6 ms·

And yet compared to those European countries, the US experiences significantly higher GDP per capita. Doing work and getting paid for it hardly seems like it's

by JackFr 12y ago

And yet compared to those European countries, the US experiences significantly higher GDP per capita. Doing work and getting paid for it hardly seems like it's hurting the economy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP... As to the studies cited in the article I would point to the OECD labor productivity statistics which, in the aggregate, seem to disagree. http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL The fact that Americans seem to only be able to find identity and meaning in their work, so much so as that it causes a psychic crisis to leave even temporarily, is the real problem, if it need be called such, rather than some imagined hurt to the economy. But that problem is so ingrained in our culture it is never going away.

claybinion 12y ago
Can you explain what you mean by your last paragraph? The inability to find meaning and indentity in ones work causes people a psychic crisis to leave their jobs even temporarily? That problem is an imagined hurt to the economy?
- JackFr 12y ago
  What I mean to say is that Amercians are overworked because they like to be overworked. Typically an American's sole sense of identity comes from his or her job, and while we give lip service to 'happiness' as our life's goal unless happiness means ambition and success in one's work, you are an oddball. The problem isn't that Americans are hurting the economy with over work; the problem, if you want to call it one, is that because we have nothing else in our lives, we don't mind that we're overworked.
  - stedlev 12y ago
    I don't get how you come to the conclusion that no one minds it. I am very lucky and have built a business where I have lots of free time, and I have yet to find a person who says I am wasting my life by spending my free time learning new languages, teaching myself new things, backpacking the world, and developing new hobbies. People say they like their work and they "live" for their work because it's all they have, yet they aren't happy with it. If they were, they wouldn't be so compelled to go out and drink weekends away. Americans have no choice but to be overworked. I look at professional jobs where I could use my computer science degree, and I have no choice. I basically have to choose a job where I work more than 40 hours a week. And in the US, a lot of employers only pay you for when you work. So that hour lunch break doesn't count toward the time you're working. Neither does your commute. So there's a large swath of people in the US who work 10 hours a day, have an hour of two of commute each way, and an hour of idle time at work. meaning worst case scenarios, you're looking at 13+ hours a day spent at doing work related things. Something that people have to do that consumes their life will be perceived as something that that person likes, kind of like how Stockholm Syndrome works. No one ever speaks of how these long hours affect Americans to the point where they don't have time for constructive hobbies, time to learn about the world, etc, and that is going to hurt Americans far more than anything else. I realize that their is more distance for Americans to see the world than Europeans or Asians, however, you would think that if seeing the world was considered important, that Americans would have more time off and more paid vacation to make up for the fact that you need to travel so far to experience vastly different cultures. You've got to think about the fact that we have a generation of people raising children who only know how to work while the rest of the developed world is taking long vacations and living in the assumption that a worker should have access to health care, education, etc. I am terrified of how the next generation of Americans will turn out. They're going to grow up seeing both their parents work 50 hour work weeks, have no hobbies, never travel to anything inspiring and only travelling for escapism, and thinking that they have it better in the USA than anywhere else. I don't plan on having children in the USA. I don't think I could morally raise a child and fill their heads with delusions of grandeur and getting rich quick by working 65 hours a week, only to see them swallowed by student loans and debt, never escaping that mortgage until they die, while I look them in the eye and tell them the people in France work half as much yet make more money. Please, look at these numbers: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL# http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL# I realize they are a bit dated (the new dataset doesn't include the metric I want to look at), but USA already works harder than the Japanese. USA works almost 30% more hours than Netherlands. That's massive. To put that into perspective, that means an 8 hour workday in the USA translates into a 5.6 hour work day in the Netherlands.
    - tomp 12y ago
      What kind of business do you have?
    - JackFr 12y ago
      Perhaps I'm overstated my case. It would be more correct to say Americans are overworked because they chose to be overworked. It may not seem like a choice to some, especially in the professional class, because they have a preconceived notion of a lifestyle and 'acceptable' careers based on where they see themselves in life.
alandarev 12y ago
Feels more like journalists are just using any correlations to explain recession.
_delirium 12y ago
Re: your second point, there actually does seem to be a pretty negative correlation between working hours and GDP in the OECD statistics you link. Just sort on the average-hours-worked column and look at who's at the top and bottom: with a few outliers, the rich countries are all on the low end, and the poor countries are on the high end. The shortest hours are in the Netherlands, Germany, and Norway; while the longest are in Mexico, Korea, and Greece. This doesn't establish that longer hours lower GDP, of course. If I had to guess on a causal direction, it'd be some mixture of [more GDP] -> [shorter hours], as well as a good helping of [better-run country] -> both shorter hours and more GDP.
antr 12y ago
I agree with your first paragraph, but GDP is the measurement of one thing, and one thing only: products and services produced. Should we compare the 'economic output' with other (in my opinion) equally important indices, like life expectancy, cost and access to healthcare, access to 'free' and universal primary/secondary/university education, income inequality, safety, etc, the concept of (social) productivity will definitely shift to other countries. Don't get me wrong, I value GDP as much as almost any economist and finance minister, but all these other 'soft' factors are, to me, equally important.
gejjaxxita 12y ago
The US has a lower population density than those European countries, more natural resource is divided between fewer people. That is the primary reason for the higher GDP per capita.
- lgieron 12y ago
  It seems unlikely, given that mining & agriculture (industries affected by availability of natural resources) comprise only 3% of the US economy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States
  - pjc50 12y ago
    Er, what about oil? I'd have thought the oil industry on its own was more than 3%, and industries affected by gasoline costs are a huge sector.
    - lgieron 12y ago
      1. Oil production goes under mining. 2. Oil is a globally traded commodity, the fact that some of it is produced in the US doesn't affect the local (=in the US) price.
- adventured 12y ago
  The facts don't bear out what you're saying. The US is the world's second or first largest manufacturing nation (it's a close race with China currently, but they likely pulled ahead this year). The US has the world's largest IT industry. The US has the world's largest software industry. The US has the world's largest internet / cloud industry. The US has the world's largest telecom industry. The US has the world's largest airlines, and railroads. The US has the world's largest auto industry. The US has the world's largest defense industry. The US has the world's largest agriculture industry. The US has the world's largest space industry. The US has the world's largest retail industry. The US has the world's largest capital markets. The US has the world's largest real estate market, both commercial and residential. The US has the world's largest advertising, marketing and design industries. All of these things are not true simply because the US has natural resources. If it were simply a matter of resources per person, Norway would be the world's largest automaker or similar.
hnnewguy 12y ago
>the US experiences significantly higher GDP per capita This is to be expected, if Americans are working longer hours than their European counterparts. If you do a little back-of-the-envelope normalization (GDP/capita/average hours worked), the results are much closer. Norway, of course, absolutely dominates by this metric. US: 28.9 France: 24.3 Germany: 26.4 Sweden: 25.4 Norway: 38.0
- cbr 12y ago
  > Norway, of course, absolutely dominates by this metric. This is North Sea oil, right? Hard to generalize from.
  - hnnewguy 12y ago
    >This is North Sea oil, right? Hard to generalize from. Wasn't really generalizing, just stating fact. Norway has far fewer proven oil reserves than Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Algeria, Ecuador, Nigeria and on and on... Oil is not a panacea. The combination of a progressive culture and resource endowment tends to win. But don't assume that the latter is most important.
    - chimeracoder 12y ago
      > The combination of a progressive culture and resource endowment Don't forget having a relatively culturally and ethnically homogenous population (when compared to countries like the US), something that is often forgotten when holding up Scandinavian countries (esp. Norway) as a model.
      - selectodude 12y ago
        And the fact that there are fewer people in Norway than there are in New York City.
        Dewie 12y ago
        I think that's kind of why 'per capita' is used.
Arjuna 12y ago
But that problem is so ingrained in our culture it is never going away. To your point, you may find this study interesting, entitled "Europeans Work To Live and Americans Live To Work (Who is Happy to Work More: Americans or Europeans?)" [1]. Here is another interesting piece on the topic, entitled "Reluctant Vacationers: Why Americans Work More, Relax Less, Than Europeans" [2]. As with anything, take these in stride; I offer them as additional data points. However, they do explore an interesting perspective, as both pieces attempt to investigate some of the cultural and historical differences between Americans and Europeans with regard to views toward cultural identity, taxes, unions, work, etc. [1] http://people.hmdc.harvard.edu/~akozaryn/myweb/docs/final_work_to_live.pdf http://people.hmdc.harvard.edu/~akozaryn/myweb/docs/final_wo... [2] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/reluctant-vacationers-why-americans-work-more-relax-less-than-europeans https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/reluctant-vacati...
- saraid216 12y ago
  Those articles sound really familiar and I'm pretty sure at least one of them has spawned a pretty sizable HN thread. Might be worth searching for if someone wants to dig.
incision 12y ago
>'But that problem is so ingrained in our culture it is never going away.' I don't know about that. Anecdotally, I've experienced this culture enforced by older (>50) people and don't see much of it at all with younger people (<30). Surely there are exceptions - startup culture seems more prone to it - but that's to be expected. I expect the culture is simply going to die off not long after the baby boomers.
TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
>than some imagined hurt to the economy Whose economy? I don't see how people who are working >80 hours a week are living in the same economy as the 'investors' they work for. Real spending power for most people has crashed since 2008; tech is a rare exception. How can that happen if these people are valued, equal participants in the national economy?
joesmo 12y ago
GDP per capita is a terrible measure here. There are countries that work significantly less than us and still have similar or higher productivity levels (some countries like Switzerland even have higher GDP per capita though that's still irrelevant). Not to mention a much higher quality of life. (http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010/ http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2...) This isn't surprising considering the water cooler based work culture in the US. This benefits no one, but since there are almost no laws protecting workers, most workers have no choice but to comply or be fired. Then, of course, you have the people that do it intentionally, especially in the software industry, as a badge of honor or because delusional thinking makes them seem productive when they're actually less productive. The ones who can take vacation and won't. Mixing the desperate former and insane latter is exactly what most US companies strive for as their ideal work culture. What the article overlooks is the unemployment caused by overtime. Two people working at 60 hours are roughly equivalent to one 40 hour a week job taken out of the economy--though obviously, the quality is much less than having a dedicated third person working. This isn't true for all jobs, just most.
fh973 12y ago
You seem to imply that higher GDP of a country is relevant for quality of life of its citizen. Knowing the US and Europe, I was also wondering what this high GDP is about, because it surely does not translate to material wealth. Googling reveals: GDP includes military expenses, bloated health care expenses, bloated education costs, ... I guess that explains the relation.
- Dewie 12y ago
  GDP per capita doesn't say anything about the wealth of the median person, either. Maybe in this case, GDP per capita should be coupled with the gini coefficient, which in the US' case is high (less equality) for a first world country.
  - adventured 12y ago
    Why is equality more important than, say, how poor your average citizens are? Most of Europe is exceptionally poor by American standards. I would rather the average person earn $45,000 per year, with wide inequality due to a lot of rich people, than have the average person earn $8,000 or $14,000 per year like a dozen poor European countries that may have a better gini number.
    - Dewie 12y ago
      I was comparing the US to first world countries, not Europe as a whole. And no first world country is exceptionally poor compared to the US. Yes, the point in this case is actually to have fewer poor people - specifically a strong middle class. As supposed to, say, a vast percentage of poor workers and an exceptionally rich upper class. You'll have to be more specific, or else your post looks like a derailment from what was under discussion, namely US GDP per capita compared to other first world countries.
      - adventured 12y ago
        Which European countries do you consider first world?

by JackFr 12y ago

claybinion 12y ago

Can you explain what you mean by your last paragraph? The inability to find meaning and indentity in ones work causes people a psychic crisis to leave their jobs even temporarily? That problem is an imagined hurt to the economy?

JackFr 12y ago
What I mean to say is that Amercians are overworked because they like to be overworked. Typically an American's sole sense of identity comes from his or her job, and while we give lip service to 'happiness' as our life's goal unless happiness means ambition and success in one's work, you are an oddball. The problem isn't that Americans are hurting the economy with over work; the problem, if you want to call it one, is that because we have nothing else in our lives, we don't mind that we're overworked.
- stedlev 12y ago
  I don't get how you come to the conclusion that no one minds it. I am very lucky and have built a business where I have lots of free time, and I have yet to find a person who says I am wasting my life by spending my free time learning new languages, teaching myself new things, backpacking the world, and developing new hobbies. People say they like their work and they "live" for their work because it's all they have, yet they aren't happy with it. If they were, they wouldn't be so compelled to go out and drink weekends away. Americans have no choice but to be overworked. I look at professional jobs where I could use my computer science degree, and I have no choice. I basically have to choose a job where I work more than 40 hours a week. And in the US, a lot of employers only pay you for when you work. So that hour lunch break doesn't count toward the time you're working. Neither does your commute. So there's a large swath of people in the US who work 10 hours a day, have an hour of two of commute each way, and an hour of idle time at work. meaning worst case scenarios, you're looking at 13+ hours a day spent at doing work related things. Something that people have to do that consumes their life will be perceived as something that that person likes, kind of like how Stockholm Syndrome works. No one ever speaks of how these long hours affect Americans to the point where they don't have time for constructive hobbies, time to learn about the world, etc, and that is going to hurt Americans far more than anything else. I realize that their is more distance for Americans to see the world than Europeans or Asians, however, you would think that if seeing the world was considered important, that Americans would have more time off and more paid vacation to make up for the fact that you need to travel so far to experience vastly different cultures. You've got to think about the fact that we have a generation of people raising children who only know how to work while the rest of the developed world is taking long vacations and living in the assumption that a worker should have access to health care, education, etc. I am terrified of how the next generation of Americans will turn out. They're going to grow up seeing both their parents work 50 hour work weeks, have no hobbies, never travel to anything inspiring and only travelling for escapism, and thinking that they have it better in the USA than anywhere else. I don't plan on having children in the USA. I don't think I could morally raise a child and fill their heads with delusions of grandeur and getting rich quick by working 65 hours a week, only to see them swallowed by student loans and debt, never escaping that mortgage until they die, while I look them in the eye and tell them the people in France work half as much yet make more money. Please, look at these numbers: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL# http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL# I realize they are a bit dated (the new dataset doesn't include the metric I want to look at), but USA already works harder than the Japanese. USA works almost 30% more hours than Netherlands. That's massive. To put that into perspective, that means an 8 hour workday in the USA translates into a 5.6 hour work day in the Netherlands.
  - tomp 12y ago
    What kind of business do you have?
  - JackFr 12y ago
    Perhaps I'm overstated my case. It would be more correct to say Americans are overworked because they chose to be overworked. It may not seem like a choice to some, especially in the professional class, because they have a preconceived notion of a lifestyle and 'acceptable' careers based on where they see themselves in life.

alandarev 12y ago

Feels more like journalists are just using any correlations to explain recession.

_delirium 12y ago

Re: your second point, there actually does seem to be a pretty negative correlation between working hours and GDP in the OECD statistics you link. Just sort on the average-hours-worked column and look at who's at the top and bottom: with a few outliers, the rich countries are all on the low end, and the poor countries are on the high end. The shortest hours are in the Netherlands, Germany, and Norway; while the longest are in Mexico, Korea, and Greece. This doesn't establish that longer hours lower GDP, of course. If I had to guess on a causal direction, it'd be some mixture of [more GDP] -> [shorter hours], as well as a good helping of [better-run country] -> both shorter hours and more GDP.

antr 12y ago

I agree with your first paragraph, but GDP is the measurement of one thing, and one thing only: products and services produced. Should we compare the 'economic output' with other (in my opinion) equally important indices, like life expectancy, cost and access to healthcare, access to 'free' and universal primary/secondary/university education, income inequality, safety, etc, the concept of (social) productivity will definitely shift to other countries. Don't get me wrong, I value GDP as much as almost any economist and finance minister, but all these other 'soft' factors are, to me, equally important.

gejjaxxita 12y ago

The US has a lower population density than those European countries, more natural resource is divided between fewer people. That is the primary reason for the higher GDP per capita.

lgieron 12y ago
It seems unlikely, given that mining & agriculture (industries affected by availability of natural resources) comprise only 3% of the US economy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States
- pjc50 12y ago
  Er, what about oil? I'd have thought the oil industry on its own was more than 3%, and industries affected by gasoline costs are a huge sector.
  - lgieron 12y ago
    1. Oil production goes under mining. 2. Oil is a globally traded commodity, the fact that some of it is produced in the US doesn't affect the local (=in the US) price.
adventured 12y ago
The facts don't bear out what you're saying. The US is the world's second or first largest manufacturing nation (it's a close race with China currently, but they likely pulled ahead this year). The US has the world's largest IT industry. The US has the world's largest software industry. The US has the world's largest internet / cloud industry. The US has the world's largest telecom industry. The US has the world's largest airlines, and railroads. The US has the world's largest auto industry. The US has the world's largest defense industry. The US has the world's largest agriculture industry. The US has the world's largest space industry. The US has the world's largest retail industry. The US has the world's largest capital markets. The US has the world's largest real estate market, both commercial and residential. The US has the world's largest advertising, marketing and design industries. All of these things are not true simply because the US has natural resources. If it were simply a matter of resources per person, Norway would be the world's largest automaker or similar.

hnnewguy 12y ago

>the US experiences significantly higher GDP per capita This is to be expected, if Americans are working longer hours than their European counterparts. If you do a little back-of-the-envelope normalization (GDP/capita/average hours worked), the results are much closer. Norway, of course, absolutely dominates by this metric. US: 28.9 France: 24.3 Germany: 26.4 Sweden: 25.4 Norway: 38.0

cbr 12y ago
> Norway, of course, absolutely dominates by this metric. This is North Sea oil, right? Hard to generalize from.
- hnnewguy 12y ago
  >This is North Sea oil, right? Hard to generalize from. Wasn't really generalizing, just stating fact. Norway has far fewer proven oil reserves than Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Algeria, Ecuador, Nigeria and on and on... Oil is not a panacea. The combination of a progressive culture and resource endowment tends to win. But don't assume that the latter is most important.
  - chimeracoder 12y ago
    > The combination of a progressive culture and resource endowment Don't forget having a relatively culturally and ethnically homogenous population (when compared to countries like the US), something that is often forgotten when holding up Scandinavian countries (esp. Norway) as a model.
    - selectodude 12y ago
      And the fact that there are fewer people in Norway than there are in New York City.
      - Dewie 12y ago
        I think that's kind of why 'per capita' is used.

Arjuna 12y ago

But that problem is so ingrained in our culture it is never going away. To your point, you may find this study interesting, entitled "Europeans Work To Live and Americans Live To Work (Who is Happy to Work More: Americans or Europeans?)" [1]. Here is another interesting piece on the topic, entitled "Reluctant Vacationers: Why Americans Work More, Relax Less, Than Europeans" [2]. As with anything, take these in stride; I offer them as additional data points. However, they do explore an interesting perspective, as both pieces attempt to investigate some of the cultural and historical differences between Americans and Europeans with regard to views toward cultural identity, taxes, unions, work, etc. [1] http://people.hmdc.harvard.edu/~akozaryn/myweb/docs/final_work_to_live.pdf http://people.hmdc.harvard.edu/~akozaryn/myweb/docs/final_wo... [2] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/reluctant-vacationers-why-americans-work-more-relax-less-than-europeans https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/reluctant-vacati...

saraid216 12y ago
Those articles sound really familiar and I'm pretty sure at least one of them has spawned a pretty sizable HN thread. Might be worth searching for if someone wants to dig.

incision 12y ago

>'But that problem is so ingrained in our culture it is never going away.' I don't know about that. Anecdotally, I've experienced this culture enforced by older (>50) people and don't see much of it at all with younger people (<30). Surely there are exceptions - startup culture seems more prone to it - but that's to be expected. I expect the culture is simply going to die off not long after the baby boomers.

TheOtherHobbes 12y ago

>than some imagined hurt to the economy Whose economy? I don't see how people who are working >80 hours a week are living in the same economy as the 'investors' they work for. Real spending power for most people has crashed since 2008; tech is a rare exception. How can that happen if these people are valued, equal participants in the national economy?

joesmo 12y ago

GDP per capita is a terrible measure here. There are countries that work significantly less than us and still have similar or higher productivity levels (some countries like Switzerland even have higher GDP per capita though that's still irrelevant). Not to mention a much higher quality of life. (http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010/ http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2...) This isn't surprising considering the water cooler based work culture in the US. This benefits no one, but since there are almost no laws protecting workers, most workers have no choice but to comply or be fired. Then, of course, you have the people that do it intentionally, especially in the software industry, as a badge of honor or because delusional thinking makes them seem productive when they're actually less productive. The ones who can take vacation and won't. Mixing the desperate former and insane latter is exactly what most US companies strive for as their ideal work culture. What the article overlooks is the unemployment caused by overtime. Two people working at 60 hours are roughly equivalent to one 40 hour a week job taken out of the economy--though obviously, the quality is much less than having a dedicated third person working. This isn't true for all jobs, just most.

fh973 12y ago

You seem to imply that higher GDP of a country is relevant for quality of life of its citizen. Knowing the US and Europe, I was also wondering what this high GDP is about, because it surely does not translate to material wealth. Googling reveals: GDP includes military expenses, bloated health care expenses, bloated education costs, ... I guess that explains the relation.

Dewie 12y ago
GDP per capita doesn't say anything about the wealth of the median person, either. Maybe in this case, GDP per capita should be coupled with the gini coefficient, which in the US' case is high (less equality) for a first world country.
- adventured 12y ago
  Why is equality more important than, say, how poor your average citizens are? Most of Europe is exceptionally poor by American standards. I would rather the average person earn $45,000 per year, with wide inequality due to a lot of rich people, than have the average person earn $8,000 or $14,000 per year like a dozen poor European countries that may have a better gini number.
  - Dewie 12y ago
    I was comparing the US to first world countries, not Europe as a whole. And no first world country is exceptionally poor compared to the US. Yes, the point in this case is actually to have fewer poor people - specifically a strong middle class. As supposed to, say, a vast percentage of poor workers and an exceptionally rich upper class. You'll have to be more specific, or else your post looks like a derailment from what was under discussion, namely US GDP per capita compared to other first world countries.
    - adventured 12y ago
      Which European countries do you consider first world?