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The first point is untrue. The OECD measures hours worked per member nation. You can see the results here [1]. The United States is just about square in the middle. We work 1,789 hours per year. The OECD average is 1,763. That's 26 hours less per year, or 30 minutes a week, or less than 5 minutes a day. These hours are also way down from the past and contributing to income inequality. In the 60s most men, regardless of education, worked about 50 hours a week [2]. The article shows an informative graph on hours worked by income quintile. The bottom 20% of society works, by far, the fewest hours in all of society. The 20-40% quintile works substantially more than the bottom, but less still than the rest of society.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Average_annual_ho...

[2] - https://qz.com/574693/americans-working-less-than-ever-befor... (media article, but based on study which is cited with relevant numbers and figures shown)




The US is one of the hardest working highly-developed countries.

According to [1] for 2015, the US #13/35 (in the top 37%, so not the middle) on the list on the OECD ranking of average hours worked per worker. In 2015, the US had a Human Development Index (HDI) of 0.920 tied for #10/188 in the ranking of HDI [2]. The only 2 countries with a higher HDI than the US that works more hours in 2015 than the US is Ireland and Iceland. Iceland in 2015 had a population of 329,425 [3] and Ireland in 2015 had a population of 4,688,464 [4], while the US had a population of 321,773,631 [5]. Given that Iceland has an extremely low population compared to the US, Ireland is the only country of comparable population and HDI where the workers work _more_ than US workers.

In contrast, Mexico works the longest hours according to the OECD ranking, but is #77/188 on the HDI ranking list [2].

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Average_annual_ho...

[2] - http://hdr.undp.org/en/composite/HDI

[3] - https://www.populationpyramid.net/iceland/2015/

[4] - https://www.populationpyramid.net/ireland/2015/

[5] - https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...


> the US #13/35 (in the top 37%, so not the middle)

At the very tail end of the top 37%, which makes it part of the middle third and part of the middle two quarters.




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