The Diligence Front

Yglesias reminds me: the strong cultural norm in Germany to complain about being overworked is explained by the fact that Germans want to hide from the rest of the world just how little they work:

The methodology is taking the total number of hours worked and dividing it by the number of people employed, which presumably includes the millions of German mothers who work less than full-time to care for their children.

If you inform Germans of what's in this chart, they invariably profess surprise and become defensive, insisting that the statistic must somehow be misleading and/or that they work very hard when they do work.

I tell them what they should do is lean back with a wolfish grin and chuckle: "Yes, we've built a society in which people have tremendous amounts of leisure time. I personally take three long vacations a year, and haven't worked a weekend in years. Magnificent, isn't it?" At first it might earn them a few punches in the face, but eventually other nations might become interested in how to imitate the Germans, which would lead to a massive worldwide increase in leisure time!

Comments

[Chris]

I work with these statistics for a living. At least as of 2007, the German economy was exactly as productive as the U.S. one, measured in PPP-adjusted output per hour worked. The Germans just work 70% as much so their incomes are 70% as big. Aaaaand they complain about it.

But yes, wages here are pretty low.

[Ney]

Great post! I will put it into my collection of lousy statistics.

[Alexander]

Germans complain a lot! About anything and everything (you only realize this once you have left the country for a while). Naturally, this includes the work they need to do to make a living. I always try to explain to foreigners that this grumpy baseline is completely normal with the following example: if Mrs. Merkel’s government decided to give every citizen 500 EUR cash and all they had to do was to go to city hall and fill in a form, the Germans would still complain noisily about the red tape. If we are doing well, we are not happy but asking why we are not doing better. Although this surely does not apply to every single one of us, sadly it does apply to a majority.

That being said, let’s complain about the statistic some more: work hours are indeed a faulty indicator. I could also spend hours and hours at work doing nothing to make the statistic look “more favorable.” I do not want to single out any nationality mentioned in that statistic. I have had professional experiences with some of them. In my opinion, work ethics and the efficiency and effectiveness of work put in can be widely different. The numbers cannot reflect productivity.

I have held jobs outside of Germany with a staggering five days paid annual leave. Folks at home had questioned my sanity;)

[Alex (the other one)]

@Sebastian: I'm rather relaxed about that. I don't know why I should be scared of a country that's behind Jamaica, Peru and Albania in GNP per capita.

[tk]

How do you count “the total number of hours worked” anyway?

PS: Seems that I’m only slightly lazier than a South Korean, and so far I have never complained.

[Trotzkopf]

I'll add my fair share of German complaining and join the chorus here: how irrelevant is the number of hours worked? What is relevant is the outcome, i.e. productivity[*].

For example, if you hire someone to clean up your house and get the garden in order, you are interested in the result, not how many hours they worked. On the contrary, you're happier if they took less hours to get the same result.

And you can tell Yglesias that "spending a lot of hours at work" does not necessarily mean "hard working", I know that much from personal experience (typing this from my desk at work).

[*] Of course German productivity isn't world-class either.

[alex]

I think that "average working hours per employed person" is a rather silly statistic in itself. For example, one might deduce from such a statistic that people in a country in which many married women take part-time jobs actually work less than people in a country in which married women stay at home as housewives more often.

Apart from that, 2009 saw a widespread use of "Kurzarbeit" in Germany. Unless the chart accounts for that, and by your description it doesn't, I think the chart does a particularly bad job describing the situation in Germany.

[lukas]

That's hours of paid work. Since Germans do not get paid for remodeling their own homes, mowing their own lawns, and washing their own cars, they are indeed overworked. Especially on Saturdays.

[Sebastian]

@Alex:

I do ;)

Well, you're in for a surprise when "Mandarin ab der ersten Klasse" will become mandatory!!

[Bernhart]

Apparently I work as much if not more than an average Japanese. No "wolfish grin" from me. Somebody, please adopt me.

[Alex (the other one)]

And who in Germany actually thinks the German economy is particularly productive?

I do ;)

[Sebastian]

Unless you're Angela Merkel or have applauded her faith-based (you know, as opposed to fact-based) comments about lazy Greek retirees, there's not much to be defensive about. Work hours are not an economically relevant number anyway.

And who in Germany actually thinks the German economy is particularly productive? All that I ever hear from fellow Germans is that the Chinese will stomp us all into the ground because European wages are so high, and that in a few years' time no tangible goods will be produced in Germany. And they may not even be wrong about that.

If you inform Germans of what's in this chart, they invariably profess surprise

Then maybe you're invariably talking to uninformed blowhards? I posit that many Germans will actually be surprised how competitive German labour is in the Eurozone. (They shouldn't, really, as they're probably all aware that we still export a lot of stuff.) That doesn't mean, by the way, that if you're thinking about producing something or other you should do that in Germany rather than somewhere else. Germany is as productive as it is because it's highly industrialised, whereas South European countries have a larger agricultural component. (Even that agriculture which we do have is highly industrialised, we're world champions in the inhumane treatment of pigs and chickens, for example.)