Europe, Boring Until it's Not

[nmoore63]

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/table ... 0&plugin=1

Greece and Portugal are both below average.

Which is why they have to work more hours.

What you are getting at is not a thing.

https://www.nber.org/digest/jul06/w11895.html

Why High Earners Work Longer Hours

"Between 1979 and 2002, the frequency of long work hours increased by 14.4 percentage points among the top quintile of wage earners, but fell by 6.7 percentage points in the lowest quintile."
...
As evidence, the authors note that an extra hour beyond 40/week was associated with a 1.2 percent increase in earnings for male workers overall between 1983 and 1985, and with more than a 2 percent increase by 2000-2. For salaried workers, the man putting in 55 hours per week in the early 1980s earned a weekly salary of 10.5 percent more than an equivalent worker putting in normal hours. By the early twenty-first century, that gap had more than doubled, to 24.5 percent. Such pay gaps, or "long-hours premiums," were accommodated by a markedly wider dispersion of earnings within an occupation between 1983 and 2002.

https://www.epi.org/publication/ib348-t ... 1979-2007/

1979 2007
All 100% 1,687 1,868
Bottom fifth 1,248 1,523
Second fifth 1,588 1,829
Middle fifth 1,787 1,983
Fourth fifth 1,917 2,032
80–95% 1,952 2,036
Top 5% 1,784 1,919

[DBTrek]

Incompetent people work super hard, but not super productively.
I guess we're at the spell-out-the-obvious portion of the conversation.

[Speaker to Animals]

It wouldn't surprise me one bit that the the Greeks who actually work spend about 40 hours per week at it. That doesn't say anything about the productivity per capita because 23 percent of the people are on welfare and the unemployment rate (the people out of work looking for jobs and not on welfare) is almost 19 percent. 42% of them are not working.

That doesn't include the retirees either.

Probably more like 30% of them are actually working full-time.

[SuburbanFarmer]

Clearly explains why blue-collar workers and farmers are the moneyed elites of the world.

[nmoore63]

unproductive people work the least.

[The Conservative]

You don't go bankrupt six times by being productive Monte. That graph (assuming it is true at all) is not telling the whole tale. Either they spend too much, don't collect adequate revenue due to lying citizens, or they are lazy and want govt programs they can't afford. My personal belief is that is a combination of all three.

You are more spot on than you think... taxes for a few decades were more of a suggestion in paying than enforced...

[Montegriffo]

The most productive people work fewer hours per unit of production.
If I make 10 Beef Wellingtons per hour but Pedro only makes 7 and we need to produce 100 Wellingtons each who goes home first?

[Speaker to Animals]

Again, that's not true. You have to normalize the data by removing the massive welfare state effects. If only 30% of the population are working 50 hour weeks, you are confounding variables when you argue that their nation's low productivity is caused by the higher weekly hour average.

Or.. you know.. you could factor in the big fat ZERO that the other 60% of the population works to probably get an average work week of about 20 hours.

[The Conservative]

The most productive people work fewer hours per unit of production.
If I make 10 Beef Wellingtons per hour but Pedro only makes 7 and we need to produce 100 Wellingtons each who goes home first?

Remind me never to allow you to do business with a capitalist... you'd bankrupt them in less than a year...

[Montegriffo]

Again, that's not true. You have to normalize the data by removing the massive welfare state effects. If only 30% of the population are working 50 hour weeks, you are confounding variables when you argue that their nation's low productivity is caused by the higher weekly hour average.

Or.. you know.. you could factor in the big fat ZERO that the other 60% of the population works to probably get an average work week of about 20 hours.

Back to front.