July 28 JDN 2458693

American culture is obsessed with work. We define ourselves by our professions. We are one of only a handful of countries in the world that don’t guarantee vacations for their workers. Over 50 million Americans suffer from chronic sleep deprivation, mostly due to work. Then again, we are also an extremely rich country; perhaps our obsession with work is what made us so rich?

Well… not really. Take a look at this graph, which I compiled from OECD data:

The X-axis shows the average number of hours per worker per year. I think this is the best measure of a country’s “work obsession”, as it includes both length of work week, proportion of full-time work, and amount of vacation time. The At 1,786 hours per worker per year, the US is not actually the highest: That title goes to Mexico, at an astonishing 2,148 hours per worker per year. The lowest is Germany at only 1,363 hours per worker per year. Converted into standard 40-hour work weeks, this means that on average Americans work 44 weeks per year, Germans work on average 34 weeks per year, and Mexicans work 54 weeks per year—that is, they work more than full-time every week of the year.

The Y-axis shows GDP per worker per year. I calculated this by multiplying GDP per work hour (a standard measure of labor productivity) by average number of work hours per worker per year. At first glance, these figures may seem too large; for instance they are $114,000 in the US and $154,000 in Ireland. But keep in mind that this is per worker, not per person; the usual GDP per capita figure divides by everyone in the population, while this is only dividing by the number of people who are actively working. Unemployed people are not included, and neither are children or retired people.

There is an obvious negative trend line here. While Ireland is an outlier with exceptionally high labor productivity, the general pattern is clear: the countries with the most GDP per worker actually work the fewest hours. Once again #ScandinaviaIsBetter: Norway and Denmark are near the bottom for work hours and near the top for GDP per worker. The countries that work the most hours, like Mexico and Costa Rica, have the lowest GDP per worker.

This is actually quite remarkable. We would expect that productivity per hour decreases as work hours increase; that’s not surprising at all. But productivity per worker decreasing means that these extra hours are actually resulting in less total output. We are so overworked, overstressed, and underslept that we actually produce less than our counterparts in Germany or Denmark who spend less time working.

Where we would expect the graph of output as a function of hours to look like the blue line below, it actually looks more like the orange line:

Rather than merely increasing at a decreasing rate, output per worker actually decreases as we put in more hours—and does so over most of the range in which countries actually work. It wouldn’t be so surprising if this sort of effect occurred above say 2000 hours per year, when you start running out of time to do anything else; but in fact it seems to be happening somewhere around 1400 hours per year, which is less than most countries work.

Only a handful of countries—mostly Scandinavian—actually seem to be working the right amount; everyone else is working too much and producing less as a result.

And note that this is not restricted to white-collar or creative jobs where we would expect sleep deprivation and stress to have a particularly high impact. This includes all jobs. Our obsession with work is actually making us poorer!