Odd Lots: Europe may be falling behind. Working less isn’t why

Can we substantially say that the broad European middle class does, in fact have, you know, substantially more leisure and time than their counterparts here, especially in countries like Spain and Italy, there are a lot of informal hours that are not captured by the headline figures. There are adjusted series for that. But my own crunching the numbers says it doesn't make that much of a difference for the bulk of the European economy, uh, the richer parts of the European economy. So that's Central Europe, the lowlands and Low Countries and all the countries that they do work much, much less. And if indeed it it meant that Europeans were employed at lower rates, it would be concerning and it would probably point to the fact, oh, this is a labor market failure, and people may not be able to work or they're not working because they're getting diminishing returns. But there's again, there's good empirical evidence, including by people who co-authored the the long run productivity figures that go into the Draghi reports that show. Well, actually, it's sort of a substitution effect where productivity is causing me hours to go down and I was going down is actually increasing productivity. So first of all, it is real. People do work less. And there's no reason to think that that's a sign of dysfunction underlying it.