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Comment by Grangar | Hacker News Reader

I don't think these statistics are correct. People in the Netherlands supposedly work 27 hours/week according to this data, whereas 36-40 hours is the common standard here. Even accounting for vacations et cetera that is terribly low.

Also from the data source: "The data are intended for comparisons of trends over time; they are unsuitable for comparisons of the level of average annual hours of work for a given year, because of differences in their sources and method of calculation." The data is unsuitable for this article.

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Netherlands has (one of?) the highest rates of part time work, which would explain this disparity if you're thinking only of full time norms.

> The data is unsuitable for this article

That disclaimer is primarily dissuading comparing a single year across countries, which is reasonable (studies are usually performed within different time periods). The data is, as stated, perfectly suitable for identifying trends.

> That disclaimer is primarily dissuading comparing a single year across countries,

which is of course the entire content of the article.

The data source (OECD) isn't blameless either: the default/main view of the data (https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm) shows exactly what their disclaimer says you shouldn't do.

The content of the article looks at trends: it looks at productivity in countries tending to be at one end of the hours worked scale versus productivity of countries at the other. Comparing a Mexico and Costa Rica directly wouldn't work but looking at the tendency for those countries to trend toward one side of the scale does.

Those are not trends, which are comparisons for the same country over multiple years. What the article does and what you're describing are cross-country comparisons in a single year, just at the opposing tails of the distribution.

> Those are not trends, which are comparisons for the same country over multiple years

I think you may be choosing an arbitrarily narrow definition of the word "trend".

A typical definition[0] is "an inclination in a particular direction"

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trend

Yeah, the numbers are averaged over full-time, part-time, and seasonal workers according to the OECD report.

A lower average could mean longer holidays and maternity leaves, but it could also mean that fewer people have full-time jobs. It's impossible to tell without knowing the distribution.

Having read the description on the OECD website it certainly looks to me like part-time and temporary work are skewing the graph. Also self-employment appears to correlate on one end of the spectrum.

But as GP said, they acknowledge the data is unsuitable for this type of analysis entirely so it's all a bit pointless.

Apples next to oranges in a bar graph comparing the relative qualities of pears.

- As already mentioned, the denominator is "number of employed persons", not "number of persons employed in a full time job"

- Data source: http://statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/publication/?DM=SLNL&PA=82575...

1.3043 million total worked hours / 9.099 million employed persons = 1433 hours / person

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