Working hours by country

[The Minsky Moment]

The figures are from the OECD, the BBC has just put them into a friendly format. If anything it seems to me that fewer hours might correlate with wealthier economies, ie that productivity is the more dominant of the two factors. I was surprised to find that the USA was actually at or even slightly below the OECD average.

Read the fine print:

The concept used is the total number of hours worked over the year divided by the average number of people in employment. 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.  Part-time workers are covered as well as full-time workers

In other words the BBC is using these figures for the very purpose that the OECD specifically warns they are unsuitable for.

To paraphrase the NRA: statistics don't lie, people do.