Comparing Europeans and Americans is dangerous territory, but last week Nicolai Tangen, head of Norway’s giant oil fund, got there. He told the Financial Times there was a difference in “the overall level of ambition. Us [Europeans] They are not very ambitious. “You should be careful when talking about work-life balance, but Americans simply work harder.”
This has been said many times before. In Franz Kafka’s novel America, published posthumously in 1927, the main character, Karl, travels from Europe to the United States, where he meets a man who studies at night and is a salesman by day. “But when do you sleep?” Karl asks.
“If he sleeps!” said the student. “I will sleep when I finish my studies. At the moment I drink black coffee.”
Europeans and Americans do things differently.
Europeans have more time and Americans more money. It’s a evasion to say which one you prefer, it’s a matter of taste. There are three fairly objective measures of a good society: how long people live, how happy they are, and whether they can afford the things they need. A society must also be sustainable, measured by its carbon emissions, collective debt and level of innovation. So which side does better?
Americans, who typically have fewer paid vacations, get the equivalent of more than an hour of extra work each day of the week compared to Europeans: 1,811 hours per year per American worker in 2022, compared to about 1,500 globally. northern Europe, reaching a minimum of 1,341 in Germany. , according to the OECD. Because Americans are also more productive per hour worked than most Europeans, their average earnings are higher than in all European countries except Luxembourg, Ireland, Norway, and Switzerland.
Earning more is, in part, an American choice not shared by other nations. As economies advance, Americans have opted for more money. Europeans have stuck to the historical trend: once people rise above the subsistence level and have met their needs, they tend to prioritize leisure time, rather than devoting their lives to maximizing wealth.
As if to prove Tangen’s point, HSBC’s British chief executive Noel Quinn unexpectedly announced on Tuesday that he was lowersaying he needed “rest and relaxation” and a “better balance between my personal and business life” after “five intense years” on the job.
In 1870, the average worker in industrialized countries worked more than 3,000 hours a year, economic historians Michael Huberman and Chris Minns calculated. Today’s Europeans do about half of that.
The average hours per European worker has decreased further since the pandemic. “Men – particularly those with young children – and young people are driving this decline,” reported a recent IMF paper by Diva Astinova and others. He also noted: “Decreases in actual hours coincide with decreases in desired hours.” Today’s young parents seem to want to spend more time with their children (or at least feel like they should). And surveys repeatedly show that millennials and Generation Z want fewer hours at work.
This displeases the strivers at the top of society, like Tangen, who tend to want everyone else to strive too. These people love their jobs, are well paid, employ home help, and probably die wishing they had spent more time in the office. Emotionally, I have to admit, I’m on this team. Due to a recent series of poor decisions, I am currently working seven days a week and began writing this on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
But workaholics are exceptions. Most people don’t particularly like their jobs. Gallup, the pollster, publishes large-scale international studies on workplace engagement. American workers express more enthusiasm for their jobs than Europeans. Yet even in corporate America, Gallup reported last year, “only about 30 percent of employees are truly engaged. Another 20 percent are miserable and spread their misery in the workplace, and 50 percent just show up, wishing they didn’t have to work at all, especially in this job.”
In short, most Americans would probably prefer European work schedules. It’s just that their employers and the cost of health insurance get in their way. The United States offers big rewards for finishing first and big penalties for finishing last. That’s partly why Europe exports its most ambitious fighters there.
But few Americans win the big prizes. Many others end up overworked and unhappy, albeit in big houses and cars. In the latest World Happiness Report, a partnership between Gallup, the Oxford Well-being Research Center and the UN, the United States finished 23rd in self-reported happiness. The Nordic countries ranked first. As Swedish political scientist Bo Rothstein observed: “It is now clear that, of the many social models that have been tested since the advance of industrialism, social research can point to one winner in terms of human well-being and this is the Nordic model. “
Even Tangen seems to like it. He has taken enough time off to build the world’s largest collection of Nordic modernist art (the kind of activity the typical New York hedge funder wouldn’t do alone) and is enjoying vacations at his summer home. It was from there or some other vacation spot that he posted an idyllic photo on LinkedIn of a pizza suspended over a fjord, below the caption: “My hobby this summer is recycling leftovers to make pizzas for lunch! Today it is the all-time favorite with garlic and chilli prawns. Wow! Any suggestions for the rest of the week? Life can’t be more European than that.
Europeans also win in the most important indicator of social success: longevity. The Spanish, for example, are much poorer than Americans, but they live on average to be 83 years old, compared to 77.5 years for Americans. Even super-rich Americans only live as long as the richest Brits, despite being much richer.
There is a right-wing belief that the good European life of short hours and long pensions is unsustainable. European states will go bankrupt, the argument goes, and then Europeans will have to work like Americans. The facts suggest otherwise. The United States has a higher public debt-to-GDP ratio than almost all European countries: 123 percent, almost double that of timid Germany, and triple that of Norway, Sweden and Denmark, the IMF reports.
And the United States is unsustainable in the most fundamental sense: carbon emissions. Americans use their extra wealth to buy more things than Europeans, drive more, use more air conditioning, etc. Consequently, US emissions were 13.3 tonnes per capita in 2023, compared to 5.4 for the EU, the International Energy Agency estimates.
It is true that the United States produces more innovation, some of it beneficial. There is no European Google, Tesla or Facebook. Perhaps the global economy needs the United States, or at least some inventive parts of it, as long as you don’t need to live there.