Greeks not lazy—that’s the Germans you’re thinking of

Writes Matt Ygelsias:

It’s true that Germans and Greeks work very different amounts, but not in the way you expect. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the average German worker put in 1,429 hours on the job in 2008. The average Greek worker put in 2,120 hours. In Spain, the average worker puts in 1,647 hours. In Italy, 1,802. The Dutch, by contrast, outdo even their Teutonic brethren in laziness, working a staggeringly low 1,389 hours per year.

….

The truth is that countries aren’t rich because their people work hard. When people are poor, that’s when they work hard. Platitudes aside, it takes considerably more “effort” to be a rice farmer or to move sofas for a living than to be a New York Times columnist. It’s true that all else being equal a person can often raise his income by raising his work rate, but it’s completely backward to suggest that extraordinary feats of effort are the way individuals or countries get to the top of the ladder. On the national level the reverse happens—the richer Germans get, the less they work.

It’s a pretty standard American expectation, grounded partially in the old “protestant work ethic,” that if you’re rich you worked harder, or more, than the poor, who clearly aren’t working hard enough, or else they’d be rich. But, in reality, it’s always the other way around: it’s hard work being poor, and if you’re rich, it’s probably dumb luck.

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