That's quite a stretch. Ask any engineer about having that a-ha moment in the shower, or when out for a walk. Downtime is incredibly important for mentally intense work. Work smarter, not harder and all that. Productivity isn't tied to time spent in office - my experience with american offices is that they encourage people to hang around, spend time there with meals, etc. That's not productive time, that's time spent in the office. Similarly, innovation doesn't come from time in the office, it comes from collaboration, experience, thinking outside the box.

> However, despite its reputation, it's not a place that I would say prioritizes work (compared to the U.S.)

I don't think this is a fair statement. The US prioritizes butts-in-seats, workplaces where you're competing against your peers, system where the power imbalance between an employee and employer is heavily stacked in favour of the employer. That doesn't mean that the US prioritizes work., and it definitely doesn't mean that Germany doesn't prioritize work.

I agree but I think you’ll find that working usually contributes economic value. Not working usually doesn’t. The key word being usually. if you’re in doubt, just try to record the economic value delivered by your downtime. How many hours are idled for every a-ha moment? Not that there is anything wrong with idling…

> That doesn't mean that the US prioritizes work., and it definitely doesn't mean that Germany doesn't prioritize work.

I’m using productivity as a measurement. Ideally, productivity accounts for inefficient work by comparing inputs (labor) to economic outputs. The U.S. is more productive in this sense, so it’s more than just butts in seats.

During WW1, the British "Health of Munition Workers' Committee" collected some fascinating data on production and working hours from armament factories. These were fairly motivated workers, doing semi-skilled manual tasks where you'd expect productivity to scale linearly with time on the job.

Moving from 25 hours/week to 30, 40, or 45 hours did lead to a proportional increase in output, but it then begins to plateau. Teams working 7x 10 hour shifts produced about as much as those working 8x6.

Check out the first few figures of Pencavel, J. (2014). The Productivity of Working Hours. The Economic Journal, 125(589), 2052–2076. Portico. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12166

Data collected from American workers during WW2 showed a similar pattern. I'd expect that "creative" work has an even smaller linear range, but I'm not aware of any studies.

Actually, the differences are quite small and in 2017 Germany overtook the US in labour productivity: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...

_Some_ people have to be "not working" in order to make use of all the other areas of the economy - shops, transport, leisure centres, clubs, nightlife, the arts, self-care (beauty, massage, counselling etc). That's a fairly large slice of the economic activity in many countries.

Productivity has no strong meaning either. How do you measure it? GDP PPP / worker / hour? What if it actually depends on externalities like the amount of carbon released in the atmosphere? What is actually a worker (back at the what is "work" and "economic value" point)? What if it counts destroying then rebuilding things (as-is)? What if it counts absurdly high health expenses? What if it counts absurdly high health expenses coming in part because some people illegal pushed for addictive drugs to be way over-prescribed by corrupting physicians?

That's unimportant, though.

Arguments like this are pointless.

  > artificially inflated

https://www.statista.com/statistics/184968/us-health-expendi...

There's a quote from Obama in an article from The Nation years ago, that basically says we can't fix our healthcare system properly because it would put too many (white-collar make-work jobs program participants, essentially, under our current system) people out of work.

The main US advantage wrt to the last generation of tech giants (i.e. Google, Facebook and Amazon) is language. You will reach scale far faster in the US than in Europe because you do not have to translate your product to new languages and markets. Thus the US giants reached scale before similar European products could compete.

That is false. EU mandates minimum 4 weeks of PTO across all members but varies wildly according to country, sector and company.

In most EU countries I've seen the average tends to hover around 5 weeks while 6 weeks or more is usually for very generous employers trying to attract top applicants in employee friendly countries.

I get you're attempting a jab at Americans by flashing large number of PTO, but let's be realistic that 6 weeks is not the norm in for all jobs in the whole of Europe.

There’s vacation and sick leave in most of EU. PTO is an acronym used in the US and the concept doesn’t apply in Europe.

I fail to see how admitting that certain countries have particular qualities that make them less competitive in a given industry and thus make it more economically feasible to use the solutions of other nations, means that they would become dependent on another culture/language.

I mean, exploring new languages and knowing a few polite phrases is generally a good idea, even if you don't find the idea of learning a new language fun/useful personally. That said, it's not like it's required either: people who shop on AliExpress don't need to know Chinese by any means.

Globalization (and thus getting out-competed in certain respects) is kind of inevitable nowadays, though admittedly it would be really cool to see European alternatives to AWS - I mean, Alibaba Cloud and Yandex Cloud seem to prove that it's at least somewhat feasible to explore something like that and companies like Hetzner and Scaleway seem to also prove that the infrastructure aspects are basically covered.

All that's missing is the platform around it, as well as all of the complexity and development that would come with setting out to make something like that.