Americans Work 25% More Than Europeans, Study Finds

So let's compare tax rates in the US vs Norway where I live, arguably a "socialist bastion" according to the rest of the world!

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates

Corporate tax Norway: 25%

Corporate tax US: 35%

Individual (Min/Max) Norway: 0%/46.9%

Individual (Min/Max) US: 0%-3%/52.9%

Payroll tax Norway: 0%-14.1%

Payroll tax US: 20.2%

VAT Norway: 10%-25%

VAT US: 0%-11.725%

The tax systems are different though, for Norway, the max tax bracket is from 950.000 NOK (a bit over 100k USD). You do not pay tax until you make around 80k and the rates are progressive. You do have loads of deductibles though like paid interest, children, transportation etc.

So I wouldn't say we pay vastly more in tax here, but we still get social services.

The salaries here are not on EU level, but a bit higher. As an analyst I make about 1.1 million NOK/year. From that I pay around 350k in tax and that is not too bad compared to what we get in exchange. I actually have no objections to paying the tax.

Edit: BTW, I work 37.5 hours a week and two of the days are from home. And I have 27 paid vacation days a year + the public holidays :)

Edit2: the tax stuff was mangled, reformatting

London is particularly expensive because of the massive banking industry. They rake in the high salaries and drive up the prices for everybody. But it's true, programmer salaries in the US are higher than in the EU, and sometimes a lot higher.

The point is: what are you going to do with all that money if you don't have the time to enjoy it? Even a cheap vacation can be more fun than slaving all year long and having only two weeks to do something with it.

It's a very light analysis from me, so might not be fully true, but I live in the US, now in Europe, and in Canada before that. You could also say Canada is kind of in the middle.

Well, maybe correlation doesn't imply causation in that case but here is what I can see:

- US > Canada > Europe in terms of opportunities, be it starting salary, end-of-career salaries, and everything in the middle such as promotions, personal growth, etc. - Europe > Canada > US in terms of social support - Europe > Canada > US in terms of work/life balance.

And it's interesting to see how things are different and it looks like there IS causation.

- People in the US work more

- The separation between work and personal life In the US people all have their emails/chats on their personal cellphone, will work on weekends without much reason, will be talking about work with friends more, will show more passion about their company, will show more ambition. In Europe, people seem to take their job more as a secondary things AFTER their life. Their have less coworkers-friends, they talk less about work, show less ambition about a promotion/new job coming.

- People seem to try harder at lower scale jobs in the US There is often the excuse of the tips for waiters etc.. but it's the same for customer support and things like that. When you call cust sup in Europe, the service is way worst. People to try as hard to make the extra effort, etc.

Overall you really explicitly see and feel that most people just see their current job as an end state, versus in the US people constantly work hard to reach the next step and have more ambition.

I'm sure it's in part because there are indeed less opportunities (harder to get promotions, salaries varies less, etc.) and it's harder to move from a class to another compared to the US.

That's mostly my feeling, but it seems like it's so obvious... and Canada, really, is in the middle of those 2 extremes.

How do you measure productivity in an information economy? A failed startup may have been very productive at churning out code at an astounding rate, but the problem it tried to solve turned out to be irrelevant, so all that productivity went into the trash. When talking about the correlation between productivity and the overall efficiency of a society, we always have to know whether the end goals succeed in delivering real value to the society. Otherwise, we are busy, advancing nothing.

To some extent, this is a choice many Americans intentionally make. There are many jobs that offer European-like benefits, working hours, and employment stability in the US (e.g. Federal government jobs and some companies) but these are frequently viewed as undesirable -- it is not a first choice for many people if circumstances offer something better. The tradeoffs tend to be similar to Europe if you take one of these jobs. Lower pay, less opportunity for advancement (these kinds of environments tend to have promotions that are more seniority based), and you have to work with more people that put in the minimum effort required.

The concept of "quality of life" goes beyond the hours you work to also include having the opportunity to go after your ambition, if you have one. Culturally, I think one of the ways the US and Europe differ is that Europe imposes an environment designed to limit expressible ambition to the lowest common denominator, whereas US culture allows much greater variance in ambition. Or to put it another way, if it is your nature, it is easier to be ambitious in the US and easier to be non-ambitious in Europe. But all other things being equal, I prefer having the opportunity to be ambitious. Americans are not required to be ambitious, but many Americans take the opportunity nonetheless.