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Comment by notliketherest | Hacker News Reader

Every time someone makes the comment "oh if America was just like Europe and had X number of days off and relaxed attitudes towards work and a strong work life balance etc", I feel obliged to point out that there's a large majority of people in this country who A) Do not like being told we should be more like Europe and B) Don't mind the 5 day work week and have just as much joy and happiness as anyone. Not to mention the abysmal state many European countries and economies have found themselves in. While they were taking their siesta, the USA was busy being the largest economy in the world.

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I think you're mostly right, trying to apply European solutions to American problems is not necessarily a good idea, just like trying to apply American solutions to European problems is not necessarily a very good idea.

The nationalist slur at the end of your comment was totally unnecessary though.

The free market: It's what makes America great, Britain good, and France terrible. /s

I thought the staunchest defenders of the free market are of the opinion that America needs to be made great again.

anarcho-capitalists are trump supporters?

Oh that's a good point, I had just autocapitalized "Free Market™" (and tacked on that ™ symbol) in my brain reading the comment. I forgot that the words have actual meaning too. Yeah probably those guys are mostly holding their nose and backing Gary Johnson. :)

I'm reasonably certain you've mixed up stereotypes. The staunchest defenders of the free market are keeping busy retreating back to the Democratic Party because it serves their interests more than the Republican Party does. They did the reverse in the 80s (hence "neoconservative") for the same reasons.

I'm... fairly certain that no one in this discussion realizes that's a Ron Swanson quote, or that /s means sarcasm.

>The nationalist slur at the end of your comment was totally unnecessary though.

Is highlighting the fact that the US is the largest economy considered a slur?

The comment about taking siestas was saying the US is the largest economy because people in other countries were lazy. Did you really think that it was the other half of that sentence being objected to?

To add some perspective though, because the US is the largest economy, the notion of working harder to achieve similar results to the US is quite the aspiration for the developing countries. Not to mention geeks like me (and probably others here) who are endlessly fascinated by how much easier it is to go from idea to prototype to production to profit in the US compared to just about every other country on the planet.

The commenter could have just said that the 25% extra hours worked each week compounded into a much larger economy and omitted 'siesta'.

> how much easier it is to go from idea to prototype to production to profit in the US compared to just about every other country on the planet

Is that true? I honestly don't know, but my intuition is that it's true for a certain subset of projects and not others. Even if it is true, is the origin of that truth "working harder"? I sincerely doubt that. If I had to guess, the availability of capital is the leading cause. And that capital came from somewhere, but it wasn't all hard work.

> Is that true? I honestly don't know, but my intuition is that it's true for a certain subset of projects and not others.

Good point. I cannot offer you proof, although if you polled people who have lived in multiple countries, including the US, you would probably find a majority of them agree.

Also, at the very cutting edge of technology, I think even small things can kill ideas, and the US probably does the least damage to the idea while it is taken from germination to profit. Maybe it is that small subset which has a cascading effect on the rest (e.g. Google, whose extraordinary financial success in search certainly cascaded into many things which touch people's lives directly).

Interestingly, I have made this comment at what is sleeping hours in the US but is more closer to work hours in many other places around the world. And till now this is the only comment which has raised this question despite HN's global audience - not that I am not glad you asked the question, I am just saying that it is not meeting with a ton of resistance (yet). On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if my point is completely refuted with a mountain of evidence in the next few hours :-)

> Even if it is true, is the origin of that truth "working harder"? I sincerely doubt that.

My point is that everything is a sort of multiplicative factor when it comes to the size of the economy, and a nation where people are working nearly 25% more time than other nations (or at least the ones being compared here) can be a pretty significant boosting factor, especially when it is combined with the availability of resources and the productivity associated with what is called "human capital".

> If I had to guess, the availability of capital is the leading cause. And that capital came from somewhere, but it wasn't all hard work.

Not to say that the US has never made mistakes, I think they have at various times abused the power of their economic and military strength for mobilizing capital to their advantage (to put it really mildly). I don't know how to account for its effect.

This study (looking at the "Entrepreneurship & Opportunity" column) for 2015 shows Sweden at #1 and the US at #11: http://www.prosperity.com/#!/ranking

Its a point of view. Partying all night and sleeping half the afternoon is definitely not an indicator for productivity. PC objections aside.

The US has a larger population than any individual EU state. Comparing GDP per capita is fairer and puts the US between 9th and 13th worldwide, behind a few european countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

To be fair, wealth from natural resource extraction should be discounted for the purposes of the current discussion. This would remove Qatar, Brunei, Kuwait, Norway, and the UAE from the top of the list.

But then again, it would also lower the US quite a bit, so I guess the comparison is difficult. Besides, "the EU" does not exist when it comes to work/leisure regulation and attitude.

The others on the list, which do not have oil, are inflated, because they have foreigners working there, who increase the GDP but do not count to the population. Essentially a part of Switzerland's and a big part of Luxembourg's GDP per capita belongs to Germany.

USA is much larger than any European state, but if we're looking at a whole union, EU has a larger economy than USA. Despite paid vacations, siestas and stuff.

Also US leapt ahead while most of Europe was recovering from a devastating war.

The US was kind of like starting a game of Civilization on Chieftain difficulty with industial tech level, with oceans on two sides, natural resources abound, peaceful ally to the north and weaker country to the south.

"Nationalist slur" Oh please, take a look at Spain's economy and tell me that their 2 hour siesta (it means nap in English btw) is doing anything to help their happiness or quality of life. My point is you work hard to maintain your happiness and it's not given to you freely by some government policy.

Any links to studies suggesting Spain's economy is related to their siesta?

For another irrelevant comment about productivity: Try walking into any office in China right after lunch and find any worker not asleep at their desk. And their economy is pretty booming.

1) United States is ranked 13th on the World Happiness Report, behind 12 countries all more regulated than the US. [1]

2) Americans might work hard, but they work less than both Mexico, Russia, Greece, etc. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report

[2] http://fortune.com/2015/11/11/chart-work-week-oecd/

And yet social mobility and wealth inequality in the US is among the worst in the developed world.

Weird huh?

And if you really are interested, short afternoon sleeps are positively correlated with lower stress levels and increased personal wellbeing.

Life does not have to be a constant pursuit of ever-higher GDP, which is skewed towards those with large amounts of capital anyway.

At least in the US the base level of wealth (poor) is higher than half the countries on earth. True that the higher levels (the 120 people that own half of America) are way out of balance.

> European solutions to American problems is not necessarily a good idea,

European here. Fully agree. What is largely overseen is that the meme of Europe being a largely regulated field where everything is so much different to the US, has (according to my perception) largely evaporated over the last 10-15 years. While the startup acumen is still more elaborated in the US due to more liberal working laws, people in Europe work a lot overtime unpaid, even more than in the US.

http://fortune.com/2015/11/11/chart-work-week-oecd/

What I would like to say is people feel exhausted in Europe too.

Every time someone makes the comment "oh if China was just like Western countries and had X etc", I feel obliged to point out that there's a large majority of people in this country who A) Do not like being told we should be more like Western countries and B) Don't mind Y and have just as much joy and happiness as anyone. Not to mention the abysmal state many Western countries and economies have found themselves in. While they were taking their Z, China was busy being the second largest economy in the world and soon to be the largest.(Source: Chinese) /s

But when it comes to happiness of individuals.... American factories certainly don't have suicide fences around them.

Well, sure, because American factories don't even exist in the first place. ;)

But if we're making happiness the measure, America doesn't even break into the top ten.

> the USA was busy being the largest economy in the world

The article is about energy consumption and how to save the worlds natural resources. What has your comment to do with that?

It is having more money worth damaging our planet, risking famine for millions, risking natural habitats?

Maximizing relative economy value is not a goal in itself. The goal is the citizens happiness and health. They are talking about saving the world and you answer back talking about money.

> there's a large majority of people in this country who A) Do not like being told we should be more like Europe and B) Don't mind the 5 day work week and have just as much joy and happiness as anyone.

Citation needed. From what I've seen the US underperforms on e.g. happiness surveys (certainly in an overall statistical sense - it's possible there are individual exceptions).

> While they were taking their siesta, the USA was busy being the largest economy in the world.

And what do you have to show for it? Has that large economy "trickled down" to the people in the street?

Isn't America 108th of 140 countries by happiness index.

US is 13th on the UN's World Happiness Report: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report

I don't know how many of these lists there are, but 108th would be a little hard to believe. The UN puts Palestine at 108.

Here are my sources. I kinda find it hard to believe a happy country would choose Trump as its Presidential candidate.

Truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

http://happyplanetindex.org/countries/united-states-of-ameri...

Well these rankings would be a lot easier if it was just a boolean happy or unhappy.

Phillipines is 20th. "I kinda find it hard to believe a happy country would choose Duterte as its President."

Brazil is 23rd. "I kinda find it hard to believe a happy country would impeach its President".

Palestine is 22nd. I was gonna write a sentence of that form for each one but it seems a little unnecessary.

Pakistan is 36th. Haiti is 57th. Iraq is 67th. Egypt is 86th. America does at least barely squeak by Afghanistan and Syria at 110th and 113th.

There certainly is no objective way to measure happiness and the UN method does seem flawed, but come on.

That link defines happiness as in how happy would an American hipster be with the local political situation if teleported there, not happy as in how likely is the average dude on the street to smile or laugh, or how likely is armed revolution.

For example Turkmenistan comes in near last, and it would be hell on earth for a coastal USA hipster who just wants to talk progressive politics in a coffee shop all day, but the natives kinda like it the way it is... happiness is not defined by most as a starbucks on every street corner, etc.

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