I'm not sure how to interpret the "GDP per working hour" metric. Are people in Ireland significantly more productive than people in other countries? Or how do we explain Ireland's significant lead on those charts? It sounds as vague or as useful as "the average temperature of all patients in a hospital". Also, the two links you provided show very different ranking of countries.

At the same time, I don't know how to properly measure human productivity. I mean, how do you compare productivity of people working at OpenAI to productivity of people working at Walmart?

> Also, the two links you provided show very different ranking of countries

Different years.

> At the same time, I don't know how to properly measure human productivity. I mean, how do you compare productivity of people working at OpenAI to productivity of people working at Walmart?

Exactly. Just because Ireland has a lot of services HQed there due to a beneficial tax regime doesn't make an Irish person working 40h at Google who count all EU revenues there more or less productive than someone working at a midsized German manufacturer of critical car components (say brakes).

GDP per hour worked is the least bad way of measuring we have, and I'm not aware of other ones. It can easily be skewed though, because it relies on a poor metric at its base, GDP.

My point was just that the difference between US and EU is minimal, with the imperfect way of measuring it. If anyone has a better way I'm all ears, but I highly doubt it will show anything different.