Study Finds That Asians Take Fewest Vacation Days, Europeans Take Most | Hacker News Reader

Study Finds That Asians Take Fewest Vacation Days, Europeans Take Most

forbes.com

94 pointsrtcoms98 comments

Japanese workers are offered an average of twenty days off each year and take only twelve, leaving eight unused vacation days lying on the table.

No lie, that's a qualified success: it used to be 14 days offered and 8 exercised in Japan, as recently as a few years ago. (The 2006ish timeframe? Read it in a work-related report. [+])

[+] Proving once again that you can almost never underestimate how bad the Japanese work culture is, the actual stats from 平成19年就労条件総合調査結果の概況 (covering 2006) were, at companies above 1,000 employees, 9.7 days offered and 5 actually used. You might think "Well maybe that's the megacorps being shoddy" but the actual numbers get worse as you go down the size-of-employer table.

That's just scary. It definitely shows how much culture can change/warp our ideas about existence. Although that few days off probably is a significant factor in heightened Japanese suicide rates.

I am not sure the days off to hours per week ratio for a sane life..

I.e. I hear 12 days off and I shrug. I hear 18 hour workdays and never seeing your family and my jaw drops.

I think if I worked 20h weeks, 0 days off would be okay. You never get THAT burned out over a week that the weekend can't cure you.

But if I worked 80 hour weeks, I would need 30 days off per year to stay long term sane.

Of course, that makes perfect sense. It is the number of days off being so low combined with things like this: http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/09/news/japan-work-salaryman/ that make me truly concerned. The combination of hours and lack of days off surely takes a toll on mental health and productivity.

I'd rather have shorter weeks and zero days off, but that just might be my personality. I hate the idea that once in a while I'll get a vacation that I'll enjoy half of and spend the last half dreading going back.

Sounds like you need a new job? I can honestly say that I'm usually excited and energised after a holiday and ready to get back to work. Sure there is part of me that would like to stay on a beach or with my family for ever, but equally there is a large part of me that enjoys solving the problems I solve at work and the people I work with.

I definitely felt that dread in the past though, but don't think that is how it has to be. There are great roles out there!

Mind blowing (but not surprising) is how low Japan (and South Korea) ranks in terms of worker productivity. IIR, if South Koreans worked at a similar productivity as Norwegians, they could take half the week off with no effects at all on GDP. Japan is only slightly better.

In other words, quite a bit of those long work hours are absolutely useless.

Norway is perhaps not the best country for comparison. If South Koreans could get 22% of their GDP and 67% of their exports from the Oil & Gas sector that would help their productivity too.

http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/countries-and-regions/count...

This is overly-simplistic, and misses three key points:

1) Labour productivity is measured as the _average_ output per worker, i.e. total output divided by total number of workers. It does not measure the _marginal_ output of an additional worker (i.e. the derivative of output with respect to number of workers).

2) Labour is not the only factor of production. There is also land, financial capital, technology, etc.

3) Haircuts in Norway cost more than haircuts in South Korea. Is a South Korean barber less productive than a Norwegian one?

So if I understand correctly we should compare:

1. Median household income (which should mostly be wages and not land, financial capital, technology).

2. Divided by purchasing power parity (to normalize for different prices in the country).

3. Divided by average hours worked per week for households with median income.

This is however assuming that if an employee gets paid X (in purchasing power parity) for their work, then their generated value is some linear constant of X. I don't know how to compensate for the scenario where this is false.

None of that would account for a massive national surplus of a globally demanded resource (oil in Norway's case). A strong currency based on heavy exports of energy can subsidize all of the other factors.

All you have to do is estimate the impact to GDP that has on Norway, and pull it out from the comparison.

Norways Currency NOK isnt strong, its actually one of the weaker currencies:

Here it is in the last 2 years falling compared to USD and EUR.

http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=NOK&to=USD&view=2Y http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=NOK&to=EUR&view=2Y

Norway is oil exporter. Oil is cheap now -> NOK is falling.

No, that wouldn't work, due to the effects of my point 2 above. Google 'solow growth model' to get some idea about why.

Yeah but this is easy to manage and predict. You tell everyone to do X work, where X is somewhere in the bottom quartile of productivity. If someone does less, you tell them to pick it up - it's pretty likely they're slacking off too much as opposed to being unable to perform. But you don't want people to do more, because then you start having different employees. Some would get jealous at others' higher productivity and more free time and you'll have to manage people differently and give different salaries and it will all be MADNESS. It's easiest for management if everyone is the same somewhat inefficient cog in the machine.

I have a friend working in Japan who tells me his coworkers spend a lot of time just sleeping at work. It doesn't seem to be frowned upon. Apparently they are extremely inefficient, doing long hours, sleeping little and suffering from it during the day at work.

I wonder. Japan also has 16 national holidays in comparison with (for example) the US's 11.

The importance of that really depends on who observes holidays. There is no legal incentive for US employers to observe any. I don't know where your eleven come from, but that sounds like the Federal Government's number for its employees. Private employers typically observe 4-8, including Christmas.

Can confirm, get seven holidays.

On the bright side, I'm a shift worker, so I get to take holidays whenever I want, no questions asked. It's bundled in with my PTO, except it doesn't roll over if I don't use it. As a result, your first seven days of PTO are "holidays."

Do they have any way to figure in the part where salarymen often work Saturdays?

If you add in the shorter weekends, I'm not sure if you even get to the equivalent of zero days off.

At my company in Japan, we had 20 public holidays though. That's a lot more than we get in the US.

But those public holidays come at a cost -- trying to do any sort of activity during Golden Week is next to impossible because of overcrowding.

That just sounds outright stressful. That sounds like Black Friday shopping in the USA, something I avoid like the plague every year.

It's not nearly as bad as Black Friday (except the roads and Shinkansen in really popular routes). Hotels are full but hotels are full other times of the year too. The logistics end up working out

Another peculiar aspect is that Japan is the country with the most bank holidays in the world, so if you're in the lucky half of the population that has the "salaryman" qualification (mon-fri) then you get almost a week in January , almost a week in May,and a dozen or so guaranteed 3 day weekends (including this one)

It's so strange when otherwise-rigorous research/reporting makes generalizations about "Asians", which is an incredibly diverse continent that is not defined by Japan, China, and South Korea.

It's okay to be more specific - the data and conclusions would still be interesting even if they weren't trying to claim some magical cultural link among Saudi Arabia, Russia, Mongola, Singaport, Bangladesh, etc...

I agree that 'Asia' includes very very different cultures. Asia really should really be divided into smaller chunks.

As do Europe. Many different culutres and politics.

France pretend to cap work at 35h/week, next to it is Switzerland where we have 20 days of vacation and 42h/week.

I worked for a Swedish company. Because of holidays, vacation leave, maternity and paternity leave, and sick days, there were employees of the company that I never saw. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it took quite a while to get used to it.

I'm Swedish, and there are definitely people that are away for long periods of time (usually paternity leave), but was it really that many people that you never met? :-) How long did you work there?

Not trying to be snarky, I just want to point out that it's not like you can take vacation year round (even if you're in Sweden..), even though we certainly have quite a bit of vacation (25 days is the norm) and no problem taking half a year of per parent per child.

I like the ambiguity in your comment that leaves open the possibility that it was you that never turned up for work due to these various ways if taking time off.

I live in Sweden too, and I don't get your point. Swedish productivity per worker is up at the top in global terms. Much of Swedish society is set up to benefit workers, and in particular families. So, yes maybe a colleague wasn't at work for 12 months due to paternity or maternity leave. But that's great. Companies need to be structured so that no one worker is indispensible. Once you get your head around that, everything else is logical.

I found it interesting how Expedia is behind this study. I can see how this would help their bottom line.

For those interested, source data for the study.

https://images.trvl-media.com/media/content/expus/graphics/o...

Not working at all is the inevitable (awesome) future of humanity.

I wouldn't bet on that.

Me neather, short term. But in the long run Capitalism will not want humans, we're too expensive. It also really makes no sense to work, I think this will become increasingly more evident.

Note: Marx wouldn't agree with me. He would say that the rich will still have the means of production (automation), so the poor will still do stupid jobs to get paid that little to afford the products made by automation. It's basically like it now, but I hope this will change.

There is no startup that can fix this. We need to collectively own the automation to not work.

You're describing a depression, though. High unemployment -> less demand -> fewer jobs -> repeat.

Internet provides you access to unlimited amount of information that basically allows people to create their own automation solutions. Why do you have to depend on rich to provide it ? The whole idea of Rich and Poor is based on Scarcity of goods. When we enter the era of full automation, we will be able to convert Energy into any form of product without human intervention. Energy + AI = Products.

> The whole idea of Rich and Poor is based on Scarcity of goods.

No, actually, it's based on ownership of the means of production.

True only in the absence of strong AI.

No, actually, he was just talking about the concept of "rich and poor", nothing at all to do with Marx's theories about owning the means of production.

The concept of rich and poor relies on the fact that the poor can afford less goods than the rich because of scarcity. I.e. in that simplistic scenario, if there was no scarcity, the concept of "poor" wouldn't exist because they'd have access to as much resources at the rich. Though we are heading into a utopian-level discussion at that point.

Thank you.

Marx would probably have agreed with you, but see it as the reason for why a revolution is inevitable, and at the same time the criteria for what would make the success of a socialist revolution possible. From The German Ideology, part I, section A (Marx, 1845):

"This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism."

Basically his assumption was that it will never be possible or politically tenable under capitalism to change the system to channel enough capital back to the general population (e.g. lets say via taxes to fund basic income to a level equivalent to lost incomes) to allow people to continue to consume enough to allow manufacturers to continue to grow, and that the result would be ever greater cycles of economic crashes until the contradiction of capacity to create wealth coupled with unemployment and/or underpayment gets great enough to cause people to rise up against it.

Capitalism will not want humans, we're too expensive.

I'm worried that, on current history, this is more likely to be ""solved"" by genocide than leisure.

We could have the Star Trek future. We're probably going to get the Judge Dredd one.

Let's not lose hope before we've even started. Star Trek future needs to be made.

I would dispute the awesomeness of no work at all. We're not well equipped for total leisure. To paraphrase Tal Ben-Shahar, "we're built for the climb, not the summit" ( check the book "Flow" or google "Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi" for a scientific explanation as to exactly why )

But climbs you don't get payed for can be just as (or more) rewarding/challenging.

Of course. So I would hope that the future holds this different sort of work. Not 'no work' at all.

If work was so great, the rich would keep it for themselves.

Not only that, in Asia they work longer hours too. When I visited Japan, I noticed rush hour in Tokyo would start round about 6pm and would go on until 10pm.

Compare that with London, starts around 5pm and pretty much everyone is dispersed by 7pm.

Is there some way to normalize this with average income per employee, number of public holidays, non-paid leave taken, actual average retirement age, and non standard vacations like sabbaticals (Pretty much everyone I ever known to take a sabbatical/career break for a year or so was from the US)? Because this would be actually quit interesting to check, otherwise it's just quite random correlation.

In Spain, the work law (Estatuto de los trabajadores) specifies a minimum of 30 natural days or 22 working days of vacation days so it is normal that you take them.

And then o look at the map and think... what does this title even mean?

Shocker. They really needed a study to determine this?

Yes, because the alternative is racism.

wait, (correctly) anticipating the result of a study is racism?

Yes because you don't have evidence to support your theory. You're generalizing with insufficient data.

I disagree.

It's not insufficient data, it's uncharacterized data.

If more-or-less everyone with exposure to both cultures is in broad agreement about the differences, that's not "insufficient". It's probably actually more data than any formal study would generate.

But it's also lower-quality data, with a greater chance of being distorted by various cognitive biases. Which means that it doesn't meet current regulatory standards[1] for use on large protected-class[2] groups of humans.

[1] as loosely and collectively defined by the morality police, loudest / most extreme non-ignorable activists, Internet Lynch Mob, etc

[2] which includes pretty much anything these days

How do you know if it's "more-or-less everyone" without a formal study to prove it? You only know anecdotally, which, as you said, is subject to various cognitive biases.

But there are plenty of things that we only know anecdotally -- that one restaurant has bad service, or that line cooks smoke more than usual -- that no one gets up in arms about when we generalize in those cases. Formal studies are great when they exist, but in the absence of them it's only practical to extrapolate from incomplete data.

Does being practical preclude it being racist as well? Also, is generalizing about whole continents ever "practical"?

I was more addressing the implication that because it's racist, we shouldn't do it. And as to generalizing about entire continents, if your goal is to avoid getting mugged on a late night, and you know that on average black people commit more muggings than anyone else, is it not practical to walk to the other side of the street if you see a black man (and that's your only information?)

If you can generalize on similar problems and be correct more often than random chance, then you have a useful model regardless of the data backing that model.

A genuine question: is making assumptions based on perceived cultural influence incorrect?

I mean, I know asian work cultures are "harder" than my european one, but is it incorrect to spell that in a public/social context?

It's not incorrect (it'll just lead you to results as good as your assumptions were), but it today's climate, it's definitely not a good idea to say it out loud.

The study is geographic, and about work culture not race.

To your point, a better title might refer to "Asian Countries" and "European Countries" instead of individuals. Europeans living in Japanese companies work similar days/hours as their coworkers, of course.

> The study is geographic, and about work culture not race

It's a social study, not geography. Assuming that Japanese are like that or french people are like that is indeed prejudice, since there is no data to back things up but individual bias, or bias promoted by movies or the pop culture.

I agree with your second point.

The study is done by country (geography), not by race. From the article:

"According to the study, South Korea and Japan lead the legions of overworked...On the other side of the globe, workers in Finland, France, Germany and Spain are all given 30 days of vacation each year"

I take this as evidence that the word "racism" has completely lost whatever meaning it may have had, and that we should probably make up a new word to mean what "racism" used to mean, if we still think that's a useful concept.

Yes.

Not everything that's "obvious" is actually correct. There is value in verifying such things.

There is also value in quantifying such things beyond the level of detail available from "but everybody knows...".

Good on you Turkish, Chechens and Georgians. Uncle Joe Stalin would be proud of his fellow Asian descendants.

Not sure what you wanted to convey, but Chechens live north of Caucasus mountains, which probably makes them Europeans. Now that's a scary idea.

They're about as European as the Albanians lol

The Albanians are one of the oldest population groups in Europe. They are descended from Paleo-Balkanic peoples.

If uncle Hitler has taught me anything, it's that people who aren't blond-eyed blue-haired Aryans are dirty non-European foreigners! /s

Well, OK, I just recently learned they're an mostly Islamic country who love their gun culture.

An odd combination for any "European" country, yet they're technically in Southern Europe.

Nothing against it, really, but they don't fit in with the neighbors, for sure...

Finns and Czechs also love their guns. And Albanians used to be Christians until they were converted under Ottoman rule.

If you take any given coordinates available in Europe, you're bound to find oddballs.

Oh, and regarding Islam, there's Wahhabism and there's the Ottoman-style Sunni Islam (I don't know the historic name for it). The two have little in common. The Muslims in Europe are 99% results of Ottoman influence. So European Muslims, especially in the Balkans, are quite moderate.

There's no reason why moderate Muslims won't gravitate towards Wahhabism. For three reasons:

- Wahhabism seems to be sound, certainly more than selective reading of holy books and closing eyes on some scenes. Of course, I'm not Muslim so I can't really judge.

- Saudi Arabia is pouring billions of oil dollars into promoting Wahhabism worldwide: building mosques, educating priests, etc etc.

- There does not seem to be a productive, attractive doctrine for moderate, tolerant Muslim. As far as I see, it's pacified on ad hoc basis.

Well, they could have just asked me (I lived in Europe, Asia, currently US), the answer would have been the same :)

I know that correlation does not imply causation, but EU GDP growth is the lowest in the world [1], while Asian is the highest.

1. https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/economic-dat...

The EU block's GDP is also the highest in the world though, with little room to grow.

Furthermore, the only Asian country if comparable GOP/capita is Japan which has smaller growth than Europe for two decades...

South Korea has a similar GDP/capita to many European countries. Not the richer ones, but some countries in Southern or Eastern Europe.

Sure S. Korea is great Taiwan also. But before insinuating that europe's economic woes are due to their summer holidays, I'd look at curroption and the like.

I'd prefer to live in a country with low GDP growth and have an enjoyable life than kill myself with work.

But your great grandchildren (if any) will prefer that you had different preferences.

First of all, it may be a false tradeoff. There certainly is a lot of evidence that happy people with balanced lives are more productive.

Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, and Australia have very high quality-of-life (according to the Economist Intelligence Unit) and very high per-capita GDP[1]. Note that Switzerland's and Australia's GDP per capita are more than double Japan's. Sweden's is close to double.

Second, my grandchildren will be able to move to any country they want. If they prefer a soul-crushing job, they can easily find one.

1. https://trulysingapore.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/per-capit...

Well there won't be any Asians either. Japan has a celibacy problem, sekkusu shinai shokogun. Their young have given up on sex altogether. They've killed even the two most physical and the most primitive joys in life - sex and the parenthood.

I don't think growth issues in EU are due to more vacations. Tbh, we need lesser work hours and days to pass automation gains to workers.

And still Germany and France are the most productive countries in the world: http://blog.pgi.com/2014/07/winding-work-week-infographic/

It's probably other countries that bring overall EU GDP down?

Germany needs to export more Germans :-D

It is not the people, it is the whole working context, the type of businesses has a huge effect, demand hugely affects productivity, eg some businesses scale up with little extra effort (eg finance) so productivity appears to move as demand moves, while others do not.

Europe's economies are mature whereas many in Asia are still developing.

The EU country that works the most is... Greece.

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