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Mind blowing (but not surprising) is how low Japan (and South Korea) ranks in terms of worker productivity. IIR, if South Koreans worked at a similar productivi
by bane 11y ago
Mind blowing (but not surprising) is how low Japan (and South Korea) ranks in terms of worker productivity. IIR, if South Koreans worked at a similar productivity as Norwegians, they could take half the week off with no effects at all on GDP. Japan is only slightly better.
In other words, quite a bit of those long work hours are absolutely useless.
- pedrosorio 11y agoNorway is perhaps not the best country for comparison. If South Koreans could get 22% of their GDP and 67% of their exports from the Oil & Gas sector that would help their productivity too. http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/countries/norway/ http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/count...
- rahimnathwani 11y agoThis is overly-simplistic, and misses three key points: 1) Labour productivity is measured as the _average_ output per worker, i.e. total output divided by total number of workers. It does not measure the _marginal_ output of an additional worker (i.e. the derivative of output with respect to number of workers). 2) Labour is not the only factor of production. There is also land, financial capital, technology, etc. 3) Haircuts in Norway cost more than haircuts in South Korea. Is a South Korean barber less productive than a Norwegian one?
- nightcracker 11y agoSo if I understand correctly we should compare: 1. Median household income (which should mostly be wages and not land, financial capital, technology). 2. Divided by purchasing power parity (to normalize for different prices in the country). 3. Divided by average hours worked per week for households with median income. This is however assuming that if an employee gets paid X (in purchasing power parity) for their work, then their generated value is some linear constant of X. I don't know how to compensate for the scenario where this is false.
- hueving 11y agoNone of that would account for a massive national surplus of a globally demanded resource (oil in Norway's case). A strong currency based on heavy exports of energy can subsidize all of the other factors.
- will_pseudonym 11y agoAll you have to do is estimate the impact to GDP that has on Norway, and pull it out from the comparison.
- martin_bech 11y agoNorways Currency NOK isnt strong, its actually one of the weaker currencies: Here it is in the last 2 years falling compared to USD and EUR. http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=NOK&to=USD&view=2Y http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=NOK&to=USD&view=2Y http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=NOK&to=EUR&view=2Y http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=NOK&to=EUR&view=2Y
- dennisgorelik 11y agoNorway is oil exporter. Oil is cheap now -> NOK is falling.
- rahimnathwani 11y agoNo, that wouldn't work, due to the effects of my point 2 above. Google 'solow growth model' to get some idea about why.
- anon4 11y agoYeah but this is easy to manage and predict. You tell everyone to do X work, where X is somewhere in the bottom quartile of productivity. If someone does less, you tell them to pick it up - it's pretty likely they're slacking off too much as opposed to being unable to perform. But you don't want people to do more, because then you start having different employees. Some would get jealous at others' higher productivity and more free time and you'll have to manage people differently and give different salaries and it will all be MADNESS. It's easiest for management if everyone is the same somewhat inefficient cog in the machine.
- baby 11y agoI have a friend working in Japan who tells me his coworkers spend a lot of time just sleeping at work. It doesn't seem to be frowned upon. Apparently they are extremely inefficient, doing long hours, sleeping little and suffering from it during the day at work.