I feel this article is a little weak in one major sense: comparing the US to European countries based on non-working time is okay, but you also need to compare a metric like GDP. Using this, the US is #6 world-wide only behind two European countries. So yes, Euros may get more time off, but the US is a way more economically powerful and productive country economically.
Hurting the economy, sure people get burned out, but it is hard to come to that conclusion based on the data given and the authors points.
The US has had a GDP advantage since the second world war. But since then much of the EU has rolled out socialised medicine and more workers rights (maternity leave, mandatory vacation, even a higher minimum wage) and they haven't slipped down the rankings as a result.
Understanding why the US's GDP is as positive as it is is a much bigger topic that takes us into areas like natural resources (e.g. oil, metals, etc) but also history (e.g. World War 1, world War 2, even the cold war).
It is a pretty weak argument to dismiss all of the article's points just by repeating "but GDP!!!" over and over which is more or less what your post is.
The problem with GDP per capita comparisons is that GDP is a bit of a weak measure of economic performance. It is a measure of raw, unadjusted economic throughput (cash flow, essentially), not necessarily a measure of economic performance. It is increased by an inefficient healthcare system (healthcare spending makes up 17.7% of the US GDP all on its own, while most of the affluent European countries are in the 9%-11% range), by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by the United States' comparatively high energy usage per capita. See also RFK's famous quote one the GNP [1].
The reason why GDP is still used prominently as an economic indicator, while economists have been looking for better metrics, all those other metrics involve a fair amount of subjectivity. And GDP is still a pretty decent predictor of economic performance, despite its known weaknesses.
But in the end, higher GDP does not necessarily translate into higher quality of life (of course, once the gap is large enough, it almost certainly does, at least for the average person, but we aren't talking orders of magnitude here). I don't think you'll see overall higher QoL in the US compared to Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, or France (the four OECD countries with the fewest hours worked per capita), regardless of where the GDP per capita is.
In the past two years, I've spent six months living in Germany. The quality-of-life difference between that country and the US is striking.
In Germany, it appeared that ordinary people could both afford to, and were inclined to, partake often in small pleasures such as having a Bier and a bite at outdoor cafes in the summer. The streets were lined with these cafes and restaurants, most doing a brisk business. I never saw so many cut-flower shops in my life. The small pleasure of flowers was both affordable AND something that was on the minds of ordinary people, something that one would never encounter in the US.
Here, such things are looked upon as frivolous luxuries, and financially they are that for the 99%. If you can afford such things as cut flowers, then, we're told by our betters, you can also work for less money or work more for what you're earning currently. Why do you deserve luxuries, peon?
Despite what the pro-workaholic, GDP-flaunting people in the US would say, Germans on the whole seem to be quite materially prosperous. But with that, they are culturally prosperous in a quality-of-life sense too. They seem to expect it, whereas in the US a high QoL is reserved for the wealthy.
Obviously I'm not saying that every German lives this way, necessarily. But I think that this cultural observation is accurate. I think if average people in the US would be brought to understand that they too could have a modest life containing a big helping of everyday pleasures and without life-sucking, excessive work expectations, there'd be a revolution.
We must be living in very different countries, because the things you describe, I know very few people who can't afford simple things like cut flowers whenever they want them, or to go eat out at a cafe.
Average / middle class people I knew while living in LA did these things constantly.
Maybe you do live in a different country. In my decades-long residence in Washington State, my upbringing in Vermont, my considerable time in Sacramento, my years in Eastern Mass, and my trips around the US and Canada, I've never been somewhere where people "did these things constantly". If they did, every block would have a cut flower shop. These are a relative rarity, you'd usually have to look them up if you wanted one.
Average people I've known in the places I've lived most definitely did not frequent flower shops or cafes. And by "average", I include Target employees and Walmart employees and the clerical employees of most companies large and small. That is to say, most people in the US.
Apart from the financial issue, my point was that there's a cultural phenomenon going on. In Germany my feeling was that the residents had a joie de vivre that is largely missing in the US, something which is probably both a cause and effect of the cult of overwork.
it also tries to state that working hard leads to less productivity, when US productivity eclipses most european countries.
i had a consultant complain that they hate working with europeans. the people always go on vacation and projects get held up, and they come back and have to get oriented with everything again. by the time they catch up they are on vacation again
How big a sample size of Europeans does your consultant have? Your claim that "Europeans go on vacation and projects get held up and they can never catch up again" is... dubious at best.
Danes who work in the U.S. are often very surprised by the lack of organization in American workplaces. People work long hours but they seem somewhat haphazard hours, at least from a foreign perspective. Meetings are a particularly big cultural friction point: Danes expect a meeting to start exactly at a specific time, have an agenda distributed at least a day ahead of time, stick to the agenda, and end at exactly the agreed ending time. So you have a 10-11am meeting, you get going on the main topics of discussion at 10:00 (not 10:15 after 15 mins of small-talk and waiting for stragglers to come in), people have come prepared with what they're discussing, and it's guaranteed to be done by 11:00.
i made a statement, backed it up by mentioning productivity, and then made a reference to a real world example that I have observed, unlike the article that just mostly made platitudes.
if you'd like further evidence, the EU area has an unemployment rate close to 12%. companies are not anxious to hire europeans for one reason or another.
Almost all the EU unemployment is in the countries with long working hours and shorter vacations, oddly enough. Scandinavia, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands don't have high unemployment. People work reasonably short hours, take long vacations, and the many consulting companies here have no problem getting contracts, both within Europe and worldwide.
The European countries with major economic problems are in the south and east, where they tend not to have as generous vacation and hour policies in the first place. If you work with a Greek or Spanish consulting company, they will be there any time you want, bringing everyone into the office at 3am on a Saturday their time, if you ask for it. Good luck getting a Danish company to do that! Yet the Danish companies are not having trouble getting work.
Platitudes? On the contrary, the article made a lot of claims to back up the central point, and backed almost every one of them with research papers.
The countries with a high unemployment rate are also poorer and lack other benefits, most notably the mentioned vacations. We're talking about developed EU countries, and that's what we're comparing against the US.
France, Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain are developed nations, they just don't suit your argument. They all have or did have very long vacation days per year.
And you cant just cherry pick a few european countries and compare against the whole of the US. If we are going to play that game, why not pit them against silicon valley, manhatan, etc.
Greece and Portugal barely qualify for being developed. Greece in particular is basically a third world country that sits on Europe's doorstep. They got into the eurozone through gross fraud and manipulation of their own economic statistics, then borrowed money at German rates for years to enjoy a first-world standard of living. But the fundamentals in Greece were not first world at all. One memorable quote I saw in an article about this was, "We imported flat screen TV's and exported tomatoes".
What's happening in Greece is basically the huge pain of reality reasserting itself. Greece is more like a poor Asian or African country; enormous corruption, largely unskilled workforce, rampant tax evasion, no real industries to speak of outside shipping, huge imbalance of payments and so on.
Portugal is in much the same boat. It's "developed" in a sense, but like Greece up until very recently was actually a military dictatorship of the like you'd expect to see in the developing world. It's not developed in the same way Germany is.
With respect to the others, Ireland and Spain are indeed first world nations, suffering very badly thanks to the financial crisis. Ireland took on its banks debts and became poor in the process. Spain had a huge construction bubble.
Most EU unemployment is in the countries comprehensively raped by the IMF/EU Central Bank/European Commission cabal, who swooped in after 2008 demanding huge cuts in social spending so that the bond investors who were partly responsible for the crisis would be inconvenienced as little as possible.
Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Cyprus have seen huge leaps in unemployment, underage prostitution, suicide, child and adult mortality, and drug use as a result.
They used to be solid economies, with EU-wide unemployment running at around 7%. Now they're hollowed out shells.
'Employers' have nothing to do with this. It was purely a political decision, based on bad economic science (at best) and north-south racism at worst.
And the forcing of disparate country economic systems into line with the single euro based German one which meant they had no way out.
As the economics editor of the Guardian said of the Euro is a bad idea who's time has come.
The PIGS politicians also fiddled the figures to there own ends which lead to a property boom and crash in their country's - so those country are not totally innocent.
>> the people always go on vacation and projects get held up, and they come back and have to get oriented with everything again. by the time they catch up they are on vacation again
It's almost as if work is something they do to support a life outside the office.
All of the measurements are based on the workforce, which is a term of art that means something. When you get more efficient, lay off people and have everyone else do 1.5-3x more work, you get efficient.
The problem is, many of the discarded people are ending up on disability, and are thus out of the workforce. I'd like to compare the productivity of various societies based on population.
i clearly set something off. I didnt mean to disrespect EU workers, but it does seem like their vacation time is on the extreme side where as our seemingly lack there of is weighted towards the over working side but not by a huge deal. IMO
Quick note: according to Wikipedia (citing IMF, World Bank, etc) the US is #1 in GDP at ~$16 trillion, almost double China in the number two spot. We are number 6 in PPP, but if we're talking economic output I would argue the former is more relevant.
I think an even better statistic would be the following (GPD per hours worked): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_... The differences are remarkable. However the comparison is not entirely fair with countries like Norway resting at the top. Norway derives a large part of its GDP from industries which are not very labor heavy but contribute heavily to GDP (Norway's economy is >50% based on petrochemicals).
Yeah, all these Europe's way are better articles and books fall a little flat considering how terrible their economies are nowadays. It sounds like they are saying, "come be like us! Our nations can't even make their debt payments!"
If you want to compare individual EU countries with something, compare them against individual US states, which also vary widely in terms of how well they do economically.
Which is a completely manufactured "problem" whereby the completely real problem the EU nations in question had was that the money simply wasn't there.
Hurting the economy, sure people get burned out, but it is hard to come to that conclusion based on the data given and the authors points.