Baldwin, the author of The Narcissism of Small Differences, which I’ve just started reading, is really, really awesome. In an exchange with Thomas Geoghegan, a much-admired left-liberal labor lawyer and public intellectual, Baldwin offered tremendous insight into the differences between work-leisure trade-offs in Germany and the United States:
Mr. Geoghegan points out they work less than we do. Indeed, they work less than almost everyone else in the industrialized world.
Long vacations are not the only reason. It’s not only that the Germans who do work work little; it’s that so few of them work in the first place. German women, for example, to a remarkable degree still stay at home doing housework and minding the children rather than pursue careers.
Also, the figures understate the German hours worked. Since the statistics simply divide the total numbers of hours by the total number of workers, and since a higher percentage of Germans work part time (22 percent) than do Americans (14 percent), the hours per worker in Germany are lower than if measured more accurately. Nonetheless, a difference undeniably remains.
After factoring in household labor, Baldwin finds that Americans work 12 percent more than Germans:
That Americans work 12 percent more than Germans seems to be the hard kernel that emerges from the statistics. Considering that for that 12 percent investment the American G.N.P. per capita is 32 percent higher than the German, this seems a defensible trade-off. Perhaps Americans have collectively decided to work somewhat harder to be substantially better off. Mr. Geoghegan’s anecdotes do not undermine the fact that even measured per hour worked, the Americans are more effective than the Germans (8 percent more, according to Labor Department 2008 P.P.P. figures).
Baldwin is not a Europhobe by any stretch of the imagination. This is one thing that always about the rather specious “Europe vs. America” debate. There are virtues to both systems. But enthusiasts for social democracy are quick to dismiss the invisible costs of various social protections, while defenders of laissez-faire often use a polemical tone that suggests misplaced hostility to the European way of life. To his great credit, Baldwin doesn’t fall victim to either tendency. I hope that his book finds a wide audience.
I particularly enjoyed Baldwin’s closing comment:
What makes the German happy as a trade union member upsets him as a customer. It’s all too easy to romanticize an only dimly understood situation.
That last sentence is very wise.