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Comment by adverbly | Hacker News Reader

This is measuring household not individual... Needs context then... How did average working hours per household change during that period?

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Hours worked for full time employees in EU apparently has been falling year over year since at least 2013. Maybe it has increased for part timers though?

Not sure how to square that with the fact that there’s been low productivity growth since 2008.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser and either search or use data code tps00071

In the higher income countries the hours worked have fallen, however it may be that in lower income countries they have increased.

That is to say, due to more work opportunities more people have gotten jobs that count towards measured work hours and GDP. Including households who used to have one person working jobs that count towards metrics now have two.

I don’t have numbers for this though, just an informed guess.

Good point. It would be sufficient for there simply to have been an increase in % of households where both parents work. That can lead to fewer hours worked per employee, low productivity growth, and increase in household income.

Household income per capita is a bit confusing, can't blame anyone for interpreting this way. But from the glossary "Household real income per capita is the adjusted gross disposable income of households, in nominal terms, divided by the total population (source: national accounts) and by the deflator (price index) of household actual final consumption. "

So it's not divided per household.

But the point about working hours remains.

Many things are missing from this picture. It uses mean not median income, which would do a better job of telling how widespread the increase is. It uses a basic inflation adjustment which doesn’t differentiate between luxury goods and services vs basic necessities. In other words it’s hard to tell to what degree this rise has benefited people in general.

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