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Comment by DrJokepu | Hacker News Reader

I think you're mostly right, trying to apply European solutions to American problems is not necessarily a good idea, just like trying to apply American solutions to European problems is not necessarily a very good idea.

The nationalist slur at the end of your comment was totally unnecessary though.

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> European solutions to American problems is not necessarily a good idea,

European here. Fully agree. What is largely overseen is that the meme of Europe being a largely regulated field where everything is so much different to the US, has (according to my perception) largely evaporated over the last 10-15 years. While the startup acumen is still more elaborated in the US due to more liberal working laws, people in Europe work a lot overtime unpaid, even more than in the US.

http://fortune.com/2015/11/11/chart-work-week-oecd/

What I would like to say is people feel exhausted in Europe too.

The free market: It's what makes America great, Britain good, and France terrible. /s

I thought the staunchest defenders of the free market are of the opinion that America needs to be made great again.

anarcho-capitalists are trump supporters?

Oh that's a good point, I had just autocapitalized "Free Market™" (and tacked on that ™ symbol) in my brain reading the comment. I forgot that the words have actual meaning too. Yeah probably those guys are mostly holding their nose and backing Gary Johnson. :)

I'm reasonably certain you've mixed up stereotypes. The staunchest defenders of the free market are keeping busy retreating back to the Democratic Party because it serves their interests more than the Republican Party does. They did the reverse in the 80s (hence "neoconservative") for the same reasons.

I'm... fairly certain that no one in this discussion realizes that's a Ron Swanson quote, or that /s means sarcasm.

"Nationalist slur" Oh please, take a look at Spain's economy and tell me that their 2 hour siesta (it means nap in English btw) is doing anything to help their happiness or quality of life. My point is you work hard to maintain your happiness and it's not given to you freely by some government policy.

Any links to studies suggesting Spain's economy is related to their siesta?

For another irrelevant comment about productivity: Try walking into any office in China right after lunch and find any worker not asleep at their desk. And their economy is pretty booming.

1) United States is ranked 13th on the World Happiness Report, behind 12 countries all more regulated than the US. [1]

2) Americans might work hard, but they work less than both Mexico, Russia, Greece, etc. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report

[2] http://fortune.com/2015/11/11/chart-work-week-oecd/

And yet social mobility and wealth inequality in the US is among the worst in the developed world.

Weird huh?

And if you really are interested, short afternoon sleeps are positively correlated with lower stress levels and increased personal wellbeing.

Life does not have to be a constant pursuit of ever-higher GDP, which is skewed towards those with large amounts of capital anyway.

At least in the US the base level of wealth (poor) is higher than half the countries on earth. True that the higher levels (the 120 people that own half of America) are way out of balance.

>The nationalist slur at the end of your comment was totally unnecessary though.

Is highlighting the fact that the US is the largest economy considered a slur?

The comment about taking siestas was saying the US is the largest economy because people in other countries were lazy. Did you really think that it was the other half of that sentence being objected to?

To add some perspective though, because the US is the largest economy, the notion of working harder to achieve similar results to the US is quite the aspiration for the developing countries. Not to mention geeks like me (and probably others here) who are endlessly fascinated by how much easier it is to go from idea to prototype to production to profit in the US compared to just about every other country on the planet.

The commenter could have just said that the 25% extra hours worked each week compounded into a much larger economy and omitted 'siesta'.

> how much easier it is to go from idea to prototype to production to profit in the US compared to just about every other country on the planet

Is that true? I honestly don't know, but my intuition is that it's true for a certain subset of projects and not others. Even if it is true, is the origin of that truth "working harder"? I sincerely doubt that. If I had to guess, the availability of capital is the leading cause. And that capital came from somewhere, but it wasn't all hard work.

> Is that true? I honestly don't know, but my intuition is that it's true for a certain subset of projects and not others.

Good point. I cannot offer you proof, although if you polled people who have lived in multiple countries, including the US, you would probably find a majority of them agree.

Also, at the very cutting edge of technology, I think even small things can kill ideas, and the US probably does the least damage to the idea while it is taken from germination to profit. Maybe it is that small subset which has a cascading effect on the rest (e.g. Google, whose extraordinary financial success in search certainly cascaded into many things which touch people's lives directly).

Interestingly, I have made this comment at what is sleeping hours in the US but is more closer to work hours in many other places around the world. And till now this is the only comment which has raised this question despite HN's global audience - not that I am not glad you asked the question, I am just saying that it is not meeting with a ton of resistance (yet). On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if my point is completely refuted with a mountain of evidence in the next few hours :-)

> Even if it is true, is the origin of that truth "working harder"? I sincerely doubt that.

My point is that everything is a sort of multiplicative factor when it comes to the size of the economy, and a nation where people are working nearly 25% more time than other nations (or at least the ones being compared here) can be a pretty significant boosting factor, especially when it is combined with the availability of resources and the productivity associated with what is called "human capital".

> If I had to guess, the availability of capital is the leading cause. And that capital came from somewhere, but it wasn't all hard work.

Not to say that the US has never made mistakes, I think they have at various times abused the power of their economic and military strength for mobilizing capital to their advantage (to put it really mildly). I don't know how to account for its effect.

This study (looking at the "Entrepreneurship & Opportunity" column) for 2015 shows Sweden at #1 and the US at #11: http://www.prosperity.com/#!/ranking

Its a point of view. Partying all night and sleeping half the afternoon is definitely not an indicator for productivity. PC objections aside.

The US has a larger population than any individual EU state. Comparing GDP per capita is fairer and puts the US between 9th and 13th worldwide, behind a few european countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

To be fair, wealth from natural resource extraction should be discounted for the purposes of the current discussion. This would remove Qatar, Brunei, Kuwait, Norway, and the UAE from the top of the list.

But then again, it would also lower the US quite a bit, so I guess the comparison is difficult. Besides, "the EU" does not exist when it comes to work/leisure regulation and attitude.

The others on the list, which do not have oil, are inflated, because they have foreigners working there, who increase the GDP but do not count to the population. Essentially a part of Switzerland's and a big part of Luxembourg's GDP per capita belongs to Germany.

USA is much larger than any European state, but if we're looking at a whole union, EU has a larger economy than USA. Despite paid vacations, siestas and stuff.

Also US leapt ahead while most of Europe was recovering from a devastating war.

The US was kind of like starting a game of Civilization on Chieftain difficulty with industial tech level, with oceans on two sides, natural resources abound, peaceful ally to the north and weaker country to the south.

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