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Comment by marvin | Hacker News Reader

They probably chose a poor word ("hard") for high productivity, but apart from that the point is sound: The US works a long longer hours with fewer holidays than many European countries.

And there's good reason to believe that the results/hour coefficient is lower for each individual worker regardless, when the "hour" part of the equation is higher.

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In general, the poor work both 'harder' (physically) and longer hours than the rich. It's just the way it is. Time off is a luxury.

The supposedly lazy Greeks and Italians work far more hours per year than the supposedly industrious Germans and Dutch, but not as much as sweatshop workers in Bangladesh.

In most (all?) Scandinavian countries, time off is not a luxury. It is a right, awarded to every working man and woman, guarded by law and regulations.

Which is actually quite ironic - when you are freezing for eight months a year, time off is not a luxury at all - it is a life-and-death matter. You'd think that we'd have developed a much greater culture for very hard work than the Americans, but things have for some reason gone the other direction.

Why does the rest of the world end up with such crap politics? What are you doing right in Scandinavia?

In my opinion, Scandinavia's good social policies comes from generations of dying of cold and hunger if you didn't occasionally get help from your neighbor. There is a spirit of cooperation with no expectation of being paid back, which has grown into the current system. External commentators will sometimes say that a system like this only works when you have a very homogenous society, but many of these cultures were quite isolated until the modern age, e.g. nestled in a tiny community in a valley somewhere, with only rare journeys outside. The equality principles have as far as I know only existed since the 1960s. (Note that I am speaking from a Norwegian perspective).

A lot of people forget that large parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland were dirt poor as late as the 1930s. These are very harsh climates to live in if you don't have trade and modern technology.

Because unlike Scandinavia, they aren't dying civilizations with net negative fertility.

Actually all of the Scandinavian countries have fertility rates of < 2 births per woman...

So Scandinavian eugenics programs don't count as "crap politics"? Look, every part of the world currently has something wrong with it. I was just as shocked to find this as everyone reading this:

http://www.economist.com/node/155244 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilisation_in_Swe...

> results/hour coefficient

I think maybe we can make a bold move and call that metric 'efficiency'.

I had a boss once who had done the same role in SV and in a subsidiary of BT (which still has a lot of civil service type rules extra privilege holidays)

His comment when asked was he got as much work out of the teams in the usa who had 2 weeks annual leave as he did in the uk with the team having 5 weeks holiday.

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