The answer is: "What does a country's GDP per capita have to do with time off?"
What they should have correlated it with is RGDP GROWTH. Just because previous generations busted their asses off for their spoiled children to enjoy high standards of living and take vacation has NOTHING to do with what they're implying. Economic GROWTH is what matters, not the nominal GDP per capita people pre-establishedly enjoy.
10 comments:
Where to start? How about average vacation instead of mandated vacation? How about not dealing with nationwide aggregates that are useless to begin with?
Hah! The old cart-before-the-horse theorem!
"Contrary to popular European belief, low levels of statutory holiday in the United States and Canada are not comparative to European standards when taking public holidays into account. Employees in the United States and Brazil have an additional 10 and 11 days of public holiday, respectively , while workers in Canada are entitled to 9. In total, employees in Brazil that can take the full entitlement and the full number of public holidays would receive 41 days off, those in the United States typically 25 days and those in Canada 19 days."
From
http://hr.cch.com/news/hrm/101509a.asp
How about not including the obvious trend line which would roughly run from Brazil to the US, indicating less GDP with increasing vacation - leaving it out seems to imply the opposite.
"Statutory" i.e.: Mandated and part of employment law.
The US doesn't mandate vacation time off, but it sure is customary and an employer that didn't allow ANY would attract ZERO employees.
I know they're trying to show a correlation and how the US is evil by not giving employees vacations. Last time I checked, 2 weeks minimum and more time over more service.
So everyone else mandates something by law and the US doesn't.
Funny how they use an American Office and typical American sign/phrase "Gone Fishing". If we don't take any vacations, why are you using it in the graph?
Bunch of Tools
Is there an economic relationship between statutory holidays and GDP where more holidays = higher GDP? Seriously doubt it. There is probably an optimum number of holidays where GDP rises, and once that threshold is exceeded GDP starts to decline.
Don't they have their axis' mixed up?
Yeah, 5 days more work per year (that is 2% more) makes 30% more GDP. WTF? Has The Communist ever heard of diminishing marginal returns? Who works for this rotten magazine? People who studied fashion?
So many things wrong, many of which have already been stated:
1. Using an income measure for "wealth"
2. Confusing mandatory vacation with actual vacation
3. Comparing two variables which have no theoretical relationship in the direction of causation they're implying
Every two variable chart should be taken with a grain of salt. We don't live in a two-dimensional world. The internet and mass media are fostering overly simplistic analysis for every problem, constrained by the difficulty in charting three dimensions and the inability to chart higher dimensions.
People need to start thinking beyond linear correlation. That requires the ability to grasp abstract concepts. It is encouraging, though, to see people identifying all the problems. Those are the hidden dimensions and empirical biases.
Face it: when all is said and done, even the Economist is nothing more than a rag, but journal articles with complex theory and empirics don't sell well. You, like everyone else, post 2 dimensional charts but you augment them with explanation to address the shortcomings of the picture. These cutesy examples from the Economist are usually unsupported with text, leaving everything up to the imagination and intellect of the reader.
The biggest thing to notice is that the headline doesn't even form a thesis.
Oops, I spoke too soon. I didn't see there was a short article attached to the chart. My bad.
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