Josh Barro has a piece at Upshot about increasing work hours. In it, he plays the irritating game of describing certain institutional choices that help to determine how many hours people work as "distortions" and also wrongly downplays the degree to which the US truly is a bizarrely overworked country.
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Normally, when a country increases its per-hour productivity, it reduces the amount of work it does. This is because life is not all about maximizing total GDP for the sake of it, but also occasionally includes such things as spending time with family and friends and pursuing personal projects. Relative to the general tendency across countries, US workers put in 462 more hours per year than the US level of GDP/hour would predict. For Ireland, that same number is 358 hours. For South Korea (whose GDP/hour is the same as Greece's), it's even lower at 274 hours.
All three of these countries are well above the norm, but none more so than the US:
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It's not just these one-year comparisons either. Consider change over time since 1970 for the countries whose data runs back that far.
Despite doubling our GDP/hour over this period, the US only cut 114 hours off its work year, a 6% reduction. Every other country cut hours further, with the top being France whose workers cut 518 hours off its work year, a 26% reduction.
Given our high GDP/hour, there is absolutely no reason the US needs to be working as much as we currently do, and certainly no reason why we need to be working more. While I can't speak for Barro obviously, to me, the idea that we shoud be trying to reshape our institutions so as to claim an even greater share of workers' scarce lives for toil is unthinkable...
