I think your data agrees with OP, you're just misunderstanding it. Yes, richer countries work few hours and richer countries also see modest GDP growth.
Cambodia's GDP growth is over +5% YoY, whereas Switzerland (and the rest of Europe) has more modest GDP growth.
There is some "Work smart, not hard." facet to this, which requires an educated population.
The other fascet is developing countries exist in climates heavily impacted by global warming (look at flooding in VN or TH this year). They make 2 steps forward, and then 3 steps back when a monsoon takes out an entire town.
> Also, even if your claim were true, I wonder if joining the rate race of working harder is worth it.
Personally, employment makes my life interesting and rewarding. I love the puzzles (and compensation) that my employer provides. The rewards compound, but in career development and via investing the profits.
Unfortunately, I think the one area that isn't accounted for is child care. Societies (rich and poor) continue to extract time away from parenting, via cost of housing near job centers and dual-income families. Offering an extra month of vacation or 4-day work week isn't the same as 1 income household or the parents living 15 minutes from their job.
This is a natural consequence of being an industrially advanced country though.
A lot of GDP growth can come from establishing basic services like a functioning healthcare system, insurance apparatus and financial system. Of course, we can't building out infrastructure like roads, power, etc.
Especially construction can lead to substantial GDP growth, but once you have a basic set of infrastructure and housing in place, growth is much slower and consistent for very obvious reasons.
Once you have that stuff in place, getting consistent growth requires more advanced stuff.
The US is very much an outlier and attributing that soley to a difference in work ethic is ignorant at best.
> This is a natural consequence of being an industrially advanced country though.
Ok, but then compare the GDP of the USA vs Europe as millennials enter the workforce. Entering the 2008 crisis, USA and Europe were neck in neck. Now, the USA has left Europe in the dust.
Declaring the US an outlier seems like an odd choice... What country should you compare Europe to?
> Ok, but then compare the GDP of the USA vs Europe as millennials enter the workforce.
First of all, I hate that we're still using GDP as an indicator for any success, because by any stretch, it is a pretty shit indicator. Take medications as an example. Many medications in the US are substantially more expensive than they are in Europe. By selling/buying those medications, you to have a substantially higher GDP related to services like these, without having any benefit for the actual people living and working in that country. (/rant)
Putting differences like these aside, there are a few notable differences. First, the US being an outlier should be fairly obvious to anyone. First of all, the US being extremely resource rich is part of many US states' economic success. If you're lacking the natural resources to extract, there is barely anything you can do policy wise.
Then there is the fact that the US is (still) world reserve currency. With this constant demand for US dollars, the US can relatively easily follow an inflationary economic policy (as demonstrated by the debt to GDP ratio), which is obviously good for growth. Then there is the fact that the US has more consolidated large scale companies. In Europe, aside from a few national industrial giants, SMBs tend to play a much bigger role than they do in the US. This can of course partially be attributed to the fact that the US is a unified market, as opposed to Europe/EU (despite regulatory efforts). Partially this is also down to differences in market watchdog interventions (you can decide for yourself wether or not that is a good thing).
Aside from that, there is no denying that the US also knows how to use the advantage. Unlike other countries cough Germany cough, the US actually has a fairly solid domestic market, which is generally a healthy indicator.
All that "US has it easy" whining aside. I can't really comment on the industrial policy on other European countries, but as far as industrial policy goes, Germany really made some policy mistakes that are now backfiring in a spectacularly painful way.
Why do we use GDP though? On average quality of life, Europe left the USA in the dust. GDP just measures how expensive everything is. More expensive things is bad.
GDP is a measure of productivity, which is (normally) corrected for inflation.
The point you are making is exactly the reason why this problem is so existential for Europe. QoL is good, so nobody wants to change anything, or feels the need to.
But structurally, Europe is not sound and European leaders know it (Just look at the surge in rhetoric about Euro independence). Do you know the story of the ant and the grasshopper?[1] Europe is in a 50 year long post soviet era summer. Most young (and now even middle aged!) Europeans only know summer, so it's going to be incredible difficult to get them to collect food for this mythical thing called "winter".
Can you provide convincing evidence that this is the case? What is the winter that is coming? And that your proposal will prevent it? And what exactly is your proposal anyway?
North Koreans think the outside world is going to collapse because they aren't doing what North Koreans are doing, but it's all just propaganda. You need to distinguish what you say from this.
The surge in anti-EU rhetoric seems to be mostly coming from US propaganda bleeding over, and is still a minority.
People have been predicting the immediate collapse of Europe and the immediate collapse of the USA for decades.
Nobody on the ground, who actually buys groceries, trusts official inflation numbers. How much apparent GDP growth is actually just unreported inflation? I saw some food getting 50-100% more expensive over the last 5 years, which is 10% per year. What was GDP growth? Less than 10%...
Many topics condensed into a single comment to conserve rate limit.
> People have been predicting the immediate collapse of Europe
Have they? I thought most were predicting stagnation and slow decline? Which has been the cast for the past >15 years. Europe is just being left behind..
> trusts official inflation numbers
Because they are unwilling to read and learn what these numbers mean and how they are calculated?
> What was GDP growth? Less than 10%...
Well… reported GDP growth is always adjusted by inflation.
This is not a fair question. The roaring 20s had no idea The Great Depression was coming. Most people didn't see the 2008 crash happening. Ukraine signed agreements with Russia to not be attacked. In 2019, no one was worried that their country couldn't produce face masks or mRNA vaccines.
IMHO, the only foreseeable disaster now is climate change and CN/TW conflicts. I'm not smart enough to model the downstream effects of those events and how Europe should be preparing for them.
The USA is forcing TSMC to at least shift some of their output to US soil.
> anti-EU rhetoric
I don't know what you mean by anti-EU rhetoric. Americans have no problems with the a centralized governance for Europe. Generally speaking, we are taught the EU is a good thing Europe (and the USA), because we want strong allies.
Just like how the EU got upset with Greece for poor fiscal responsibility, the US is concerned about the EU's military investments, tech development, and general economic output.
> trusts official inflation numbers
I think you're comparing apples and oranges. The inflation numbers are not supposed to represent any one individual's on-the-ground's inflation numbers. For example, Washington state adding a gas tax might not show up in the national inflation numbers, but if you're a long distance trucker, you're definitely experiencing inflation.
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Anecdote with heavy sampling bias: When traveling in Southeast Asia, I met tons of Europeans complaining 5 day work weeks is too much and 30 days of PTO isn't enough. One woman in her 30s took an additional month off of unpaid leave so she could have a second holiday in Laos, Malaysia, and Thailand.
IMHO, Europeans should be developing their own tech / biotech / military, instead of demanding 4 day work weeks, and 60d holidays.
Cambodia's GDP growth is over +5% YoY, whereas Switzerland (and the rest of Europe) has more modest GDP growth.
There is some "Work smart, not hard." facet to this, which requires an educated population.
The other fascet is developing countries exist in climates heavily impacted by global warming (look at flooding in VN or TH this year). They make 2 steps forward, and then 3 steps back when a monsoon takes out an entire town.
> Also, even if your claim were true, I wonder if joining the rate race of working harder is worth it.
Personally, employment makes my life interesting and rewarding. I love the puzzles (and compensation) that my employer provides. The rewards compound, but in career development and via investing the profits.
Unfortunately, I think the one area that isn't accounted for is child care. Societies (rich and poor) continue to extract time away from parenting, via cost of housing near job centers and dual-income families. Offering an extra month of vacation or 4-day work week isn't the same as 1 income household or the parents living 15 minutes from their job.