> In Germany, an economic powerhouse, workers rank second to last in number of hours worked. Despite more time off, German workers are the eighth most productive in Europe, while the long-toiling Greeks rank 24 out of 25 in productivity.
Germany has the whole EEU working menial jobs for them. So in Germany VW workers slack off and even protest to get reduced work week, while in EEU German managers walk over a car plant with watches and time each manipulation in order to fulfill their quotas. Yet the sales are reported in Germany, so productivity metrics goes way up there. It's really naïve to think they aren't benefiting from what is essentially softer colonialism.
People really dont understand the term productivity. Productivity is produced value / hours of work. So usually people that work the hardest will have lower productivity that does not mean less value produced. Something can have very bad productivity but be very profitable and generate a lot more value than something else with bigger productivity.
It never makes sense for the worker. But most of the time is more profitable for the one squishing the work out of the people if people are cheap enough.
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Parasites are always the most productive if you don't measure in absolute terms. The same happens among countries.
I never understood this. Pay people half the wage for half their time, hire twice the staff. Get a significant increase in value produced for the same money.
I, for one, would accept half pay for half work. And I suspect others too.
If you think about it the less "productive" you are the more "productive" the people extracting the value from your job will be.
That is if you work more and earn less then whoever captures the difference in value produced would have augmented their productivity. It all depends where you measure the ratio and in which terms.
Parasites are always the most productive if you don't measure in absolute terms. The same happens among countries.
If you are paid by the hour (as most low wage jobs are) time in the "office" does translate into more returns. There are many people (mostly immigrants) working long hard hours so they can afford to send their children to better schools. The returns don't make sense in any short term sense, but their ~grandchildren tend to get rich as we know from history.
Isn't labor productivity measured per-time, though? If there are diminishing marginal returns on labor (as there are on everything else) then it would make sense that those who work the least are the most productive. It doesn't mean they produce the most, though.
Average productivity in the economy is just ratio of hours worked to GDP. It doesn’t mean that all, or even most of the workers work harder or smarter. In countries like Germany, the high productivity industries pull the rest of the economy behind them. The German janitor is not likely to be any more productive that janitor in poorer countries, his wage is just higher than there, because the economy provides better job market, and so the companies must pay higher wages to find employees.
In countries like Greece or Poland, average worker does much more hours in a year, but it’s not because he is working less smart. It’s just the high productivity industries are simply not there, so he must work harder to earn the same money.
I happen to agree with you broadly. However, two data points to bring to the discussion.
Germany's median net wealth per adult is below that of the US ($47,000 vs $56,000 for 2017). Given the US isn't renowned for how well its middle does these days, that implies something has gone wrong in Germany.
Per the OECD figures, the US is the third most productive in terms of GDP per hour worked, at around $73 for 2017.
Excluding Norway, the best off country in terms of a combination of GDP per hour worked, least hours worked per week, and highest median net wealth is... Belgium.
They have $161,000 median wealth per adult, about 30 hours worked per week and a GDP per hour worked just a notch below the US.
Here's how the OECD ranks hours worked per week:
Mexico 41.2, South Korea 40.7, Greece 39.1, Chile 38.2, Russia 38, Latvia 36.7, Israel 36.3, Iceland 36.1, Portugal 35.9, Lithuania 35.8, Estonia 35.6, New Zealand 33.8, Czech 33.8, Slovakia 33.7, US 33.6, Hungary 33.6, Ireland 33.5, Italy 33.1, Japan 33.1, Canada 32.8, Australia 32.7, Spain 32.5, Slovenia 32.5, UK 31.9, Finland 31.6, Sweden 31, Austria 30.9, Switzerland 30.6, Belgium 29.8, France 28.2, Netherlands 27.4, Norway 27.3, Denmark 27.2, Germany 26.3
> Germany's median net wealth per adult is below that of the US ($47,000 vs $56,000 for 2017). Given the US isn't renowned for how well its middle does these days, that implies something has gone wrong in Germany.
The US middle class's problem isn't that they don't have enough cash in the bank, it's that they're one firing/health issue/missed mortgage payment/... away from losing it all. Someone with $47,000 in the bank in a country with single-payer healthcare, job security, tenant security... is much better off than someone with $56,000 to their name but no social safety net.
> Excluding Norway, the best off country in terms of a combination of GDP per hour worked, least hours worked per week, and highest median net wealth is... Belgium.
I find that completely plausible, what do you think it proves? Belgium is similar to western Germany in many ways, and doesn't have the former DDR to drag its average down.
I disagree, the US famously has a low cost of living compared to developed nations in Europe. That includes everything from energy prices to housing prices to food prices. When adjusted for the higher US wages, that imbalance is even more dramatic.
Take energy costs as one example. US natural gas prices are half that of Western Europe. Electricity costs are half or less that of Western Europe. In Germany, electricity is about $0.35 kilowatt hour. In the US, it's $0.12.
Depends on your definition of "smart". Germany undercut and closed down most factories from around Europe. Ask anyone you know in the EU, they'll tell you how things were going well in the 70s and how their country actually had a lot of manufacturing plants for electrical and mechanical equipment (fridges, car parts, machinery etc). Then, near the 70s, globalization hit hard.
It was still cheaper to produce locally, but German lobbies knew well that if they sold below cost, bribed government officials and pushed strong advertising campaigns , they'd manage to shut down the industry of Europe and make everyone reliant on their production.
Was it "smart"? I guess so, they fucked over everyone in Europe, and still do (the Euro was obviously the deathblow for South Europe and much of the East).
But this has nothing to do with "working smart". If you visit germany you'll realize that the image of the hard-working, incorruptable, efficient German is just a lie.
The sad thing is that this kind of propagandistic sentences are crafted to make people believe that. Usually people don't understand producitvity so they understand what you said from the sentence. A German reading that will think "Ha we work less and produce more" but that is NOT what productivity means.
Productivity is the ratio between man work and output. So if someone works only 1 min a month and earns for that minute $30 you could say of that person that he is extremely productive. Compared to that person someone who works 24h a day and earns a million would have very bad productivity.
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So countries who find their competitive advantage in labour intensive industries and processes will by definition have lower productivity compared to industrialized economies. Germany being a very industrialized economy will have higher productivity by the nature of their business.
I think it has more to do with education. In Italy, Portugal and Greece students find themselves being overqualified for the antiquated production methods of industries in their countries, together with no investments from the government (e.g. italian 110m startup public investments against France's 60 billion)
And agricultural output in PIIGS countries having been destroyed by EU regulations, goods are literally wasted because of quotas.
The problem is with productivity is that its that counter-intuitively, it might only be a measure of efficiency in absolute terms.
For example consider a family that owns a plantation powered by slave labour. If you look at their gdp/work its close to infinity. Then you go to the plantation and measure the productivity ratio of this as an economy and it would be very low.
So it depends a lot who captures the value of work and how you measure that as well. The more capital you have and the more you can extract wealth without working the more productive you will be.
> In Germany, an economic powerhouse, workers rank second to last in number of hours worked. Despite more time off, German workers are the eighth most productive in Europe, while the long-toiling Greeks rank 24 out of 25 in productivity.
Work smart, not hard.