Hacker News Reader

Comment by math_dandy | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, Americans tend to shower more often than Europeans. Perhaps this explains why more tech innovation tends to happen in America these days?

I suspect a major cause of the shower gap is energy price gap, leading one to conclude that cheap energy increases innovation!

View on HN

Ahh funny my country is very hot, in summer I'd shower 3 times (I wish for 4 sometimes). It's too hot to come up with any idea. It's only thankful to have water run through.

Can I ask, in places where showering that often is the norm, does one change into a new set of clean clothes each time? And does this basically triple the laundry chore burden?

I'm in Thailand. Same should be applied with "tropical climate" countries. Basically it's hot and humid. Cloths are usually not thick as it's hot, so 2-3 days per laundry for 2 people is ok. It's only annoying when there's not enough favorite cloths.

Smell of sweat / odor happens very soon than those who live in cold+dry area.

Can you explain the energy price gap portion of your hypothesis?

From my personal experience showers take less energy than a bath. For my usage, if I block the drain, take a shower, there will only be about a foot of water in the tub, maybe a 1/3 of what I would need to take a bath. Are you assuming other forms of washing or that Americans shower more frequently? Just curious!

You have a three foot deep bathtub? I'm jealous.

Standard American bathtubs are 60" long, 30" wide, and 18" tall -- external dimensions. That's what you'll see in 90+% of apartments and homes.

You're correct, its actually considerably less than a foot of depth from one shower. It's probably 1-3 inches from my usage, but I take quick showers.

More to my point, a bath's water and energy usage is multiple showers from my experience.

Maybe they mean ankle deep. A foot turned sideways is only ankle-high, you see... (Metric ain't got nothin' on this kind of versatility, baby!)

As they say, once you have eliminated all which is impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth!

But perhaps there are still a few more probable hypotheses to test before we settle on your shower theory… Would you agree with that, my friend?

I feel like that has to be cultural rather than price based. The French shower more often than Americans for example and we have higher energy prices.

It fails to explain why Japanese people who shower literally everyday don't lead innovations...

In Brazil two showers a day are pretty common.

So access to R&D funding is probably far more relevant for innovation indexes than people's hygiene.

Japanese people are very creative in my perception. I'm in Thailand where if you aren't taking shower 2 times a day, you are considerably "bad hygiene". In winter, at least 1 time in the morning. You will feel "I'm dirty" outside if you don't.

Don't they? In consumer electronics they certainly did for a good chunk of the past 50-60 years.

Japanese people are very innovative, but aren’t motivated enough to create export-oriented products so you don’t get the end results. It mostly seems to come out in “unproductive” areas like unreasonably good amateur twitter artists.

Hmm... Japan has the most complex economy in the world though?

The Global War on Terror (GWOT) revealed remote places where the Toyota Hilux refused to break

> I suspect a major cause of the shower gap is energy price gap

What a funny assertion. Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Gulf states etc have bottomless supply of cheap energy, where are their innovations?

Just because you produce energy doesn’t mean you can afford buying your own products. One of your customer countries can have lower energy costs simply because their weather is more mild.

Stifled by oppressive regimes? Directed away from technology?

Source required.

Recent visit to my in-laws in Germany.

Ah so elderly couple in Germany allows you to conclude that the whole of Europe showers less than your household, a household which is also representative of the whole American continent, did I get that right?

I'm sure like everything else, times have changed and Western Europe and the US are now more similar (if not the same) in their shower habits.

But I'd like to provide another anecdote just for fun, from 6 years of living in Spain beginning 20 years ago. It was, at that time, certainly considered unique to shower every day, in a mid-sized northern Spain city. Unless every other friend in my residencia was weird in this regard, which is unlikely.

Interestingly, they also had a communal pool. Swimming to them rendered a shower that day unnecessary. Note -- I didn't notice any notable signs of bad hygiene, though.

Anyway I'm sure there are studies that show we're all converging on similar routines!

Curious. I'm from a mid-sized northern Spanish city, always shower once a day, most of my family and friends do as well. People I know from the south of Spain even shower more than once a day (it's hot down there). And in Spain there is the meme that French and British people shower much less than the Spanish. No idea if there is truth to it (although when I lived in the UK, I was shocked at how seldom the British people I was sharing house with showered, but that's a sample size of two).

Ahem… whoossshhh

Maybe something to do with electricity suddenly being 5-10x more expensive than usual.

Skyrocketing energy prices projected to cause unprecedented drop in already dangerously low rate of European innovation!

European innovation is doing quite well. As usual it's the part where we actually make money off the innovations where we suck. Good trolling effort though! ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com