{"id":5765,"date":"2011-04-19T15:06:59","date_gmt":"2011-04-19T15:06:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=5765"},"modified":"2011-04-19T15:06:59","modified_gmt":"2011-04-19T15:06:59","slug":"working-hard-working-smart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/working-hard-working-smart\/","title":{"rendered":"Working Hard, Working Smart"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Krikorian and I have been singled (doubled?) out for a sneer from AEI’s Nick Schultz. Are our heads exploding (he wants to know<\/a>) at the news that Mexicans lead the world in “total minutes worked, paid and unpaid, per day”?<\/p>\n

Mark is very well able to speak for himself. My own reaction on seeing the OECD chart Nick displays was that Mexicans are getting dismally little bang for the industrious buck. After five hundred years of toiling away for 594 minutes a day they have nothing much to show but a mediocre economy propped up by oil revenues and expatriate remittances, dysfunctional politics, and wellnigh zero achievement<\/a> in the cultural or
\nintellectual spheres.<\/p>\n

A few minutes’ number-crunching confirms the impression. Remember how your Uncle Stan used to tell you that while working hard is good, working smart<\/em> is better? OK, let’s create an Uncle Stan index. I’ll divide annual per capita GDP (from the CIA World Factbook<\/a>) by the daily number of minutes worked to see how much annualized per capita GDP each minute generates. For Mexico I’m dividing $13,800 a head by 594 minutes, to get annualized $23.22 per person per minute worked in the day.<\/p>\n

On the Uncle Stan Index (USI) Mexico ranks 27 out of 29 on the OECD list. That is to say, it’s one of the least efficient nations in the world at turning work into wealth.<\/p>\n

Here’s the table. I’ve included a column for mean national IQ, these numbers taken from Tatu Vanhanen’s latest book<\/a>. The last two columns correlate quite well:\u00a0 r<\/em>\u00a0=\u00a00.47.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Country<\/td>\nUSI\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/td>\nMean National IQ<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Norway<\/td>\n131<\/td>\n100<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
U.S.A.<\/td>\n96<\/td>\n98<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Netherlands     <\/td>\n90<\/td>\n100<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Belgium<\/td>\n89<\/td>\n99<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Australia<\/td>\n86<\/td>\n99<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Denmark<\/td>\n83<\/td>\n98<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Germany<\/td>\n81<\/td>\n99<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Austria<\/td>\n79<\/td>\n100<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Sweden<\/td>\n79<\/td>\n99<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Finland<\/td>\n78<\/td>\n99<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Ireland<\/td>\n78<\/td>\n92<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Canada<\/td>\n77<\/td>\n99<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
France<\/td>\n74<\/td>\n98<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
U.K.<\/td>\n74<\/td>\n100<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Italy<\/td>\n65<\/td>\n102<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Japan<\/td>\n63<\/td>\n105<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Korea<\/td>\n62<\/td>\n106<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Spain<\/td>\n62<\/td>\n98<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Slovenia<\/td>\n57<\/td>\n96<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
New Zealand<\/td>\n56<\/td>\n99<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Portugal<\/td>\n44<\/td>\n95<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Hungary<\/td>\n40<\/td>\n98<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Poland<\/td>\n39<\/td>\n99<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Estonia<\/td>\n37<\/td>\n99<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Turkey<\/td>\n25<\/td>\n90<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
South Africa<\/td>\n24<\/td>\n72<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Mexico<\/td>\n23<\/td>\n88<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
China<\/td>\n15<\/td>\n105<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
India<\/td>\n7<\/td>\n82<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Now, see how unfair life is. Here’s me, a poor freelance drudge, doing all this math, while Nick Schultz has a nice cushy number at AEI where apparently he is required to do nothing but strike politically-correct moral poses. Nick doesn’t even bother to source his data: I had to Google for the spreadsheet link<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I guess Uncle Stan was right\u00a0\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Krikorian and I have been singled (doubled?) out for a sneer from AEI’s Nick Schultz. Are our heads exploding (he wants to know) at the news that Mexicans lead the world in “total minutes worked, paid and unpaid, per … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[8,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5765"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5765"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5772,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5765\/revisions\/5772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}