Is this Trillion Dollar Man right?? No, not Elon Musk...

[theking]

‘Americans just work harder,’ says Norway’s trillion-dollar man. But how does that impact productivity in the US?
American companies are now outpacing their European counterparts in growth and innovation and it’s got Norway’s trillion-dollar man worried.

Nicolai Tangen, head of the $1.6 trillion Norges Investment Bank Management, which handles the revenue from the country’s oil and gas resources, says much of it has to do with differing attitudes around work. American companies simply are more productive than their European counterparts, and part of that comes down to attitude, he argues.

“We are not very ambitious. I should be careful about talking about work-life balance, but the Americans just work harder,” Tangen said in an interview with the Financial Times.

However, Tangen noted that while American culture results in high productivity, it does come at a cost.

Work hours versus worker productivity
On average, Europeans only work slightly less than Americans per week. The average employee in the European Union works 37.5 hours per week, while the average American works 38 hours per week, based on analysis from Eurostat.

The real difference in working days between Europe and the U.S. comes down to vacation days. European countries offer between 26 and 38 days off work, including minimum paid leave and public holidays, Euronews analysis shows.


Meanwhile, the average American takes 7.6 days of vacation per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, on top of the 11 federally recognized holidays.

With all those extra days on the job, Americans were significantly more productive than Europeans in 2024, data from the European Central Bank shows.

Interestingly, while European productivity has traditionally lagged behind that of the U.S., that gap did narrow from 2020 to 2022, the researchers note. They point to the efforts of European countries to implement job retention schemes while unemployment was surging in the U.S. But by mid-2022, the gap started widening again in the wake of a large energy price shock.