Makes Hans a poor boy.

Germans are starting to think that maybe, just maybe, their economy might do better if they didn't take so much time off.

...some economists and politicians say that if Germans want to fix the country's fiscal problems, they have to start showing up for work.

Duh...

Notice that the old "We may work less, but our quality of life is better" argument being deployed again. Notice also that while American unemployment was around 6% for 2002, German unemployment was around 10-10.5%.

I'm sure quality of life is better- except for those who don't have jobs. I'm not so sure that they would agree...

Showing up at work is only the beginning of improving productivity. The office in Essen where I worked as an intern had a party at least twice a week, celebrating whatever was a remotely celebratable event: someone getting promoted, having a baby, getting married, going out on vacation, coming back from vacation, getting a tooth pulled, what have you.

These parties were more than just standing around in the conference room for fifteen or twenty minutes, snarfing down a block of cake. We had bratwurst, mettwurst, cheeses, broetchen, and even beer and sekt (in the office...imagine!), and the parties would typically last for an hour and a half to two hours. After which everyone would be too buzzed from the alcohol to get much work done. Since the parties typically took place at nine (so that the mettwurst wouldn't go bad), it's hard to imagine how we accomplished anything at all.

OTOH, I recall working 50-60 weeks at a US high tech company for a couple of years on a product that went nowhere. Eventually, the code was sent to India where old code at that company went in those days to die. It turned out that we wrote the code before we asked customers what they wanted. Rather than offending a trading partner, they'd invariably say that the code was neat, but that it wasn't quite "mature enough" for them to use.

In hindsight, it would have been cheaper for them to give me my salary plus serious expenses in one lump sum (eg, $200,000+). But I guess that if we weren't sitting at the desk working diligently, then that would have destroyed the fascade.

My point here is that US companies have their own glaring inefficiencies despite the so-called "work ethic". I'd rather do a smaller quantity of more meaningful work, and get paid less for it. Then that gives me time for things like rocketry or mathematics research, which I'd much rather do than further some corporate executive's agenda even if the pay is somewhat better.

I've worked in offices in Silicon Valley where you were expected to be there for long hours but the actual productivity was way lower than I was used to working in London.

The Economist had an excellent article recently on the comparison of the French and US economies in terms of productivity.

Basically, the French are close to being the most productive people on the planet.

And no, I haven't a clue how they do it either.

Hi Peter, whaats happening ? Are you going to have those TPS reports for us this afternoon ?

Lots of people in the U.S. praise our "hard working" ways and attribute our strong economy to it.

I don't. My guess about the stronger U.S. economy is that we benefit enormously from being a more free and flexible society. Unfortunately that's an advantage we seem determined to end. Freedom and flexibility don't really suit the powers that be -- whether governmental, corporate, academic, whatever -- all that much.

Productivity began declining precipitously in the the 1970s -- just after the U.S. started to go hog wild on bureaucracy. How far has this nonsense gone? We don't even exempt children's games from it. When my father was a boy in the 1920s, baseball for children was a summer pastime that children were allowed to organize themselves. In the 1950s we had "Little League" which many participated in. But lots of us did not. And those who were involved weren't required to spend nearly as much time as children today are. Today we have organized sports for children as young as 4 -- people who can't physically play the games they're forced into.

I'm not impressed with today's economy. Or American productivity. Productivity gains -- despite enormous increases in time spent at work -- have been weak for decades. The productivity surge in the 1990s seems increasingly illusory. Yes, we are still seeing gains in some areas. But overall? No.

A final interesting observation: in 2000 there was a hard fought campaign for President. Gore started the campaign a significant favorite. The Democrats were in power. Gore led by a comfortable margin in the polls. Democratic policies (if not Clinton himself) were considered more popular than Republican. Bush campaigned, but not obsessively. He got plenty of rest. He began to be perceived as more likeable. Gore wore himself out from the very first day. Gore effectively blew the election. I blame his workaholism for it. I suspect if Gore hadn't worked so hard, he'd be President today.

"I suspect if Gore hadn't worked so hard, he'd be President today."

Then thank God for workaholics!

Chuck, I think your Gore analogy is off. Gore was unlikeable because he changed personality a dozen times during the campaign and people started to get the feeling that perhaps they did not know who he really was. Even the media was joking about it. Gore trying hard or not didn't matter, he turned off a lot of voters who didn't come out to vote.

I've bitched about the German way of doing business for 20 years. I worked for a U.S. Company that sold German machine tools. Very nice equipment. If I needed a replacement part during the month of August I was screwed. You see, they shut down the entire plant (except for the gate guard)including the parts department. With my customers losing 75.00 an hour in production it didn't take long for most U.S. companies to stop selling/buying these fine machines. Great produce, stupid management.

Chuck:
"Productivity began declining precipitously in the the 1970s -- "

I think you mean growth of productivity.

(By the way, pushing the 'Preview' button does show what my post will look like, but if I want to change something I have to go Back to get access to my text. Other people's Comment pages are more convenient.)

TPS reports

At last! An "Office Space" reference I actually recognized!

Ruprecht, I think Gore wouldn't have been changing personalities so often if he hadn't been what we call "trying too hard"...

Bill Woods: you're completely correct. Mondays...

Barbara Skolaut: I wasn't commenting directly about his candidacy. Although I suspect Gore would have had better ideas and got along better with people if he'd stopped working so damned hard at it.

Kevin McGehee: You hit the nail right on the head.

All: sleep is damned important. Superman doesn't exist. The notions that you don't need much sleep and can work constantly without cost are simply wrong.

American Work Ethic? Here's a little story from a geek deep in the trenches of consultation and fire management for large corps that can't even handle their own computer support problems.

I did some consulting for a now defunct (no surprise) company called AMP INC. Since their in-house geeks were busy with a "super-server" project, they hired me and a dozen other geeks to get a handle on their lagging internal support, as well as deploy 8k workstations to VP's who used them for email and mahjong..while their poor secretary/assistant was still hammering away on IBM microchannel crap....but that wasn't the worst - because AMP used Novell and NT servers, they ended up having 3 passwords to get into the typical workstation, so us geeks NEEDED the user to be available before we could work on their pc...THEY ALL HID BEHIND THEIR VOICEMAIL!!!! I could never get anyone on the phone to complete my work tasks...it got to the point where I could stand on one employees chair and look over the cubicle walls to the next cubicle I had to go, and waa-laa-there was the employee -reading the paper, or mainly surfing the net....this was not an occasional occurance, it was most of the time...now - guess what - no AMP - I saw the same things at the old Blue Shield - now Highmark Blueshield - it's also at the top of the corporate food chain - the big tech companies including Microsoft can't hope to ever have enough "bodies" to support all the product they sell - so they design diabolical automated phone attendants to bury users in a myriad abyss of push button choices to no where in an attempt to piss them off enough to go away.... "fire management" used to be reserved for unions and labor, but now its THE method of doing business in America. Technology is a double-edge sword and a very troubling but not surprising method of manipulating this technology to increase profits and squash expenses wherever they occur..especially if it has to do with customer service. This Enron and WorldCom debacle is only the tip of the iceberg---there's a tremendous amount of book-cooking going on at every level of business - partly because of government BS/taxes and lack of ethics - which is a bad word in business now. It's just like anything to do with security or control - Americans consider it their God given right to break and or defeat it (cable boxes-sat tv-Inet commerce - bill gates software etc..)

Hell, there's an Indian reservation that SELLS illegal decoders LEGALLY because of their separate laws -and they call these illegal decoders "test equipment"....Argh....So from my perspective, the American work force is over-paid, under supervised, over regulated, and under productive. Don't matter about not getting 4 and 6 week vacations - most Americans are already vacationing in their cubicles, or busy looking for a better job with more pay and less work....

God Bless ......