[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.