Re: Jim Manzi’s National Affairs essay, Justin Fox writes, a bit puzzlingly:

Yeah, but I’d be interested in knowing if we maintained that lead in output per hour, since Western Europeans have chosen less work (and more vacation) over more pay, while Americans have done the opposite. And I know, I could probably figure out the answer by spending some time here. But I’m going to choose less work instead.

I think we’ve been over this — we haven’t; France, for example, has higher output per hour — but to reiterate: while we could characterize this as an income vs. leisure trade-off, we can also characterize this as a function of rigid labor markets that have led to persistently high youth unemployment rates in Europe. See Annie Lowrey’s Foreign Policy article on this subject. Your 10-person firm’s productivity would increase if you fired the nine least productive employees, or the three or the one. There is a learning curve, and younger workers tend to be less productive than older workers.

Also, as Edward Prescott has noted, this income vs. leisure trade-off flipped after the sharp 1981 reductions in marginal tax rates. Europeans choose more leisure in response to the fact that they keep relatively little of the gains from working longer hours.

The leisure vs. income trade-off cuts both ways: As Aguiar and Hurst have found, the U.S. has seen a large increase in leisure inequality over the last four decades.

Over the last 20 years, less educated men increased the time they allocated to leisure while more educated men recorded a decrease in leisure time. While the relative decline in the employment rate of less educated men is important, trends in employment status explain less than half of the increase in the leisure gap.

Could it be that the less educated men are, like Europeans, simply “choosing” a different work-life balance, and so we should stop fretting about income inequality? I imagine that isn’t the conclusion that Fox would draw. But I could be wrong.