Against the Work Fetish
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2013/10/01/glen-newey/against-the-work-fetish
What, in the end, is so marvellous about ‘hardworking people’? (‘Say what you like about George Osborne/Torquemada/Himmler, he used to put in an 18‐hour day.’) For Osborne, work isn’t just a means to end; it’s an end in itself. We’re a long way from Keynes’s 1930 prediction that automation would leave people needing to work only a couple of hours a day. One good question to put to work evangelists is whether they think working hours are longer in the UK or Germany. In fact UK workers average 1654 hours a year against just 1393 in Germany, who are only one notch above Europe’s champion dossers, the Dutch. Who comes out on top? The Greeks, with a Stakhanovite 2034 hours a year. That’s working well for them.