The myth that working more makes us richer

The debate about working hours misses the real issue: productivity and economic structure

A few weeks ago, Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz suggested that Germany will have no future unless its workers start working harder. As he explained, after returning from a trip to China, things suddenly appeared much clearer to him, leading him to conclude that his country’s prosperity cannot be guaranteed by shorter working weeks—such as the four-day workweek—built around balancing work and personal life. In particular, he attacked sick leave, literally suggesting that with better incentives, people would choose to work rather than take leave when they fall ill. Without a doubt, this points to the kind of European project that certain political and economic elites wish to build: one that dismantles the social achievements embodied in the welfare state.

To my surprise, the economist Branko Milanović —a great scholar of the history of economic thought and, moreover, a progressive intellectual who recently took part in an event organised by the Spanish government— has argued that Merz is right. His argument is that the richest countries are also those where people work the most hours, and that historically, if a country wants more consumption and income, it has to work more; conversely, if it wants more leisure time, it must accept lower income per person.

The virtue of Milanović’s analysis is that it clearly points to a trade-off that has accompanied humanity since the beginning of time: the need to choose between the time —and energy— devoted to production and the time available for other activities. The obvious problem with both Milanović and Merz is that by focusing the analysis on hours worked, they obscure the fact that not all economic activities are equal and that, therefore, what we call wealth may vary between two regions even if their workers have the same working day. Let us examine these two dimensions separately.

Working: how much is enough?

One of the most important demystifications produced by anthropologists in recent decades concerns the number of working hours in hunter-gatherer societies. The myth implicit in the modern idea of progress is that societies have advanced from lower stages filled with suffering and hardship towards more advanced societies with better material well-being. In reality, it depends on the indicator. For example, in terms of disease, diet quality, or the length of working days, the Neolithic Revolution —the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agrarian societies— was a bad deal: people lived considerably better in the former. Giving up that relatively better situation was the price paid to sustain larger societies. Yet it is striking that in order to secure food, some hunter-gatherer communities needed to devote fewer than twenty hours per week to work.

Naturally, the technology available in those hunter-gatherer societies cannot be compared with that of subsequent modes of production. This is why we say that working hours do not exist in an institutional vacuum, which forces us to consider aspects such as technology or politics when making comparisons. Agrarian societies in the Middle Ages were deeply unequal, and yet the number of working days per year was also far lower than today. Economic historians Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf calculated that in thirteenth-century England, people worked an average of 200 days per year. That figure reached its minimum after the Black Death, which killed half the population and resulted in enormous bargaining power for workers —not by coincidence, that period is commonly called the Crisis of Feudalism.

The work of these historians is relevant because it confirms that the emergence of capitalism went hand in hand with a greater intensification of labour, which accelerated from the seventeenth century onward and led to an average of 250 working days per year by 1700 and 350 by 1850.

In their study, Humphries and Weisdorf left open the question of whether this increase in hours worked was a choice made by people who wanted more consumption and therefore sacrificed leisure time —as some historians assume and as Milanović’s approach seems to support— or whether it was an external imposition by employers or by the emerging dynamics of capitalism itself. In that controversy, it seems fairly obvious to me that the latter is true. It is well documented, for example, that medieval workers stopped working once they had met their production targets, and that introducing them into a capitalist logic required a brutal combination of civil repression and the dispossession of the means of production—the well-known enclosures. On this point, the British Marxist historiography remains a much more reliable guide to what actually happened in everyday life.

Only from the mid-nineteenth century onwards did annual working hours begin to decline progressively. This coincided with the spread of the technologies of the Second Industrial Revolution and with the growth and strengthening of the labour movement. The latter appears to have been much more important, which becomes clearer when examining a specific component of working time: holidays and public days off. These days of rest were originally linked to religious festivities but became increasingly secularised under pressure from the labour movement demanding better living conditions.

In 1870, workers in the United Kingdom enjoyed 14 days of rest compared with 8 in the United States. Even so, these were not paid until the 1920s, when the Soviet Union took the first step; afterwards, the labour movement pushed for their introduction throughout the West. By the end of the Second World War there were already 24 paid days off in the United Kingdom, compared with 17 in the United States; and by the year 2000 there were 32 in the UK versus 20 in the United States —which had begun reducing them compared with the previous decade. Broadly speaking, where the labour movement is stronger, working days are less intense, and there are more days of rest.

The logic of Trumpism —which both Merz and Milanović implicitly assume— is that working more hours is an indicator of prosperity. In this narrative, rest appears as a serious economic problem. The contemporary debate often focuses on differences between Europe and the United States. For example, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Europeans worked an average of 1,564 hours per year compared with 1,868 in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Trumpists claim this is proof that their nation is more powerful. But is a country really richer simply because it works more hours?

The issue of productivity

The economist José Manuel Naredo —following the work of Lewis Mumford and Marshall Sahlins — emphasised that hunter-gatherer societies were, for the reasons mentioned above, societies of abundance rather than scarcity. They had everything they wanted, so they stopped working as soon as their limited needs were met.

In later agrarian societies, this outlook remained —albeit within much more hierarchical and violent contexts— so that technological innovations such as the water mill were interpreted as gifts that allowed people to work less.

This is easy to understand from an economic perspective. Productivity is the relationship between output —for example, a certain quantity of grain or a chair— and labour input —for example, the number of hours worked or the number of workers. With a technological innovation, it becomes possible to produce the same output with fewer hours of labour, since the water mill saves human effort. In this case, technology is a blessing — as I recently argued here — because it means the possibility of more leisure time.

Although productivity is very easy to measure in physical terms, there is considerable controversy over the ability and usefulness of measuring it in monetary terms. It is intuitive that if you produce two chairs in the same time that it would take to produce one previously, you have doubled your productivity. But when a company produces chairs, tables, houses, vehicles, and tomatoes simultaneously, the situation becomes extremely complicated. Economists therefore use prices to add together different things, which has generated numerous methodological controversies —too extensive to discuss here but illustrative of the fragile scientific status of what is called economic science.

In any case, the procedure involves adding the monetary values of the various material goods produced, such as the chair, the table, and so on. The sum of all these elements produced by an economy is what allows us to say, for example, that Spain had a Gross Domestic Product of €1.685 trillion in 2025.

An obvious problem with this approach is that it obscures the importance of knowing which goods each country produces. Is producing a chair the same as producing an aircraft? Is selling a tourist tour the same as providing high-level consultancy services? Conventional economists usually pay little or no attention to the question of productive structure, yet it is precisely what determines whether an economy is developed —and what its vulnerabilities and limits are.

Currently, the number of hours worked per year is 1,893 in Greece, 1,638 in Spain, and 1,335 in Germany. However, GDP per hour worked is $93.7 in Germany, $73.4 in Spain, and $44.9 in Greece. What does this mean? First of all, it means that it is radically false that a country becomes richer by working more hours. What these indicators show is that an hour of labour in Germany is more productive than in Spain, and in Spain more productive than in Greece. And this tells us nothing about some people being lazier than others, but about the type of production that each country typically has. In other words, it tells us about productive structure.

If in one hour of work economy A produces a chair valued on the market at €100, and another economy B produces a vehicle valued at €10,000, the second economy is one hundred times more productive. At that point it will not matter how many additional hours the workers in economy A perform —or how many breaks are removed during that hour. The transition from economy A to economy B will not depend on the intensity of labour during the working day, nor on the length of that day, but on economic policy and the role of the state —industrial policy, in fact— in promoting higher-quality and cheaper production.

The real dilemma

Merz’s confusion stems from Germany's stagnant economy. He has been to China and believes the problem is that German workers have too many labour and social benefits and should work harder. But the real problem for the German economy is that it now has a high-level competitor in sectors where it was previously dominant — such as the automotive industry — which is causing its sales and profits to decline. This is something Milanović’s analysis does correctly identify: the pressure of capitalist competition pushes all actors to reduce labour conditions in order to “prosper” —although, as always, some do so at the expense of others.

Having visited China, the German chancellor might have learned that the Asian giant's strategy consisted of combining cheap labour with, above all, state-driven industrial policy. Oddly enough, he has chosen not to see it that way, even though the Chinese leadership itself explains it in those terms. For him, as for many conventional economists, everything ultimately comes down to working longer and commodifying more spheres of life. This also allows the introduction of a religious-moral dimension about the work ethic and the disciplined character of the German worker, something that appeals to certain essentialist visions of the German nation. What lies behind it is simply a new twist in the old capitalist logic —only now with a much more disorganised and weakened labour movement.

It is clear that the limited lenses of economists do not allow us to imagine a viable world. The logic described uncritically by Milanović speaks of endless competition between countries to produce ever cheaper goods and services, with no natural, economic, or social limits. Karl Polanyi theorised about the impossibility of subjecting society to extreme commodification, warning about the socio-political consequences of such a project —fascism. Ecological economists and natural scientists have explained that the economy has biophysical limits which, if crossed, entail catastrophic consequences for life. Basic common sense and simple accounting tell us that not all countries can be net exporters or global sellers of electric vehicles and electronic batteries.

The economy necessarily operates within limits that economists insist on denying again and again.

The discourse of “working more” tends to appear precisely when a country is losing its position in the international division of labour. When political and economic leaders repeat that we must work more, they are articulating a social project: one in which “prosperity” depends on intensifying exploitation of the working class. It is the easiest solution because it does not require confronting the interests of capital and rentierism, nor planning the future within recognised limits; it merely demands sacrifices from the population.

But an economy that hopes to survive by making its people work more is one that has given up on progress. We must turn the argument embedded in our “common sense” upside down and recognise that a truly advanced economy is one that succeeds in freeing its population from working time.