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.
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_wo...
[2] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/reluctant-vacati...
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.
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: 38.0This 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.
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.
It's funny how people immediately just say because oil whenever it is brought up, and think that it magically explains everything. Yes, a ridiculous proportion of export is from that industry. But it's not like finding oil immediately makes people prosperous - you have to manage it. Do you want long-term prosperity? Or do you want boom towns with high local inflation, high crime etc.?
Going into how the Norwegian petroleum industry works would reveal a strategy that is very different from how countries like the US (or Canada in the prairie provinces) would have handled the same discovery. And it works.
But since you seem to be an expert, how about you enlighten me on this subject.
You seem to want to pick a fight, based on something I didn't even actually say or imply (which you carried over from another comment). That doesn't seem like very friendly behavior for HN. I never said a single thing implying Norway's financial well being was guaranteed or automatic or required no effort.
I said Norway is prosperous due to oil. That is true, and their prosperity began with the oil boom, and that is not a coincidence.
A five second comparison between how Venezuela has managed their resources and how Norway has, would tell you everything you need to know about the care Norway has taken to manage their good fortune, but that doesn't change in any way the fact that their good fortune is derived from the oil boom that saw their output peak at a massive 3.4 million bpd (particularly massive compared to their tiny population).
Pick a fight? You're refering to that whole 'care to enlighten me'? Would you have preferred a bit less sarcasm to go with that question? It seems to me that the aggression started with you, implying that I didn't understand the importance of the petroleum industry. Even though it was the only thing I was discussing in that post that you replied to.
All I said was that the combination of petroleum and the management of it has been important. Clearly, if you take petroleum out of the equation, management doesn't really help much, now does it? So I took it for granted that readers could see that petroleum was a crucial part of the equation.
You might appreciate that, after explaining how management of natural resources like this plays a significant part in how well it works to a nation's advantage, someone comes in and reduces it back to "oil, that's it", I might get a bit irritated? And if the point was not to reduce it to that, why would one even reply with a one-liner like that, as it doesn't really say anything novel on the topic?
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.
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.
Googling reveals: GDP includes military expenses, bloated health care expenses, bloated education costs, ... I guess that explains the relation.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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#
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.
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.
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
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.