to own your own business, the idiots are making it harder and ha
Flimsy excuses (Score:2)
It's a lot harder to quit your job and strike out on your own now that having health insurance is the law. I'm in my late 30's and can't do what i did in my 20's because i went without insurance for many years.
If a few hundred dollars a month for health insurance is the difference between you starting a business vs not bothering you probably were doomed to failure from the start. That's a flimsy excuse to not try. It's no harder to start your own business than it ever was and in a lot of ways it's easier today than in years gone by. There certainly are more resources available to help a budding entrepreneur.
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but I thought being forced to buy a financial instrument from an approved financial instrument vendor was a good thing and would save us all. At least that is what BHO and HRC tell us.
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Losers have an excuse for everything.
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It's a lot harder to quit your job and strike out on your own now that having health insurance is the law.
That is a lame excuse. But seriously, you should NOT try to start your own business. If you really think a molehill like this is a major impediment, you will never get over the mountains. Keep your day job.
Re:Misleading results (Score:5, Insightful)
We will soon find out, I fear. The UK has already been talking about which employee rights will be removed once it leaves the EU. Time off proportional to overtime looks like it will be the first thing to go, but they keep talking about making the UK more "competitive", by which they of course mean lower wages, longer hours and fewer expenses like safety equipment and adaptations for people with disabilities.
So it is likely we will find out just what that does to productivity soon, giving us an opportunity to compare the EU and US models.
Need more unions and workers rights! (Score:5, Insightful)
Need more unions and workers rights!
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Maybe Americans need to live in a framework that allows them to walk away from hostile work environments. To put it another way, I don't think most Americans would be satisfied by the materialistic aspects of European life and due to this pursuit we're suffering for it. Until our conceptions of what it means to lead a successful and good life changes we're doomed to repeat the same cycle of consumerism. Each concept has its own pros and cons, choose wisely.
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> Maybe Americans need to live in a framework that allows them to walk away from hostile work environments.
That's called self-discipline.
Americans have more choices. They can chose to be vulnerable or not. We make more, keep more, and our currency goes farther. We just have a consumer culture that encourages blowing it all.
Even ghetto children have this fixation on overpriced status symbols.
Re:Need more unions and workers rights! (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. You're being fired from two of your three part-time, low-wage jobs because you needed to stay home to care for a sick child? You just need to start your own business! If you're too lazy to do that, why should we care about your problems?
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Brilliant! If those lazy, shiftless poors would just put off having children until they can afford it, then... well, given the increasing stratification of American culture, they'd probably never manage to have children. So we breed poorness out of the population! Win-win!
Only Logical (Score:5, Insightful)
As Americans measure everything by size and not quality, I am not surprised by this. My USA counterparts are much more at the office, and producing less work than the continental ones. Make a study about effectiveness and I am your man!
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Unless you happen to be in Norway (the only European country with a higher per-hour productivity than the US) you're just spewing anecdotes. As a whole, Americans work longer AND are more productive than almost any European country - at least according to the UN. http://www.news.com.au/nationa... [news.com.au]
I won't say that this is necessarily a good thing. I will say that your arrogance appears misplaced.
Re:Only Logical (and irresponsible) (Score:2)
I think it is interesting to see and note. It's data. More data gives you more things to compare. We aren't exactly comparing like for like here. The US is huge. Yet it is compared to European countries, some of which are tiny. Look, we're different. So that we work more is just a data point, and judgement shouldn't be passed down on that data alone. The type of work is relevant as well.
Moreover, how do other places like Japan or China or Australia compare? We likely won't have comparable data, so
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Where is the Silicon Valley of Europe?
Judging by all the incorporation papers, Dublin most likely.
Re:Only Logical (Score:4, Insightful)
No, that makes Dublin the Delaware of Europe.
working to offset expansion of the money supply (Score:3, Informative)
Americans have to work more hours and take fewer vacation days because they are poorer at this point, given that USA is running 500,000,000,000 a year trade deficit and has been running that for 2 decades now, Americans cannot afford anything, they are completely stuck in debt and their government in concert with the Federal reserve are destroying the value of their money, value of theirs savings every days. Government spending and money printing, pushing interest rates down to keep borrowing more by doing things like 'operation twist' (the Fed buying long term bonds at negative real interest rates because nobody else would), all of this is expanding the money supply making USD less valuable all the time, thus making Americans less productive every day.
The only way out of this insanity is to restructure the debts, an honest default on the USD denominated debt, stopping all government spending (yes, this means all wars, all SS payments, all Medicare payments, everything). You have to clear away all of your debts, allow the bond holders to lose money so that the interest rates would reset to normal levels (only real market without government intervention can set real interest rates). Get the government out of your money because otherwise you will never have vacations or retirement savings or anything.
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You're correct, roman_mir, but this isn't a US-specific problem. There's Japan, EU, etc. It's a rolling disaster for the so-called liberal capitalist democracies.
What's disheartening is that public anger over the dismal outcomes of this inflationary fiscal policy manifests itself in bizarre and ineffective forms, like Trump. The Fed, meanwhile, continues as usual, while Congress ignores its constitutional responsibility to coin money and regulate its value.
Not an EU problem (Score:3, Insightful)
EU overall trades at a *profit*. There may be some of the smaller countries struggling (notably Greece) but overall EU does not have to internally inflates its economy with QE.
This is a problem with a few key economies that run at huge deficits and go the easy short-term route of internally inflating their economies. Japan had it for decades, US followed, UK joined them.
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Re:working to offset expansion of the money supply (Score:4, Informative)
It's not just the trade deficit, it's the spending we have to support as well. Even though the Federal Government took more than $10,000 per man, woman, and child (about $26,400 per worker - about $13.20 per hour worked in the US), it still spent $1,423,000,000,000 more than it took in (an additional $5.69 per hour worked). We have a LOT of Government to support - there are career politicians and crony capitalists to support after all!
Sources: number of workers, 124.73 million [statista.com]. Federal revenues: $3.3 trillion [usgovernmentrevenue.com]. Federal debt added FY2016: $1.423 trillion [treasurydirect.gov]
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*psst* lowering the value of money helps you pay back your debt *psst*
Most of your held debt is spent on armed forces (as a whole), armed forced pensions/medicaid, interest, etc.. which one do you ever see being cut? Europe had people in pitch-forks because the only things they could realistically cut were social services, education, medical, etc.. When the US gov starts cutting veteran's pensions and health, what do you see the outcome being?
Certainly scaling back new armed forced recruiting is a pretty go
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Yeah, just starve those retired fuckers in the streets. That'll make things better. No way they'll take up rifles and fix their situations.
We'll just get us some government death panels to decide who has to go.
We could get a long way by terminating our endless war in the middle east and billing the chickenhawks and their friends for the odious debt they ran up for personal benefit.
I run a trade deficit with my cleaning lady (Score:2)
I guess that means I'm way worse off.
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If this is true, how do you account for the never ending ability to sell Treasuries denominated in US Dollars?
If there was some concerted effort to devalue the US dollar, wouldn't that make it ridiculous to hold Treasuries which paid off in US dollars? There has always been an existential risk associated with this -- the US in theory has always had the ability to sell Treasuries, spend the money and then print money to pay them off, but has never directly done this, or at least not on a scale that deviates
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#notallamericans
Some of us save our money, take on as little debt as possible, and laugh at the Joneses.
Unfortunately, that doesn't help when the government you have chosen is so deep in debt on your behalf.
Each US taxpayer currently owes around $165,000 in national debt, plus $870,000 in liabilities. Add state debt, at $5,000-$25,000 per taxpayer, depending on the state.
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The US Dollar is still the most stable currency, so that shows how little all that means.
That is in part because it's the only currency used for trade with certain commodities like oil. Attempts by other countries to set up non-dollar bourses have been met with hostility from the US.
And in part because like the tulip chits, creditors cannot dare to cash in on it lest the bubble burst, but has a vested interest in inflating the value while they still hold US IOUs.
The faith is more in those who own the US debt than it is in the US economy.
We get vacation?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wage slave here. Recently changed jobs (moved) and new company gives only 8 days a year vacation+Personal Holiday+mandatory holiday. I would love to work less... My wife and I are still discussing if we could afford for me to be Mr. Mom and her to work (she does make 2x what I make)... Lately I have been working the actual hours I get paid for, and have even been taking all of the breaks I am entitled to, but nobody ever takes, and my life satisfaction has gone way up. It's not that most americans are addicted to their job, it's that they are made to feel that if they don't work 120% of the hours they are "paid to work" then they will look like slackers and be let go.
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'"paid to work" then they will look like slackers and be let go'
The total losers attitude. I've always been at least as competent as the average in my groups and I've never shed a tear working the exact time (or less) than I'm supposed to. I get my work done and my reviews are as glowing as always. I get promoted, get raises, and if I'm not I find new companies that do.
Certainly if you've been over-promoted into a position you aren't qualified / competent in, you may have to work your ass off to maintain it
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Come to Europe.
In most countries minimum vacation per year is by law 30 days. And no, you can not be forced by contract to give up days on that.
Most countries have free or partly public funded kinder gardens etc. public transport for school kids low crime rates. Chances are you never meet one who ever witnessed or suffered from a crime.
Bottom line you have less hassle with your life ... best places are of course Denmark, Netherlands or other nordic countries, Germany and France and depending on your touch f
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Managers get whatever they base their rewards on.
Your managers are so stupid they can't come up with a performance metric better than 'face time'.
Either learn to game it, or find a new job. It's one of the worst signs for a workplace. Says everything you need to know about the clue status of management. Everything else will suck too.
That's definitely not accurate... (Score:5, Interesting)
I like working. People are different. (Score:3)
Please don't force me to work less just so that you don't feel peer pressure to work more.
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Yeah, and most of those extra people are 65+'s who can't afford to retire. Nice life.
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Flat unemployment rates:
US unemployment: 6.1
France unemployment: 10.4
https://data.oecd.org/unemp/un... [oecd.org]
These are people who are seeking work of course. If you 'give up' searching for work, you fall off the board.
For raw employment rates:
US: 68.2
France: 63.6
https://data.oecd.org/emp/empl... [oecd.org]
Assuming you subtract the difference, you're left with roughly the same number of people 'not seeking employment' in either country:
US: 25.7%
France: 26%
Work != Worked hours (Score:4, Insightful)
ADDICTED? Or indebted? (Score:2)
Americans don't like to work. We're trying to survive with rising costs, leaps in inflation of everyday goods.
And this only scrapes the surface, I wager Americans also spend a significant greater amount of time commuting to work than their western European counterparts.
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There haven't been "leaps" in inflation of "everyday goods" since Rocky II was in theaters and the Apple II was in stores.
http://www.inflation.eu/inflat... [inflation.eu]
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Get a government job... (Score:2)
Alas, The US Is Not Productive (Score:2)
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That says nothing about productivity. It says a lot about where the benefits of that productivity accrue (hint, not to the people working 2 jobs).
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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more than ten thousand dollars in debt at any given time.
I used to look at figures like that and think it wasn't really that much. Now as Sterling plummets further I realize it's starting to become a significant amount. After Theresa May invokes Article 50 it'll probably equate to £50,000 Sterling.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Sure we WORK more, but our maths are better (Score:2)
Relevance? (Score:5, Informative)
Buried in all the statisics abuse in the summaries there is a paper of significance only to historians. This paper is based on numbers for 2005-2007, before the financial crisis.
It also does not reflect work per person, but work for a theoretical average person age 15-64. Employment rate is a component of this person, so as employment rate drops so does the hours this average person works.
Actually, that feels intuitively wrong, the ~25 hours per week in the US seems way too high when employment rate is factored in, but I am not interested enough in how much we all worked 10 years ago to read the paper more carefully.
Besides, I don't have time for this, I have to get back to work.
addicted ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Americans are addicted to their jobs. U.S. workers not only put in more hours than workers do almost anywhere else. They're also increasingly retiring later and taking fewer vacation days, ...
Perhaps we're just afraid of being unemployed and destitute. Employers show little loyalty to their employees (Pro Tip: If your company says "employees are our most valuable asset" start looking for another job.), the social safety net is not as strong as in Europe and it's clear that our politicians don't really care about the poor and (arguably) middle class -- look at the various budgets, including the latest Republican House budget which gets 62% from low/moderate income programs while also including tax cuts for the wealthy. (see below).
House GOP Budget Gets 62 Percent of Budget Cuts From Low- and Moderate-Income Programs [cbpp.org]
No, We're Not Addicted to Our Jobs (Score:4, Interesting)
We are NOT addicted to our jobs. We HAVE to work 25% more than everyone else to KEEP our jobs, because workers in the US have ZERO protection against anti-competitive, inhumane, and employment practices that are ILLEGAL in Europe.
We have to compete with workers in countries where there are no labor laws, no environmental standards, no minimum wages, no nothing. We have to compete with people who are essentially state-owned slaves. We're trying to break out in the lead in the race to the bottom, because if we don't, we lose our jobs to one of those people.
And, our own government is leading the charge. So-called "liberals" and their banker buddies have been trying to make indentured servants of middle class America for ages - ever since the New Deal, all while claiming to want to "help."
Help us how, exactly? By making it prohibitively expensive to do things in the US? By imposing onerous and overbearing regulations that don't make sense? By telling me that slinging burgers at McDonalds is economically equivalent to the job I do that I spend $100K on a degree for? Please.
Some regulation is necessary, of course. There is a "right" amount that makes working safe and effective, and that levels the playing field. But, we surpassed that long ago. Today it is an active assault by government on entrepreneurship and individual success.
I've voted for Democrats all my life. As a black man I took it as my duty, having been told by my father who grew up during the Civil Rights Movement that Democrats were the only ones who fought for minority rights. I now know that my father was hoodwinked, and I refuse to be hoodwinked as well.
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Wait a minute here. You start your rant basically saying "there's not enough regulation; we need protection!", and end it with "They're assaulting us with onerous regulation!"
What on earth do you actually want?
To have his cake and eat it too. Meet the electorate, and understand why we're fucked.
Livable minimum wage makes a difference (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that a lot of people in the US have multiple jobs working many hours just to be able to buy food and pay rent is not something you should be proud of.
Title wrong (Score:2)
Look at the historical data (Score:4, Interesting)
From Work and Leisure in the U.S. and Europe: Why So Different? [nber.org], hours worked by Europeans and Americans were about the same in the 1960's, although the number of hours were dropping for all every year. In about 1980, the US and Europe diverged, with hours continuing to drop in Europe, but the US plateauing.
Two reasons have been explored. The first is due to tax differences, and indeed labor taxes have been rising in the EU since the end of the 1960's. The other is differences in labor regulations, such as the requirement for contracts, limitations in legal working hours (such as the 35 hour workweek established in 2000 in France).
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True. It also doesn't take into account the quality of work done. It might just mean Europeans are 25% more efficient.
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Someone else linked this [news.com.au] which seems to indicate that south Europeans are simply lazy sods.
However, when measured as value added per hour worked, Norway had the highest labour productivity level per worker at $46.55, followed by the US at $43.66 and France at $42.99.
So, if a good hardworking Nord tells me I'm doing my work wrong, I'll listen (but may ignore the advice). If a Frank criticizes me for anything, I'll pour out his wine and feed his cheese to the rats.
Re:Capitalism of exploration (Score:4, Insightful)
Productivity and "working more" are not the same thing.
Re:Capitalism of exploration (Score:5, Interesting)
Productivity and "working more" are not the same thing.
This poster was replying to a post that tried to imply that europeans were just more efficient. Also, one common thread you hear is that productivity starts to fall as hours increase. This poster was saying that for the USA, even working more than other people we still seem to have the most productivity per hour worked. I think it still wouldn't hurt to try to reduce the number of hours worked but to be working the most hours per week and still have the most productivity per hour is actually kindof impressive.
Re:Capitalism of exploration (Score:5, Funny)
Americans do work hard, you're right. And the productivity numbers are impressive, despite my best efforts to bring down the average.
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Europeans are also not one hegemon. Liberals love to whine about diversity and then actually ignore it. Or they perhaps suppress the idea that people are different because it doesn't match their simplistic notion of equality.
Each country in Europe is distinct. They are each their own thing that's developed over thousands of years. They are not a mishmash of all ethnicities (like the US tends to be).
Re: Capitalism of exploration (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, all my friends who brag about working 10h-12h days spend much of it online social media or shooting the proverbial shit.
I come in at 6:30-7 and I spend 4-5h on mental stuff but then I'm utterly done. Got a good boss, he knows I get the plurality of team's shit done and doesn't blink twice when I head out at lunch at noon and don't come back till 3:30 because I'm playing disc golf or some such, see if I missed anything and head home.
Any of the seatwarmers here try that and they'd be out of work the next day. But then they take a week to solve problems it takes me a day, tops, all because they can't concentrate. Multitasking, my ass.
Re: Capitalism of exploration (Score:4, Insightful)
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It might just mean Europeans are 25% more efficient.
Nope. Americans not only work more, but also get more done per hour [wikipedia.org] than any European countries except Luxembourgh and Norway.
Re:Capitalism of exploration (Score:4, Interesting)
That is wrong.
They get less done.
The rest are currency conversion errors and mountain high differences in financial markets etc.
A typical worker, earning less then lets say $50,000 per year, is not even half as productive/efficient in the US as in Europe. Otherwise all your jobs would not be outsourced to China, India or other asian countries.
The GNP/capita is no measure at all when you can manipulate local costs, exchange rates and can invent artificial spendings or gains.
A country that has a financial market that dominates 50% of the money flow has obviously twice the GNP versus a country that has no financial market. But: nothing was produced. There is no productivity at all
Re:Capitalism of exploration (Score:5, Insightful)
True. It also doesn't take into account the quality of work done. It might just mean Europeans are 25% more efficient.
I think it means that Americans get less paid vacation than Europeans and they are more afraid of losing their jobs.
Re:Capitalism of exploration (Score:4, Informative)
True. It also doesn't take into account the quality of work done. It might just mean Europeans are 25% more efficient.
European countries and cultures are just too variable to make that assumption. Norway is not the same as Germany which is not the same as France which is not the same as Italy which is not the same as Greece which is not the same as Romania and so on and so on.
Trump = avatar? [Re:Greed is God] (Score:2)
Could be. We may be a simulation, and the server owner(s) sell "interference time" to the highest bidders. "Q" and Trump are customers who come to screw around in the "ant farm" as avatars. (Hillary doesn't give the vibe of a vacationer.)
We are toys, analogous to Toy Story, except we don't know, like Buzz.
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Hillary doesn't give the vibe of a vacationer.
Just for the record, I don't like either one of them but to me Hillary gives the vibe of a badly programmed AI. She appears unemotional, robotic, calculating, and amoral. She is likely a sociopath but when you seen things like her tape on the 12 year old rape victim, her testimonies before congress where she flat out lies, etc.. it makes me think of the computer in wargames or spock. I'm not even saying that a robotic overload would be a bad thing. There are several stories in Asimov's world where robot
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Hillary is a professional "gamer". She isn't playing because it is fun, she does it for the money.
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Conventional wisdom says that everything about Europeans is always better than everything about Americans. You get socially rewarded by high-social-status people for saying so. So not working is better than working in this case, regardless of whether that makes sense or not.
Conventional wisdom also states that absolutes are absolutely wrong.
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If it was Americans who had more free time and Europeans who had less. Then less free time would be considered better.
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Yeah, that's why I said "...regardless of whether this makes sense" up above.
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I found that I was most productive in the morning. Afternoon is mostly for "busy work". It was a waste of time to stay at work later in the day.
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The USA spend about as much for "defense" than the rest of the world. This is a huge cost (of order 1T$/yr) that the main superpower is unable to let other countries cover in a way or another (say by buying USD for free). In the end being US citizen has a cost that translates in more work time, lower life quality than a couple of other countries.
Let's rephrase that. A huge part of the government's spending goes directly into the pockets of the boards of companies like Halliburton so that they can spend it in the middle east on ridiculous opulence like a hotel with a water filled lobby.
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Prohibit the use of binding arbitration in employment agreements, or at least make it optional.
This is the problem with almost all unilateral contracts in the US. This needs to be outlawed in a large percentage of the places it's currently used.
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Everybody with ambition moves to America. Soon all that will be left is old money and bums.