Why America Is Working Itself To Death

Americans work more hours than their OECD counterparts but don't have a commensurate amount of wealth. Why do Americans work so hard and why don't they get more back for their tax dollars? Author Ryan Cooper has the answers.

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Sam: Once we acknowledge that our economy is simply a series of political choices that we make. Let's talk about the other vision of what an economy we could measure a good economy by or you know what the what the goal could be.

Cooper: Yeah, in the second half of the book I have a number of proposals. You know, we couldn't probably don't have time to go through all of them right now. yeah, order from your preferred literature distribution facility. I think maybe an interesting one that Americans aren't quite as well-versed in. you know I talk about medicare for all that's a pretty perhaps a pretty prominent idea. but I have a reworked and updated version of my paper that I wrote for Matt Bruenig called the leisure agenda. And so you know I'd just like to point out that Americans work more compared to the wealth of our economy than any other country in the world. You know, obviously, a lot of poorer countries work more hours than Americans do. but if you sort of plot a chart of hours worked versus wealth America will be the farthest from the trend line so to speak. Concretely, if we worked as much as I think Germans would, we would be the laziest country on earth. worked the least hours on average. we would have something like 11 and a half weeks of extra vacation every year. so that's a very substantial amount of vacation. and you know you look at the history of this you know you get into the OECD statistics you go back to like 1970 America was about average compared to pure countries in Europe. you know Sweden Denmark France Germany. and you know what happened over the years the last 50 years basically is that all of those countries decided to work less. they had to put in a vacation a mandatory paid vacation days for all you know all regular employees. they got paid sick leave and they got more of it. and they got paid maternity leave. and you know they add in more like bank holidays. and you know it was essentially a choice to you know take the wealth that they were accumulating through the process of economic growth and take some of that not in the form of more money but in terms of more time. more free time to do I mean basically if you go to Europe in July all of northern europe empties out and they go down to Greece and Italy. you know and just to have a good time because it's like what's the point of being rich if you can't enjoy it. You know? and America just didn't do any of those things and so while all their trend lines were going down since the 1970s, the USA is just flat we're working about the same as we were back in 1970 even though you know we're about something like twice as rich. And it's like why? There's a culture of overwork that penetrates way up into the income ladder. Some of the people who work the most hours are some of the wealthiest people. Wall Street bankers are silicon valley tech guys. You know they're video game developers or software engineers and stuff. Some of these people work crazy hours.