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Europe’s economic apocalypse is now (www.politico.eu)

submitted 5 days ago by yogthos@lemmy.ml to c/europe@hexbear.net

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[–] came_apart_at_Kmart@hexbear.net 33 points 5 days ago (2 children)

The degree to which Europe has lost ground to the U.S. in terms of economic competitiveness since the turn of century is breathtaking. The gap in GDP per capita, for example, has doubled by some metrics to 30 percent, due mainly to lower productivity growth in the EU.

cap-think

Put simply, Europeans don’t work enough. An average German employee, for example, works more than 20 percent fewer hours than their American counterparts.

had to look this asshole up. wrote for the WSJ for 15 years and won something called the "Gerald Loeb Award" which is a finance journalism award cooked up by a founder of a huge brokerage form on wall street in the late 1950s. it's given multiple times a year for "Excellence in Journalism". The german wikipedia bio claims this award is the highest honor for journalism in the US. that's news to me, Hauptman Matt! he has no english wiki, suspiciously. i wonder if this guy wrote his own german wiki.

anyway, this award worthy multi-author article in the WSJ was more or less a description of Bank of America buying Merrill when it went teats up. not an investigative retrospective, but literally an article saying it happened the day after it happened. how in the holy christ it's worth a journalism award escapes me. very "Dog Bites Man" type shit that it apparently took 3 people to write.

what a fucking hack, though i can see why his career floats ever upward on the wings of capitalist love.

[–] 7bicycles@hexbear.net 29 points 5 days ago

An average German employee, for example, works more than 20 percent fewer hours than their American counterparts.

Not that the USA isn't very much terrible but I'm assuming this guy picked up the ever popular "hours per job" metric instead of "hours per person" metric.

Schröders neoliberization effort introduced the mini job, where you could opt out or "opt out" out of social securities, costing you and your benefactorial employer way less money. THe purposed idea was that a mother of 5 could use her spare 5 hours a week to contribute some househould income, what actually happened of course is that 5 full time employees with all the admittedly "strong" social services benefits (compared to the USA) got replaced by 20 mini job employees who have none of those.

This drags down the "hours worked per job" average down a whole fucking bunch, since any given job is going to be like 20 hours a month max. It's just that people mostly have 2 - 5 of those, so more like a 100 hour workweek. Or they just do undeclared work a lot, which means more necessary money in their pocket, it also means 0 pensions since it's not in the system.

[–] peeonyou@hexbear.net 11 points 5 days ago

couldn't have anything to do with the US blowing up pipelines or anything