In most of Europe a lot of these things depend a lot on the company/sector you work in. It might be more true in what people call the old economy, but there you

In most of Europe a lot of these things depend a lot on the company/sector you work in. It might be more true in what people call the old economy, but there you simply go for longer smoking pauses, etc. How well you do after a trade school also depends a lot on the sector you are working it and even on companies. There are companies who love people with degrees from trade schools and others who don't like them. When you want to look at working hours in comparison to economical output there once has been a study posted here on HN showing that the richer countries (at least in Europe) tend to be those with fewer working hours and in general there seems to be a strong north-south difference, with Italy, Greece, Austria (which is the exception), etc. having many work hours and Scandinavian having fewer. As for the whole topic: I really don't think that all of this really tells you too much about what a good system for economical output is. A lot of this tells you more about the society in a country and probably its history. Of course it all affects economy, but copying Germany won't magically make you rich, same is true for US, UK, China, ... Laws and rules in general, as well as the educational systems must fit with other things like society, natural resources, population size and structure, etc. That's also why you can't just say that a libertarian (economically, not social) society will always have a wealthier society than another. There are many additional factors. China has the benefit of a large population, the US has the benefit of a great size, over many climatic zones and the UK has at the right time set a focus on institutions that act in the financial market. However also those things have to come with a society that is willing to make use of this. If you think about South America. They still struggle mostly with the problem that they in history ended up on the losing side. If that other side happened to win (could have happened, were they luckier and took different decisions at times of war) then things might have looked different, or not. I don't want to say these things depend largely on luck, but since there are multiple complex systems interacting with each other saying X is the reason for this and that everyone could have seen this coming seems like the wrong and a strongly irrational approach to me. There were lots of really tiny events throughout history that strongly affected history and thereby societies, economy, politics, etc. and thereby how well economical models end up working for certain countries.