[bump64]

Can't speak for all southern countries in EU but here are my impressions.

* At least from the people I know during the summer productivity drops because everyone is on a vacation to the seaside.

* People here seem to much more enjoy live. It is much more common to see young people just hanging around and socializing than doing anything productive.

* Tourism is usually the priority for those counties, not IT. This leads to high number of seasonal workers. Lots of people don't want to work in factories and offices. They just work a few months during the summer in the tourism and during the rest of the time they enjoy life and do nothing.

* EU allows everyone to work everywhere and smart people want to be part of the technological hubs of Europe which just happen not be here. It is the same as in USA. I haven't heard about any startup from Kansas, but plenty from Silicon Valley.

My two cents for the situation. EU has poured lots of money to these regions but very few productive things have come out. People just learned how to manipulate the system to get more funds. They are not thinking how to solve real problems and make people lives better, everyone is just trying to get money, spend them and then asks for more. The funds should be restructured to allow entrepreneurship grow. You cannot make inefficient system better by just giving it more money, you need to change the system.

[ciguy]

Technological hubs don't "just happen" to not be in Southern Europe. I'm American but also hold Italian citizenship and have lived in Italy and Spain. The regulatory environment around finance, labor and business makes any kind of scalable technical hub impossible. Starting a business generally takes many months and thousands of Euros. Why would anyone opt for that instead of going to the UK where you can get started in days with a 50 pound fee.

Corruption and graft at every level of government is also an issue. Southern Italy still has businesses being bombed by Mafia affiliated gangs for example if they don't pay protection money (This happened to several places I frequent last year when I lived in Napoli). Until Southern Europe reforms culturally they will continue to lag further and further behind and all the smart young people will go to places more welcoming of their talents.

[kevinstubbs]

I agree with your overall arguments.

However, I did take issue with one point. It's unfair to use Mafia bombings in Napoli as a reflection of all Southern Italy when Napoli is a notoriously dangerous area and has been at times even considered the most dangerous city in all of Western Europe. I'm sure you understand this, having lived in Napoli, but I think it unfairly characterizes daily life in Southern Italy for unfamiliar readers.

[ciguy]

That's a fair criticism, I certainly didn't mean to insinuate that this happens everywhere in Italy. Various mafia organizations are most definitely active outside of Napoli in various small Italian towns, though they may not be as violent. Tourists are incredibly unlikely to ever have an issue but locals are affected more.

[icebraining]

The long vacations (often a whistle word for "laziness") is a common refrain, but as far as I know the numbers don't bear that out: the vacation days are not very different, and the working hours are actually longer.

[adventured]

That's correct. People proclaiming that it's about quality of life are mistaken, other nations have overwhelmingly demonstrated that you can have both in abundance.

Portugal works more hours (1,842) than the US does (1,783; average labor hours per worker per year). Yet US output per capita is nearly three times higher. Greece works far more hours than the US. The US is near the OECD average for hours worked, Greece is 15% higher than the OECD average. Spain works 4% fewer hours than the US, with 1/2 the output. Italy works 3% fewer hours with close to 1/2 the output.

Forget about the US though, it's nowhere near the best example of this in action.

Germany is at $48k GDP per capita, over double that of Portugal or Greece, while working 1363 hours per year. About 20% fewer hours than Spain and Italy. That's nearly 500 fewer hours of annual work versus Portugal. The Germans are averaging 26 hours per week across a year, Greek workers are at 39 (which in real terms means once you remove vacation time, the average worker in Greece is pulling well over 40 hours per work week).

The Greeks are among the worst off in hours worked, at 2035 hours. 672 more hours than the Germans. That's a strong indictment of the quality of life argument usually tossed about regarding countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece.

Some of the countries near the bottom in hours worked in the OECD: Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, France, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Australia, UK.

They're all simultaneously very high output countries, working fewer hours than Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece.

Norway and Switzerland are near the bottom in hours as well, however their context are rather unique.

[adventured]

In case anyone is interested, here's how the figures break out on an hourly basis, for output per capita and hours worked. The OECD average on hours worked per year is 1,763.

Country | Hours (year) | GDP Per Capita | Output Per Hour

--- Best results (low hours, high output) ---

Denmark | 1,410 | $60.7k | $43.05

Netherlands | 1,430 | $53.1k | $37.13

Germany | 1,363 | $48.3k | $35.44

--- Mid or mid-upper tier outcomes ---

Ireland | 1,879 | $76.1k | $40.50

United States | 1,783 | $62.6k | $35.11

Australia | 1,669 | $56.4k | $33.79

Sweden | 1,621 | $53.9k | $33.25

Austria | 1,601 | $51.5k | $32.17

Finland | 1,653 | $49.8k | $30.13

Belgium | 1,550 | $46.7k | $30.13

France | 1,472 | $42.9k | $29.14

Canada | 1,703 | $46.3k | $27.19

--- Underperforming (too many hours vs output) ---

UK | 1,676 | $42.6k | $25.42

New Zealand | 1,752 | $41.3k | $23.57

Japan | 1,713 | $39.3k | $22.94

Israel | 1,889 | $41.6k | $22.02

Italy | 1,730 | $34.3k | $19.83

Spain | 1,695 | $30.7k | $18.11

South Korea | 2,069 | $31.3k | $15.13

Portugal | 1,842 | $23.2k | $12.60

Greece | 2,035 | $20.4k | $10.02

--- Some other miscellaneous results of note ---

Norway | 1,424 | $81.7k | $57.37

Switzerland | 1,590 | $82.9k | $52.14

Iceland | 1,883 | $74.3k | $39.46

Chile | 1,974 | $16.1k | $8.16

Poland | 1,928 | $15.4k | $7.99

Russia | 1,974 | $11.3k | $5.72

Turkey | 1,800 | $9.3k | $5.17

Mexico | 2,255 | $9.8k | $4.35

[LeanderK]

Wow! this is an really interesting chart. I would not have expected the US to have the same Output Per Hour as germany. Switzerland is just killing it. Where's your source? The distribution of Output Per Hour per country would be even more interesting. I would expect countries like Italy to fairly multi-modal (north/south divide).

[adventured]

I threw it together. The source is the OECD hours worked data (public information), with IMF 2018 GDP figures (which are pretty similar to other major sources like the World Bank).

This isn't a perfect system, as it doesn't account for the variance in % of the population that is working. However, since the workers ultimately represent all or nearly all of the GDP output regardless, it's quite effective overall as a reference. Basically you just need to get to the broad view: how many hours are the people of a nation working and what kind of output does the nation have. You still get a lot of things in a given nation that impact GDP that isn't going to represent perfectly when just looking at labor.

A potentially even better approach would be to take how many workers a nation has, with the hours worked and the national GDP. So you look at GDP per worker, rather than GDP per capita, and then look at the average hours worked. The big question though is the accuracy of national worker count figures, and how that compares to the accuracy on GDP figures. Flip a coin perhaps.

However, this data does tell you some clear things. It tells you that Mexico is suffering pretty hard under those hours worked vs output (and as a share of output, it tells you what their compensation limits are). The Polish are working far too many hours, although it is producing a decent output figure. The people of Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands are generating incredible economic output with those very low hours figures.

It also tells you that while eg the French often get flack for supposedly being lazy when it comes to working hours, they have one of the best hourly output figures of any nation and match that up very well with low working hours (they have one of the better combinations of hours & output, well exceeding the UK).

However it obviously doesn't tell you what effect lowering or increasing hours worked would have exactly on a given nation. For example, can Germany push its export machine a lot further by increasing the hours worked to US levels (are there buyers for those additional exports), or is that already heavily optimized and so they're doing the logical thing and reducing hours while trying to maintain max exports & output generally. Nearly all of the OECD have been persistently reducing hours worked the past decade plus, while largely maintaining or increasing output. A nice combination when you can manage it.

Switzerland, Norway, Ireland and Iceland are freak outliers for the most part. Switzerland is a banking empire, with rather dramatic banking related output concentration as a share of their GDP; no doubt they're killing it though. Ireland's GDP moderately misrepresents what their individual income levels are, as their GDP figure is quite inflated by corporations that have moved there for tax purposes; Ireland's workers have done very well overall, just not quite as well as their incredibly high GDP figure implies. Norway's numbers as everyone understands are skewed by their exceptional oil output per capita. And Iceland only has 338,000 people (it's kind of like including Luxembourg), interesting to note non the less.

[LeanderK]

there should more granular data, at least in europe. Producing a map with GDP per working hour per worker on a district level would be quite cool (whatever the most precise avaiable statistic is)! I don't think just listing countries ist actually that interesting, because i would suspect some countries to be quite heterogenous and other quite homogenous.

When I think about it, GDP per working hour is actually quite the interesting metric.

[TheOtherHobbes]

These are not like for like, because they ignore the relative value of different market segments and of comparative advantage.

Germany produces high-value consumer and industrial engineering products, and financial services. Greece produces tourism and olive oil. Should Greece somehow be forced to produce lifts, yachts, and high-status cars, or is that actually an unworkable - not to mention unhelpful - idea?

This is a major flaw with the current set-up of the EU. Euro adoption has made it very hard for countries to balance imports and exports. Germany has a huge current account surplus, while Southern Europe has an equivalent deficit.

These are structural issues and nothing to do with working hours or even with bad management.

A completely homogenised EU - or international - economy would be a monster. There's no reason why countries should compete directly on GDP when they have such different products and services to offer. But there's nothing in current GDP accounting that supports diverse economic activity without attempting to penalise it.

The ideal would be wealth redistribution between countries. The EU does some of that, but in a slightly random way that seems to lack a coherent EU-wide long-term development strategy.

Edit: it would be interesting to break out the US figures on a state by state basis. I suspect we'd see some very large disparities between the most and least productive states.

[TheNorthman]

Spain has 30 days required paid leave. In Denmark 25 is required, most IT workers have 30, some (e.g I) have 35.

Spain has a 40 hour work week, Denmark has a 37.5 hour work week.

Yes the numbers don't add up to OPs claim. Yes, it's a dog whistle.

[csomar]

This is a very simplistic and probably wrong assumption in my opinion. Let's counter it with California: It has Silicon Valley, the world-leading IT hub and it is not a cold place by any measure.

This argument is thrown a lot around the Mediterranean and I think it is the same argument that gets thrown to explain your mediocrity (Not getting a good job/wage, must be the immigrants!).

What the article is highlighting here is productivity. Productivity should be higher in Souther Europe exactly for the reasons you mentioned: There is less snow, more sunlight, less rain, less cold, less illness, and generally less troubles with the geography/weather.

[azmodeus]

I think GP's point is: productivity is not the priority of these societies. So they could be more productive but enjoying life is more important for people living there.

[csomar]

Workers are not responsible for productivity in the workplace; managers are. Enjoying life should increase the workers happiness and thus increase productivity. This is why these same workers are as productive when they move north.

[fyfy18]

It isn't as simple as just motivating managers in a single company though, it's the whole life view of a society that would need to change. Earlier this year I was living in Southern Spain for a few months and here are a few of the issues we had:

- My wife (EU citizen) was studying there, so eventually got all the documentation needed to open a bank account (which involved waiting in a police station for a few hours), took it to the bank (BBVA, #2 bank in Spain), then after a few days they opened her account. A week later we went to make a deposit, but for some reason the account had been closed. The bank said they'd look into it and get back to us, but of course we heard nothing. We went back a few times over the course of a month, but eventually gave up as nothing ever happened.

- Because we didn't have a Spanish bank account, a lot of stuff was a lot harder than it should have been. One time we wanted to visit a agritourism site with some relatives who came to visit, but even though it was aimed at tourists (the website was in English), the only way to pay was with a Spanish debit or credit card.

- Getting internet at our apartment was fairly simple, until one day it stopped working. We went to the store (Orange) and they said that we had an outstanding bill. Ok great, so why didn't you email or SMS (my wife had a SIM from them too) us about it? They checked and had the correct details on file, so said it was probably just a one-off error. They said we needed to pay online not in-store, but of course that only works if you have a Spanish bank card, so we had to transfer money to a friend and get them to pay. We never received a bill via email or SMS the whole time we were there.

- Our apartment had a gas boiler for hot water, but for some reason there was no piped gas (supposedly it's more expensive to have a gas line installed, so this is quite common). We phoned up a few of the local delivery companies who passed us around via email, voicemail etc, but we never heard anything back. In the end I just lugged the gas cyclinder to the local petrol station once or twice a month.

- Our 50m2 (500sqft) apartment had zero insulation (again fairly common, even in builds from the past 10 years), so each month we were paying €150+ for electric heating, which barely kept it at 16C/60F. Because of the cold it always smelled damp and moudly.

Travelling back home to our Eastern/Northern European country was like going to a different world in comparison. Everything here is just so much easier.

[redisman]

Northern EU countries have just as much vacation (some even more). It's not unusual for major offices to be closed for the summer.

[ptah]

it sounds like the priority is to have quality life not just bust your butt to make company owners rich.

[roenxi]

It is a very complicated issue because nobody has the perfect birds-eye view and objective moral standards needed to assess what trade-offs are truly optimal, all things considered.

But a key issue here is that the workers aren't busting their butts digging holes and filling them in again. Instead workers are generally working hard to provide goods and services that other people want.

There are real questions about whether it is the best way; but if someone is going to succeed in life they are better off succeeding in America because their success will be better rewarded; other people will work hard to make them comfortable and give them things they want. That is probably a contributing factor to why America has an easier time setting up a tech hub and attracting global talent.