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Comment by superquest | Hacker News Reader

I can see why people hate on this POV, but one thing is very reasonable:

Imagine company A and company B are equal in all ways, except company B's workers work twice as much. If they come into competition, company A will be crushed.

All the SF tech companies will come into competition with Chinese companies in the next 20 years. And there's a chance they just get outworked.

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This was the line in the 80s about japan. Didn’t actually work out like that. Edit: typo

True. Because everything else wasn't equal. And it won't be here. But if it gets close to equal ...

I imagine Chinese work ethic had something to do with the destruction of the Rust Belt, no?

Working 14-hour Days is not efficient. It is performative and counterproductive. Especially for 15 years. I doubt the entire narrative. And Chinese labor has certainly hollowed out the rust belt but that’s more about arbitrage than work ethic. We have tons of things to learn from China, but worship of long hours is not one of them.

Work ethic doesn't matter much if one workforce works for a tenth of the wages of the other.

And this explains Africa's dominance of the world economy?

Except "work twice as much" is a very vague term. Do they work twice as long? Do they have twice the amount of resources? What is the value of their output - is it twice higher than A? For how long do they work "twice as much" before burnout and overwork deaths happen like in Japan?

In Japan it is well-known that a long-hours work culture doesn't translate to actual productive work. People end up being masters of "looking productive" rather than actually being productive.

I'm deliberately being vague for the sake of argument. Of course there are many details in practice.

A similar argument applies to the economies of Europe and the USA in parts the 20th century. A lot was similar, but Americans had the better work ethic.

Of course, work ethic doesn't explain everything. But it's really freaking important.

Which part of 20th century was the same for Europe except work ethics? America did not had two world wars on its soil, that alone will make majority of that century different.

I can't find any evidence from 20th century, but here's a study from 2016: http://ftp.iza.org/dp10179.pdf

It says Americans work 25% more. This is usually the conclusion of this kind of thing.

That is account of worked hours, not that everything except worked hours was same on 20th century - which is what I found suspicious.

I agree that Americans on average spend more time in work.

More conrroversially, I also think that the notion of work ethics should count in also what you do at work and crunch stories about people sleeping under table should not count as better work ethics. E.g. more hours less effectively is not better work ethics. (That is not to imply American companies are less effective per hour, I don't think that is the case.)

Working 16 hours a day does not give enough time for eating, shovering and sleeping. So assuming A works full time and B twice as much, B are making all decisions sleep deprived and in cruck mode. I have seen crunch modes and they are less effective after few weeks.

> I have seen crunch modes and they are less effective after few weeks.

This was studied extensively in WW2 where people wanted to work long hours to win the war. Productivity would rise when hours rose, and after a few weeks it would fall below that of a 40 hr week. The solution was to do longer hours in spurts.

This knowledge gets lost regularly and rediscovered.

Setting aside that I find it rather dubious that more hours worked is being equated to more profit/gdp/productivity, if/when the chinese economy becomes a net global importer, then I'd be more interested in this line of reasoning.

Fair.

I became interested when this happened: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f8/18/f8/f818f8735acfdbf8f4a6...

Interestingly enough, GDP per capita for China at PPP, for 2017, is around $16,676 (in 2017 Intl dollars[0]).

[0] http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2017/01/weodata/weor...

Which means they are still basically farmers and just getting started.

Not quite related, but I'd have to say, I'm interested to see where their oil futures market goes, though I suspect most won't have much confidence in it unless they float the yuan.

Not true. Work smart, not hard.

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