Quem trabalha mais, europeus do norte ou do sul?

Mathew Yglesias discute o bem disseminado preconceito de que europeus do sul são mais pobres do que europeus do norte devido, simplesmente, à preguiça.

"Are Greeks Lazy?
Europe is a mess because Germans work hard and Greeks are shiftless. False!

[Neste parágrafo, ele cita opiniões recentes de articulistas renomados do NYTimes:]

David Brooks, for example, wrote on Dec. 2 that the underlying issue in the European debt crisis is that people in prosperous northern European countries “believe in a simple moral formula: effort should lead to reward as often as possible … self-control should be rewarded while laziness and self-indulgence should not.” Over the summer, while the crisis was in a less-acute phase, Thomas Friedman informed us that the key question was why can’t a Greek learn to be like a German. “Germans are now telling Greeks: ‘We’ll loan you more money, provided that you behave like Germans in how you save, how many hours a week you work, how long a vacation you take, and how consistently you pay your taxes.’ ”

[Opiniões estas que não permitem conclusão outra que:]

Blaming the whole mess on the comparative torpor of Latins places a convenient moral framework around complicated economic questions, and affirms prior beliefs about who does and doesn’t work hard.

[Mas o que a pesquisa revela é outra história:]

But the data don’t support it.

It’s true that Germans and Greeks work very different amounts, but not in the way you expect. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the average German worker put in 1,429 hours on the job in 2008. The average Greek worker put in 2,120 hours. In Spain, the average worker puts in 1,647 hours. In Italy, 1,802. The Dutch, by contrast, outdo even their Teutonic brethren in laziness, working a staggeringly low 1,389 hours per year. ....

The truth is that countries aren’t rich because their people work hard. When people are poor, that’s when they work hard. Platitudes aside, it takes considerably more “effort” to be a rice farmer or to move sofas for a living than to be a New York Times columnist. It’s true that all else being equal a person can often raise his income by raising his work rate, but it’s completely backward to suggest that extraordinary feats of effort are the way individuals or countries get to the top of the ladder. On the national level the reverse happens—the richer Germans get, the less they work."

Vale a pena ler o artigo original, em

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/ ... rc=nl_wonk,

especialmente a fim de conferir algumas das fontes citadas pelo autor. Por exemplo, para aquela última asserção do autor -- sobre alemães trabalhando menos horas, ano após ano -- este gráfico conta uma história surpreendente:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=3W5

Então, se não é por falta de esforço do trabalhador, o que realmente explica a diferença nos resultados?

I think that's something worth thinking about.

Nick Rowe, a Canadian economist, sheds further light on the problem of working hard and not accomplishing as much as one might like to. In fact, someone may be officially 'unemployed' and feeling pretty bad about it because it will look like 'laziness' to others, while working very hard and unproductively at the wrong job:

"The unemployed worker is not unemployed. He is employed digging his own garden, fixing his own car, doing his own labour market search. He is not unhappy because he is unemployed. He is unhappy because he is self-employed and doesn't want to be. He wants to sell his labour to someone else, but can't, so has to consume it himself. A recession is not a fall in employment; it is a fall in the amount of employment that is traded. A recession is not a fall in output; it is a fall in the amount of output that is traded.

We could even imagine an economy in which employment would rise in a recession. You might have to work a lot harder to grow your own food to feed yourself than if you could sell your labour and buy food.

A house with nobody living in it is unemployed. A house with somebody living in it, who wants to live somewhere else, but can't sell his house, might as well be unemployed. If something disrupts trade in old houses, so owner-occupiers are living in the wrong houses, and consuming the wrong housing services, because they can't trade, that is a recession in housing. It's just like workers who want to trade their labour but can't, and so are consuming the wrong labour services, their own, when they would rather be trading and consuming someone else's labour services. Comparative advantage, and all that.

A recession is not a drop in output and employment. A recession is a failure to exploit the gains from trade."

From http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhil ... vs-is.html