Sir, – Ben Steverman cites a number of studies in a haphazard effort to support some very questionable theses ("Who works longer: the Irish, the French or the Americans?", October 18th).
Two major fallacies underlie the article and need to be challenged. The primary study – about the reasons for Europeans working less hours than Americans – does indeed try to explain this relatively recent phenomenon but it attributes “up to half” of this to the fact that Europeans work fewer weeks per year. It then suggests that “at the individual level” extra vacation can be considered as “involuntary unemployment”. The notion that it is a collective democratic decision, which leads to happier, healthier society, is not entertained in this deliberately atomised world. The second fallacy is in the assertion by Lee Ohanian that “Americans are indeed richer than Europeans, and one reason why is because of taxes that depress the incentives to work in Europe”. Americans are only richer if you discount all social goods and consider only disposable income. Six European countries, some with very high tax rates, rank higher than the US in the Human Development Index, while at least four have unemployment rates lower than those in the US.
The shibboleth that “taxes depress the incentive to work” should have been buried a long time ago, not least by the 40 successful years of high tax, low unemployment social democracy in Europe. Our problem for the foreseeable future will not be a lack of incentive to work. It will be the lack of appropriate work and the consequent shortfall in demand. – Yours, etc,
Dr KEVIN T RYAN,
Limerick.