July 20, 2011
This is what Thomas Friedman said in his column this morning, even if he didn’t know it. Friedman told readers that:
“Germans are now telling Greeks: ‘We’ll loan you more money, provided that you behave like Germans in how you save, how many hours a week you work, how long a vacation you take …'”
If we look to the OECD data, we see that the average number of hours in a work year for Germans in 2008 (the most recent data available) was 1430. This compares to 2120 hours a year for the average Greek worker. This means that if Germans want the Greeks to be more like Germans in the number of hours a week they work and the length of their vacations, then they want the Greeks to work less, not more.
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