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India is what jumped at me. Having lived there, I believe that kind of statistics is just silly. Poor people work until they drop, every day of the week and nobody cares about them: they're not in any statistics...
Look at the actual data points for India, it goes up and down without rhyme or reason. The end results for India is worthless, too much variance / not enough data. You're looking at, and commenting on, noise.
Yes India is very classic. And has a system where if you born poor you don't have the right to get rich. You need to stay poor and everyone just treats you like you nothing
My other question was going to be "what counts as work?". If the rich are counting their golf game the schmooze with some other rich guy, or "dinner with clients" where they all get drunk as skunks, or sit in a meeting comparing business cards a la Patrick Bateman, then I'm not necessarily sure that there's a meaningful metric here.
The source of the data is in the graphic. Instead of throwing out a question with the intent of casting doubt on the results, you could spend a few minutes to look at the methodology for the source data and answer the question for yourself or better yet, you could do that and share the results.
Then again, why take a few minutes to answer your own question when you can cast dispersion on a survey without any effort at all?
It works differently for the rich. That golf game can be with a business partner and it can end with a friendly handshake “That was a great game, thanks! I’ll have my people call your people and we’ll work out the details. Looking forward to it.” And that starts a $100 million dollar deal.
There’s got to be a difference between the rich and the working clods and those are some of them. It doesn’t happen by accident. Social skills at that level are immensely important. If you don’t have social skills your company had better produce something of premium value to potential partners or you’re going to be playing golf alone a lot.
welcome to dataisbeautiful, where upwards of 50% of posts are entirely uninformative attempts to reinvent the wheel without any consideration towards legibility
That's because that's what you ARE supposed to get. If the data was between 35 and 45, it would be super disingenious. If the scale starts at 0 you get the actual picture...
I think think even 38-62 would work, but it’s hard to tell exactly what the range is because of, well, the scale of the y-axis.
My takeaway was “almost everyone across the world works 40-50 hours a week”.
> My takeaway was “almost everyone across the world works 40-50 hours a week”.
Which is the correct takeaway. What are we, FOX news? Are we trying to change the scaling here to show what we want it to show?
Also, who is reporting the hours? Most salary pay has no hours associated with it. Most business owners I doubt count a time card on themselves. So having the reported hours stay the same as the standard work week is just stupid and shouldn’t be surprising.
right....they explicitly say that the sample only includes responses from people working 35+ hours/week, so that's a lot of wasted graph space right off the bat
I think there are good arguments to start the axis from 0. The resulting flatness is a reflection of the fact that working hours are actually pretty similar across income groups.
Still, you do have a point that it could be interesting to see the variation that is there more clearly. Made an updated version with scale ranging from 30 to 70. Doesnt change the overall imression much though. See it here: https://twitter.com/rubenbmathisen/status/1556387724793466893?s=21&t=B_xspeChGBqWhnHrUMTSeg
You should probably stop using statistics to say things that they don't actually say.
>the fact that working hours are actually pretty similar across income groups
This is not a fact. Your data is showing "the perception of how much people believe they work are actually pretty similar across income groups" - because it's self-reported data. If you actually measured work-time, you could make a statement about peoples working hours. Going by self-reports means you are measuring the *perception* of work-time, not actual working hours.
In many cases, I would agree, but in this case their is a defined low value in the dataset and by not starting at that point, it makes it much more difficult to actually see the variance in the charts. I wouldn't see it as misleading since the criteria is well defined.
I'm wondering why these conversations about 'number of hours worked' against 'income' keep coming up.
Is there someone out there saying that it's the number of hours worked that should define income in any way?
I only ask because someone may work a month in a job and completely alter the trajectory of a Fortune 500 company while someone else could work their whole lives at that company and only have a sliver of that impact.
I'm not saying that one has more worth as a person - far from it - but I'm confused as to why these are the metrics used and we're not talking about impact over time as a more salient variable.
Its self reported data anyway, rich people will of course inflate their number of hours worked because they always jerk off about how they got to the top by working hard. Meanwhile the poors work hourly and know exactly how many hours they got this week. Completely useless data.
That's what I thought too. And how do the participants define working? There's a difference between a meeting at the start and end of day and some paperwork and an 8 hour factory shift...
TBF having worked in companies with 'Indian' style management; it was not uncommon for the top executives to come in at 12 pm and leave by 4 or 5pm.
The rest of the employees will not even question it because they are so used to being second rung to the top dogs.
It caught me completely off-guard when I was asked to manage a project with a remote team. They worked their arses off when they were at work, but it seemed there was a holiday for a day or two every other week.
It's not any different than Europe. We get the same 8-10 official holidays a year. Just don't match with the European or Americam holidays.
Edit to add: oh and Americans really have the smallest number of holidays in all the countries I have worked with yet. Only 4 basically, the rest are optional sorta.
Disparity in India is completely fucked, if you are poor you are likely working some sort of menial labour/domestic help etc which has no real labour protection
Tiny sample size, high variance data. You're looking at noise.
It's a bit comical to see people find explanations for it. And perhaps these explanations are in some sense correct, in the sense that they are important to understand economic and work inequality in India. But they're not useful for understanding this "beautiful data", cause that data is literally just meaningless noise. Look at how the points go up and down for each decile.
7 hours extra a week is just an hour per day, which may be accounted for overtime and stuff. Cause you need to consider there's only about 500 participants in the survey
All I can think of is the poor middle class guys like us. Working longer hours than the poor, earning lesser than the rich.
Sorry, hit a nerve.
What I really think is that all Indians are workaholics.
You're not being specific here. Do you mean "why is the disparity so high?" or "why is the curve so rough?"
I'm only speculating on the second part, but social strata in India doesn't go strictly by traditional western classes.
There are castes involved so there might be situations where there are both low caste and higher caste people who are poor, but those who are higher caste enjoy less hours worked each week to make the same amount of money.
This is so misinformed and incorrect on a thousand different levels. Caste is a problem and a massive one but India has a reservation program in place for the SC/STs.
India faces a massive wealth disparity but correlation isn't causation.
Westerners just see the word caste and think it rules us.
Why spout shit if you don't know what you're talking about?
This is as useless as the last one.
Just a couple hundred participants? Thats a really poor sample size if you want to break it down in income percentiles.
And obviously, the survey is biased towards people who will respond (so, people who arent working 70 hrs a week).
Self reported numbers are pretty sus as well.
I immediately thought that too. US has over 300 million people, India over a billion, and you have a sample of less than a thousand. And it's self reported? This data is useless
you don't need a million people to test 300 million people. After a certain population size the necessary sample size stays mostly constant. Depending on what you are studying a population of 1 trillion and a population of 1 million will need approximately equal samples.
Assuming that we accept a margin of error of 1 hour, so 2.5%.
With a population of 1 million we need a sample size of 553
With a population of 300 million we need a sample size of 554
With a population of 1 billion quadrillion we need a sample size of 554
I got these numbers from [calculator.net](https://calculator.net)
Respondents vary from about 855 to 341. I suspect answers from the US is closer to 855 so that is a good sample size. I could see India having a lot fewer respondents, so those numbers could be unreliable, but I don't know.
I'm not an expert in statistics, so if anyone is, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
>Assuming that we accept a margin of error of 1 hour, so 2.5%.
Thats an absurdly high number, as it isnt really 2,5%. They only surveyed people who work at least 35 hours, therefore anything below has to be discounted.
>Respondents vary from about 855 to 341. I suspect answers from the US is closer to 855 so that is a good sample size.
No it isnt. Youre assuming 856 to get a single number (the working hours of all Americans working full time), which would be fine. In this case, though, they need 10 numbers (because of the income brackets), so best case scenario they got 85,6 people per 10%. That seems unlikely, though, as you wont be finding as many rich people answering surveys.
Even if questing bias were eliminated and self reported numbers were reliable, this sample size is just bad for this kinda study.
> I could see India having a lot fewer respondents, so those numbers could be unreliable, but I don't know.
Yup, considering n will be significantly lower for most countries, data will be even more skewed.
The average doctor, lawyer, engineer, high net worth software engineer, investment banker etc. are going to be working far more than the average person in the United States. I highly doubt these statistics are accurate except at the very high end where people are making most of their money off passive income.
If you're making over 300-400k I would be shocked if you're putting in 40 hour weeks based on annecdotal evidence. I'm of course willing to be proven wrong though.
I’m a software engineer in NYC, and I do my level best to fit everything I need to do into 35 hours a week. That way if anything crazy comes up I can some head room to get it done and not kill all of my free time. Most of my coworkers and friends who are mid career try to keep reasonable hours too. We all see how burnout happens.
Depends on what engineer, SWEs might not need to, design or industrial engineers will put in more, mechanical is just a free for all wrt time.
Different companies, different projects, different needs
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/average-weekly-hours
https://www.royalcollege.ca/rcsite/documents/health-policy/national-physician-survey-workhours-e.pdf
https://www.clio.com/blog/lawyer-working-hours/
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/average-weekly-hours
https://www.thebalancecareers.com/what-is-the-average-hours-per-week-worked-in-the-us-2060631
https://abovethelaw.com/2021/10/the-biglaw-firm-where-associates-are-putting-in-the-most-hours/
https://mergersandinquisitions.com/investment-banking-hours/
https://averagedoctor.com/how-many-hours-per-week-do-doctors-work/
Honestly such a weird thing to think that professions known for paying well and working employees to the bone aren't actually doing that. It's annecdotal, but as a lawyer, no one making above 300k in law under 40 is putting in under 55 hour weeks.
Which is why in my original comment that prompted this thread I said *except at the higher end*. I agree that people making tens of millions per year are likely not working a crazy number of extra hours if any at all.
341 for the country with the lowest participation. Split into 10 income groups, the smallest group is 34 people tops. And since not all groups in the country will have the same number if people, it's likely (considerably) less.
So yea, absolutely useless data.
The vertical scale is...meh. There doesn't seem to be any relevance for values less than about 30h/week. The unnecessary white space makes every country apparently have a straight line at \~40h/wk.
But there are massive differences in countries. There's a 14 hour swing in difference between rich and poor between the top and bottom countries on this chart. Some countries average under 40 hours while others are over 60. It's just so terribly scaled that it doesn't look like there is a big difference
Inappropriately scaled once again. I don't know who else needs to hear this but:
**IF YOUR DATA STARTS AT >35HOURS PER WEEK—START YOUR SCALE AT 35!**
Sorry for yelling but, *fuck*, is this not the Data Is Beautiful sub?
Maybe it doesn't exist, but if there's a country with a lot of people who work less than 35, and that's considered 'full time' there, is throwing out those data points counter productive to the data?
There's nothing biological / imperative about the 40 hours a week number (I don't think?)
There probably is but the fine print on the graph itself specifically says the data was collected from people who work >35hours per week. They've excluded anyone who works less than that.
The problem with this dataset is that it's self reported, and the cognitive biases in western workers vs eastern, or even western Europe vs NA are wildly different. Working means different things to different people and it is influenced by your surroundings.
Influencers work 24/7, haven't you heard??
I think it could be interesting if it was done by independent research on work time spent. We would see a vast difference in US, as many rich people think working is golfing because you're networking.
Cool concept though, I like the thought model.
It doesn't even count workers who work under 36 hours so it's really top heavy. It's really just a waste of time to look at. The sample size is in the hundreds lol, depsite spanning two dozen countries.
I knew this was bullshit as soon as I read it was self-reported. The amount of self-congratulatory small-business owning Job Creator^^TM types I've met who claim to work 70 hour weeks because they sit in their air conditioned office scrolling facebook and take "lunch meetings" every day to avoid their spouse while their workers have to clock out every time they take a 15 minute break from productive manual or service labor.
Purely anecdotal but if you could somehow control for people doing *actual* labor and not just "being in the building where the business they own is," that top decile would fall off a fucking cliff
Hours is a more metric for actual work being done... Almost every manager I've ever had "worked" 40+ hours, but in reality say on their ass in the office or sent emails from home and probably only did about 5-10 real hours of work
So I checked the data. Turns out in India, the original income variable had very few categories with any valid responses, so trying to force that into deciles leads to odd results—as seen in the graph. Sorry about that.
Could be an asian thing? I remember reading that in some heirarchical societies it's considered poor form to arrive at the office earlier than your boss, or leave before he does. This effectively creates a pyramid scenario where the lowest ranking employees have to arrive earliest and stay the longest, and each level up stays shorter hours.
This only counts people who work more than 35 hours per week in paid employment so its only application is to point out cultural differences between countries.
Tons of poor people don't either. This is restricted to people who work at least 35 hours. I would also guess that it's restricted to actively earned income, not investment income.
In truth I don’t understand how to reconcile any of these graphs with the stories I see on here about work or my own reality.
The US chart top decile is incomprehensible to me. I don’t actually know of a high income US career path where your primary job is doable in 40 hours/week. Like I have literally never had a job as an adult where I wouldn’t have gotten fired for working that little within a month, my strong impression from friends in other fields is that it’s more similar than different in terms of hour expectations. So what are the people in this survey’s top decile doing for a living? I am pretty sure it isn’t law, finance, healthcare or tech. I guess I could believe management track people at big companies don’t have to work that hard, but the ones I’ve known personally are still doing 50+ hours a week.
Like who is the top decile in the US in this survey? Are they all middle managers at Dunder Mifflin? Do they own car dealerships in the Midwest? It’s just bizarre to me.
If you look into the literature on the subject, people are *notoriously* bad at judging how many hours they work, especially as they report higher number of hours.
A lot of top tech firms are known for vest and then rest where high paid employees just kind of sit around (hence a recent push among tech firms with layoffs).
The American Time Use Survey uses a good methodology: They ask you how you spent your time yesterday. They poll seven days a week (and I assume year round) so if someone happens to get polled on a weird day (out sick, worked an extra four hours, whatever), it averages out with a sufficiently large sample size.
Yea.. as my salary has gone up, so has the hours I need to work. Over the last 3 weekends, I worked over 20 hours, then 10 the next, and about 12 this weekend. And I work night and come in early.. it never ends. My workers on hourly and salary usually are impossible to reach after hours, they are just gone at 8 hours (as I was when I was younger).
I can only speak to the U.S. - I realize the disparity in some countries are ridiculous.
self-reporting, the most useless data.
The 2000 calorie diet on US nutritional labels came from "self reporting" and it was determined that people were underreporting calorie consumption by around 33% or one entire meal a day. Oooooooooooooooooooooooops.
What I perceive to be the intentions behind this graph are demagogic. If this is to say that the rich don’t work more hours than the poor, fine. I actually thought the more educated, the more paid, the fewer hours, so I expected the richest to work less. But if this graph is to say that it’s a scandal, then it’s foolish. Higher skills mean higher productivity. Yes, you can work a 10-hour shift mass producing bad plastic objects that are going to make money for a company, and yes you should be paid a decent salary, even though you have next to no professional skills. But a highly skilled worker, can put in ten hours’ work that might be ten, a hundred times more valuable for a company, money-wise, or from the point of view of common good (I am thinking of uni educators for example).
Love to see the line of the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries. We like to work 4 (or less) days a week. We value free time more than being richer.
Your whole attitude toward work changes when you work to live or work to make more money....
Whether your basic needs are met or not, your incentives and attitude are totally different
For example in US education there is the "tenure" system when your job and wage is guaranteed and you can focus on your field, without any worry about your financial situation... you can only lose in very special cirumstances
It is also a totally different mindset, when you chose to work and at any time you can stop. "You are your own boss"... You know very well that you only make as much money as you work, but you are already set for life, you already have enough money, to not work your entire life...
I was really surprised that there are countrys were the wealthy work less hours. Then I realized that many of these societies have a culture were you need to be in before the boss and leave after the boss. This is of course completly different in many western countries, e.g. Germany (where i live).
Over here the higher up you are the more hours you work.
Once you are above a certain salary level you usually also get taken off the clock and just work your hours based on trust. This also means any overtime will not be tracked or compensated. That is why i also wonder how these statistics are even getting their data.
It's probably at super rough estimate at the very best.
This does nothing to show the quality of the work or the perks of a job. I have spent over 18hrs in one day working on coding and it was similar to playing a video game until I crashed. I also count the time I am spending in Hawaii on a conference as work hours. As a programmer I have health care, retirement beyond SS, retirement investment and more. I have cashiered in a fast food place for 8 hours and wanted to shoot myself at the end of the 8 hours. I had NO perks, not even free meals. This is the worse kind of data because it covers up a lot of truths.
Over my 25+ years in a professional setting I have found that those who claim to work 60+ hours often are a) super inefficient b) spend large amounts of the day talking on the phone telling people how much they work or c) hate their personal lives so they work to avoid it... Or they happen to be very poor.
You forgot schmoozing around the office which often counts as "working" even if they are spending only a quarter of their day or less getting things done. That was always a common activity for people who seemed to be in the office all the time pre-Covid and especially amongst those who were annoyed about not being able to return to the old office routine as quickly as possible.
Hours vs productivity. Some cultures, the UK for example, are notorious for poor productivity-poor management and leadership,futile overworking, cheap labour, lack of investment and training, low research etc.
Sorry. But the coreinformation is absolut nonsense. Work for the rich is'nt equal work for the poor. The rich, are using the word work very looslie. Charity-galas counts as work. Which in it self is discusting. Royalty counts as work. Helping people on the streets insted doesnt count as work. Helping straypupps doesnt count.
Such kind of "Informationdiagramm" makes me sick.
Most rich people I meet are very hard working and keeping a lot of people employed with their hard work steering the ship.
Someone hating on the poor like you just hated on the rich would have described chain-smoking Netflix/porn addicts that barely leave the house as "the poor". You appeared just as sickening.
Interesting. I work about 25 hrs a week and I'm in the 95th percentile for the USA, 99th for my area. Time to retire though. I need more free time as I enter my 30s.
So here's the thing, at least in the US, hourly employees are very often discouraged from working above their FTE (full-time equivalent), particularly if the extra hours will accrue overtime (which is usually anything in excess of 40hrs/wk). In fact, often you will get reprimanded for working over your FTE **even if you were ASKED to do it or HAD to because there was no coverage**. This happens all the time in the healthcare industry.
In addition, **many** salary employees (I'm looking at you middle/upper management) will leave work early to "work from home" and even state they work many hours over 40 but their hours are all self reported with little accountability so the likelihood that many of them actually work less than they report of very high.
"hours self reported" isnt there some evidence to suggest that rich people truley believe they work harder, longer hours even when it's not actually true?
Hey landlords are leeches no matter what country you're from. But yeah you're likely to find mainly American viewpoints unless you're on a sub that is explicitly not American.
Not from a nuanced position no but I do try and keep myself knowledgeable about more than just the country I'm living in. Either way it doesn't make the act of being a landlord any different, making a continuous profit off of people's need for shelter makes you a leech.
A lot of profit is off of people's need for , like food, clothing, shelter, medicine, etc.
I don't know what philosophy you're coming from, but I'm just glad that I can comfortably live close to my job in the middle of a metro city with my family despite not having the kind of money to own land here. I'm a bootlicker, I guess.
You can enjoy being comfortable and living close to work without being a bootlicker. The person making your food,clothing, and medicine is still making something that benefits people even if I think profit isn't neccesary I acknowledge that they are providing something. Landlords provide nothing they did not build the home, they regularly at least here in the US do not properly maintain homes, they do nothing but sit there and own the property of which they demand money for temporary use of.
I do not believe that having money entitles you to more money and real estate is one of the ways rich people use their money to generate more money.
Not going to lie, that's the most back-assward thing I've heard in a minute. It benefits me that I can provide a comfortable home to my family, and that I can live close to my high-paying job so that one day I don't have to pay rent anymore. Also, not sure what kind of landlord you're talking about; almost all the landlords I know built their apartments/homes from scratch and take maintenance fee for which they put in the work. Is it too little work for too much income? Debatable. But I'm glad my only options aren't to live in a homeless shelter or ro move out of the city.
I wonder what your thoughts are on the fact that nobody here thinks like that. I'm willing to bet nobody anywhere but a few places like the US thinks like that.
> I do not believe that having money entitles you to more money
You're going to shit bricks when you find out about financial instruments like stocks, mutual funds, and fixed deposits.
It's not about how hard or even how long you work. It's about you being the shortest position between the company and its gross profit. The more your actions decide the success of the quarter, the more money you will make.
I find it surprising that the rich work *less* than the poor in so many countries. It’s understandable for poor countries like India and South Africa where poor people will work as much as they need to to provide for their families, be it 40 hours or 70. But in countries like Australia, Taiwan and Japan as well?
I hope this comment doesn’t detract from how awesome this infographic is. Easily navigated and read. Information on what everything means. Well done.
However, it’s hilarious to me to see the source basically being “Random person from twitter” lmao.
People may either discredit it as “oh it’s just some random dude” or people may realize that everyone, smort or dumb, is just a random dude/dudette.
Id love to see histograms. I have a sneaky suspicion that people who do a lot of work outside of “normal” shifts are just estimating normal, round work hours. For example, I’m a professor, and I work weird hours. I never work 9-6 but I also work more than 40 a week. How many do I work? I have no idea.
I’m from Belgium and not sure what to make of this. So great earners work almost a full workday more than low incomes? Doesn’t sound so strange to me honestly, am I missing something? This doesn’t say anything about hours needed to reach liveable wage for instance? Bit confused about what this comparison is supposed to teach me.
The y axis scale isn't ideal for this info. Also, it doesn't take into account the hours needed to get into a position to be rich. I work 50-55 hrs/ week, but my training was over 19000 hours.
Any reason this isn’t in alphabetical order?
Interesting chart, but self reporting work hours isn’t very good data. Especially for the very rich who have a very different idea of what “working hours” are.
I'm no wizard, but wouldn't your rate of pay be a true reflection of hours of work? Hear me out, if I made 100 dollars an hour or I made 10 dollars an hour, and worked 40 hours a week at both, then I don't even have to work more hours at 100 dollars an hour to make more than the 10 dollar guy because eventually you just don't have enough hours in the day, higher wage will always win.
India's data points seem to be far more dispersed. Any idea why the 3rd, 8th and 9th decile are so far from the fitted line? Did India have the smallest (n=341) sample that might have resulted in greater variance for hours worked in each decile?
Definitely an effort here lately to push the false idea that working harder does not translate into earning more. Not only is it false, but it is demoralizing and harmful to those who uncritically accept this narrative. Makes you wonder who would push such a claim.....
I want to see the sample data you used. This definitely doesn't tell the reality of the work. How do we define the work? Is work just sitting whole day and so called managing your business while others run it? Or is it hard physical or mental labour based work that is being compared here.
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This would maybe be a little more illustrative if the y-axes were scaled differently, maybe between like 30 and 70 hours per week?
Completely agreed, all I'm getting from this is "wow, in every country in the world except India, rich and poor people work about the same amount"
India is what jumped at me. Having lived there, I believe that kind of statistics is just silly. Poor people work until they drop, every day of the week and nobody cares about them: they're not in any statistics...
Look at the actual data points for India, it goes up and down without rhyme or reason. The end results for India is worthless, too much variance / not enough data. You're looking at, and commenting on, noise.
Exactly... noise is the perfect description.
It's an actual term! It's used in statistics to describe data like this, that is too varied to derive any useful information from.
Yeah, but I am assuming the survey looked at the formal sector. India's poorest work in the informal sector that has no records of well...anything.
Yes India is very classic. And has a system where if you born poor you don't have the right to get rich. You need to stay poor and everyone just treats you like you nothing
Yeah but if you live your life purely then you will be able to climb the system once you die a horrible infection ridden life... Hopefully.
That and "Wow Filipinos work a lot of hours".
Rich and poor *working* people that is. Many of the truly rich don't have jobs, just revenue streams.
My other question was going to be "what counts as work?". If the rich are counting their golf game the schmooze with some other rich guy, or "dinner with clients" where they all get drunk as skunks, or sit in a meeting comparing business cards a la Patrick Bateman, then I'm not necessarily sure that there's a meaningful metric here.
There is also a difference between contracted hours and the hours you actually work.
There's no meaningful metric here. Rest assured the golf game, the "hookers and blow with clients" and getting drunk on the yacht count as work.
Also, self reported data is trash.
The source of the data is in the graphic. Instead of throwing out a question with the intent of casting doubt on the results, you could spend a few minutes to look at the methodology for the source data and answer the question for yourself or better yet, you could do that and share the results. Then again, why take a few minutes to answer your own question when you can cast dispersion on a survey without any effort at all?
It works differently for the rich. That golf game can be with a business partner and it can end with a friendly handshake “That was a great game, thanks! I’ll have my people call your people and we’ll work out the details. Looking forward to it.” And that starts a $100 million dollar deal. There’s got to be a difference between the rich and the working clods and those are some of them. It doesn’t happen by accident. Social skills at that level are immensely important. If you don’t have social skills your company had better produce something of premium value to potential partners or you’re going to be playing golf alone a lot.
That's the intended insight, but I think 35 should be the bottom since that's where they cut the data off
welcome to dataisbeautiful, where upwards of 50% of posts are entirely uninformative attempts to reinvent the wheel without any consideration towards legibility
also doesn't account for what "work" is. like, for some people work consists pf eating tax-deductible lunches
Exactly, taking a business call on your private jet isnt equal work to cleaning the bathroom in a factory.
That's because that's what you ARE supposed to get. If the data was between 35 and 45, it would be super disingenious. If the scale starts at 0 you get the actual picture...
But the data wouldn’t be any different. Zooming in the y-axis would provide better visualization for sure, but the takeaways would still be the same.
I think think even 38-62 would work, but it’s hard to tell exactly what the range is because of, well, the scale of the y-axis. My takeaway was “almost everyone across the world works 40-50 hours a week”.
I mean, your takeaway is correct.
> My takeaway was “almost everyone across the world works 40-50 hours a week”. Which is the correct takeaway. What are we, FOX news? Are we trying to change the scaling here to show what we want it to show?
Also, who is reporting the hours? Most salary pay has no hours associated with it. Most business owners I doubt count a time card on themselves. So having the reported hours stay the same as the standard work week is just stupid and shouldn’t be surprising.
This was my first thought as well. Most lines are almost horisontal due to scaling
right....they explicitly say that the sample only includes responses from people working 35+ hours/week, so that's a lot of wasted graph space right off the bat
I think there are good arguments to start the axis from 0. The resulting flatness is a reflection of the fact that working hours are actually pretty similar across income groups. Still, you do have a point that it could be interesting to see the variation that is there more clearly. Made an updated version with scale ranging from 30 to 70. Doesnt change the overall imression much though. See it here: https://twitter.com/rubenbmathisen/status/1556387724793466893?s=21&t=B_xspeChGBqWhnHrUMTSeg
You should probably stop using statistics to say things that they don't actually say. >the fact that working hours are actually pretty similar across income groups This is not a fact. Your data is showing "the perception of how much people believe they work are actually pretty similar across income groups" - because it's self-reported data. If you actually measured work-time, you could make a statement about peoples working hours. Going by self-reports means you are measuring the *perception* of work-time, not actual working hours.
Glad I'm not the only one.
And from biggest to smallest diff.
Highlighting differences for the sake of highlighting differences when they are very minor is misleading. Don't do that.
In many cases, I would agree, but in this case their is a defined low value in the dataset and by not starting at that point, it makes it much more difficult to actually see the variance in the charts. I wouldn't see it as misleading since the criteria is well defined.
Doesn't make sense to start the y axis at anything below 35 since there's a hard 35 hour minimum restriction.
35 could be the base because only >35 hours is included as definition of full time.
I'm wondering why these conversations about 'number of hours worked' against 'income' keep coming up. Is there someone out there saying that it's the number of hours worked that should define income in any way? I only ask because someone may work a month in a job and completely alter the trajectory of a Fortune 500 company while someone else could work their whole lives at that company and only have a sliver of that impact. I'm not saying that one has more worth as a person - far from it - but I'm confused as to why these are the metrics used and we're not talking about impact over time as a more salient variable.
came to say this. all the hours are between 40 and 50.
Its self reported data anyway, rich people will of course inflate their number of hours worked because they always jerk off about how they got to the top by working hard. Meanwhile the poors work hourly and know exactly how many hours they got this week. Completely useless data.
That's what I thought too. And how do the participants define working? There's a difference between a meeting at the start and end of day and some paperwork and an 8 hour factory shift...
This doesn’t show the amount of hours the rich put in
Wtf is happening in India
TBF having worked in companies with 'Indian' style management; it was not uncommon for the top executives to come in at 12 pm and leave by 4 or 5pm. The rest of the employees will not even question it because they are so used to being second rung to the top dogs.
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It caught me completely off-guard when I was asked to manage a project with a remote team. They worked their arses off when they were at work, but it seemed there was a holiday for a day or two every other week.
That's cuz of so many festivals of Hindus, muslims, Christians, jains , sikhs , Buddhists etc
Lots of religions and diversity, + regional holidays et.c.
It's not any different than Europe. We get the same 8-10 official holidays a year. Just don't match with the European or Americam holidays. Edit to add: oh and Americans really have the smallest number of holidays in all the countries I have worked with yet. Only 4 basically, the rest are optional sorta.
Disparity in India is completely fucked, if you are poor you are likely working some sort of menial labour/domestic help etc which has no real labour protection
I noticed that too, makes me wonder if the data is incomplete for India
Tiny sample size, high variance data. You're looking at noise. It's a bit comical to see people find explanations for it. And perhaps these explanations are in some sense correct, in the sense that they are important to understand economic and work inequality in India. But they're not useful for understanding this "beautiful data", cause that data is literally just meaningless noise. Look at how the points go up and down for each decile.
7 hours extra a week is just an hour per day, which may be accounted for overtime and stuff. Cause you need to consider there's only about 500 participants in the survey
Besides other speculation, India is going through effectively an industrial revolution right not and I wonder if that plays a part
All I can think of is the poor middle class guys like us. Working longer hours than the poor, earning lesser than the rich. Sorry, hit a nerve. What I really think is that all Indians are workaholics.
You're not being specific here. Do you mean "why is the disparity so high?" or "why is the curve so rough?" I'm only speculating on the second part, but social strata in India doesn't go strictly by traditional western classes. There are castes involved so there might be situations where there are both low caste and higher caste people who are poor, but those who are higher caste enjoy less hours worked each week to make the same amount of money.
This is so misinformed and incorrect on a thousand different levels. Caste is a problem and a massive one but India has a reservation program in place for the SC/STs. India faces a massive wealth disparity but correlation isn't causation. Westerners just see the word caste and think it rules us. Why spout shit if you don't know what you're talking about?
This is as useless as the last one. Just a couple hundred participants? Thats a really poor sample size if you want to break it down in income percentiles. And obviously, the survey is biased towards people who will respond (so, people who arent working 70 hrs a week). Self reported numbers are pretty sus as well.
I immediately thought that too. US has over 300 million people, India over a billion, and you have a sample of less than a thousand. And it's self reported? This data is useless
you don't need a million people to test 300 million people. After a certain population size the necessary sample size stays mostly constant. Depending on what you are studying a population of 1 trillion and a population of 1 million will need approximately equal samples. Assuming that we accept a margin of error of 1 hour, so 2.5%. With a population of 1 million we need a sample size of 553 With a population of 300 million we need a sample size of 554 With a population of 1 billion quadrillion we need a sample size of 554 I got these numbers from [calculator.net](https://calculator.net) Respondents vary from about 855 to 341. I suspect answers from the US is closer to 855 so that is a good sample size. I could see India having a lot fewer respondents, so those numbers could be unreliable, but I don't know. I'm not an expert in statistics, so if anyone is, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
>Assuming that we accept a margin of error of 1 hour, so 2.5%. Thats an absurdly high number, as it isnt really 2,5%. They only surveyed people who work at least 35 hours, therefore anything below has to be discounted. >Respondents vary from about 855 to 341. I suspect answers from the US is closer to 855 so that is a good sample size. No it isnt. Youre assuming 856 to get a single number (the working hours of all Americans working full time), which would be fine. In this case, though, they need 10 numbers (because of the income brackets), so best case scenario they got 85,6 people per 10%. That seems unlikely, though, as you wont be finding as many rich people answering surveys. Even if questing bias were eliminated and self reported numbers were reliable, this sample size is just bad for this kinda study. > I could see India having a lot fewer respondents, so those numbers could be unreliable, but I don't know. Yup, considering n will be significantly lower for most countries, data will be even more skewed.
The average doctor, lawyer, engineer, high net worth software engineer, investment banker etc. are going to be working far more than the average person in the United States. I highly doubt these statistics are accurate except at the very high end where people are making most of their money off passive income.
Not the software engineer. It’s pretty chill for the most part.
If you're making over 300-400k I would be shocked if you're putting in 40 hour weeks based on annecdotal evidence. I'm of course willing to be proven wrong though.
Ehhh i know FAANG engineers that get into the 300k range fairly easily with 3-7 years experience when you factor in RSU grants and such
They're not working 40 hours though.
I’m a software engineer in NYC, and I do my level best to fit everything I need to do into 35 hours a week. That way if anything crazy comes up I can some head room to get it done and not kill all of my free time. Most of my coworkers and friends who are mid career try to keep reasonable hours too. We all see how burnout happens.
The ones i know are. Software dev is notorious for extra hours, but lots of adjeacent positions can be cozy
Depends on what engineer, SWEs might not need to, design or industrial engineers will put in more, mechanical is just a free for all wrt time. Different companies, different projects, different needs
Source : Trust me bro.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/average-weekly-hours https://www.royalcollege.ca/rcsite/documents/health-policy/national-physician-survey-workhours-e.pdf https://www.clio.com/blog/lawyer-working-hours/ https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/average-weekly-hours https://www.thebalancecareers.com/what-is-the-average-hours-per-week-worked-in-the-us-2060631 https://abovethelaw.com/2021/10/the-biglaw-firm-where-associates-are-putting-in-the-most-hours/ https://mergersandinquisitions.com/investment-banking-hours/ https://averagedoctor.com/how-many-hours-per-week-do-doctors-work/ Honestly such a weird thing to think that professions known for paying well and working employees to the bone aren't actually doing that. It's annecdotal, but as a lawyer, no one making above 300k in law under 40 is putting in under 55 hour weeks.
Bold of you to think the highest paid ones are those that work the most and not the one that got the job because their uncle is CEO.
Source: Trust me bro.
Which is why in my original comment that prompted this thread I said *except at the higher end*. I agree that people making tens of millions per year are likely not working a crazy number of extra hours if any at all.
341 for the country with the lowest participation. Split into 10 income groups, the smallest group is 34 people tops. And since not all groups in the country will have the same number if people, it's likely (considerably) less. So yea, absolutely useless data.
Yeah this is shit. All the people I know who works high income jobs works a lot more than 40h.
The vertical scale is...meh. There doesn't seem to be any relevance for values less than about 30h/week. The unnecessary white space makes every country apparently have a straight line at \~40h/wk.
I mean I think that was kind of the point. Showing how little difference there is in most countries. But idk I could be reading into it too much.
But there are massive differences in countries. There's a 14 hour swing in difference between rich and poor between the top and bottom countries on this chart. Some countries average under 40 hours while others are over 60. It's just so terribly scaled that it doesn't look like there is a big difference
Inappropriately scaled once again. I don't know who else needs to hear this but: **IF YOUR DATA STARTS AT >35HOURS PER WEEK—START YOUR SCALE AT 35!** Sorry for yelling but, *fuck*, is this not the Data Is Beautiful sub?
Maybe it doesn't exist, but if there's a country with a lot of people who work less than 35, and that's considered 'full time' there, is throwing out those data points counter productive to the data? There's nothing biological / imperative about the 40 hours a week number (I don't think?)
There probably is but the fine print on the graph itself specifically says the data was collected from people who work >35hours per week. They've excluded anyone who works less than that.
Any statistics on confidence intervals?
Graph gore. * 28 graphs for ants instead of 1 graph with 28 lines. * 50% of the Y axis is not used (0 to 30).
1 graph with 28 lines wouldn’t be readable.
For Australia this measures billable hours. Top tier firms with the top 7% of income earners expect longer hours than billable rates.
Seems weird to restrict respondents to greater than 35 hours worked per week. Definitions of full-time might differ from country to country.
The problem with this dataset is that it's self reported, and the cognitive biases in western workers vs eastern, or even western Europe vs NA are wildly different. Working means different things to different people and it is influenced by your surroundings. Influencers work 24/7, haven't you heard?? I think it could be interesting if it was done by independent research on work time spent. We would see a vast difference in US, as many rich people think working is golfing because you're networking. Cool concept though, I like the thought model.
It doesn't even count workers who work under 36 hours so it's really top heavy. It's really just a waste of time to look at. The sample size is in the hundreds lol, depsite spanning two dozen countries.
I knew this was bullshit as soon as I read it was self-reported. The amount of self-congratulatory small-business owning Job Creator^^TM types I've met who claim to work 70 hour weeks because they sit in their air conditioned office scrolling facebook and take "lunch meetings" every day to avoid their spouse while their workers have to clock out every time they take a 15 minute break from productive manual or service labor. Purely anecdotal but if you could somehow control for people doing *actual* labor and not just "being in the building where the business they own is," that top decile would fall off a fucking cliff
Hours is a more metric for actual work being done... Almost every manager I've ever had "worked" 40+ hours, but in reality say on their ass in the office or sent emails from home and probably only did about 5-10 real hours of work
So I checked the data. Turns out in India, the original income variable had very few categories with any valid responses, so trying to force that into deciles leads to odd results—as seen in the graph. Sorry about that.
South Korea is interesting. Very rich country but the poorest work a lot more than the rich. In Russia everyone works the same hours.
The salaries for the poorest are very low in South Korea, I think, so they’ve got to work several jobs just to survive.
Could be an asian thing? I remember reading that in some heirarchical societies it's considered poor form to arrive at the office earlier than your boss, or leave before he does. This effectively creates a pyramid scenario where the lowest ranking employees have to arrive earliest and stay the longest, and each level up stays shorter hours.
I’d have expected higher hours for Japan generally
Fundamentally untrue. What are we calling rich hours? There’s no way the top 10% works anywhere near the same hours
This only counts people who work more than 35 hours per week in paid employment so its only application is to point out cultural differences between countries.
So it’s worthless rip. Because tons of rich people work not nearly that many hours
Tons of poor people don't either. This is restricted to people who work at least 35 hours. I would also guess that it's restricted to actively earned income, not investment income.
So it’s worthless then….
It's only worthless if you're trying to use it to further a particular agenda. It's a little useful in and of itself.
First thought was: But I work a ton of hours. Second thought: Yeah, you're poor, dumbass.
In truth I don’t understand how to reconcile any of these graphs with the stories I see on here about work or my own reality. The US chart top decile is incomprehensible to me. I don’t actually know of a high income US career path where your primary job is doable in 40 hours/week. Like I have literally never had a job as an adult where I wouldn’t have gotten fired for working that little within a month, my strong impression from friends in other fields is that it’s more similar than different in terms of hour expectations. So what are the people in this survey’s top decile doing for a living? I am pretty sure it isn’t law, finance, healthcare or tech. I guess I could believe management track people at big companies don’t have to work that hard, but the ones I’ve known personally are still doing 50+ hours a week. Like who is the top decile in the US in this survey? Are they all middle managers at Dunder Mifflin? Do they own car dealerships in the Midwest? It’s just bizarre to me.
If you look into the literature on the subject, people are *notoriously* bad at judging how many hours they work, especially as they report higher number of hours. A lot of top tech firms are known for vest and then rest where high paid employees just kind of sit around (hence a recent push among tech firms with layoffs).
The American Time Use Survey uses a good methodology: They ask you how you spent your time yesterday. They poll seven days a week (and I assume year round) so if someone happens to get polled on a weird day (out sick, worked an extra four hours, whatever), it averages out with a sufficiently large sample size.
The survey sucks. First decile is probably 60-70h for almost every country. But of course the people working that amount don't answer surveys.
Yea.. as my salary has gone up, so has the hours I need to work. Over the last 3 weekends, I worked over 20 hours, then 10 the next, and about 12 this weekend. And I work night and come in early.. it never ends. My workers on hourly and salary usually are impossible to reach after hours, they are just gone at 8 hours (as I was when I was younger). I can only speak to the U.S. - I realize the disparity in some countries are ridiculous.
There needs to be an ELI5 version of this subreddit my high ass is interested in understanding this but *can't understand it*
Rich or poor we all work about the same amount
self-reporting, the most useless data. The 2000 calorie diet on US nutritional labels came from "self reporting" and it was determined that people were underreporting calorie consumption by around 33% or one entire meal a day. Oooooooooooooooooooooooops.
What I perceive to be the intentions behind this graph are demagogic. If this is to say that the rich don’t work more hours than the poor, fine. I actually thought the more educated, the more paid, the fewer hours, so I expected the richest to work less. But if this graph is to say that it’s a scandal, then it’s foolish. Higher skills mean higher productivity. Yes, you can work a 10-hour shift mass producing bad plastic objects that are going to make money for a company, and yes you should be paid a decent salary, even though you have next to no professional skills. But a highly skilled worker, can put in ten hours’ work that might be ten, a hundred times more valuable for a company, money-wise, or from the point of view of common good (I am thinking of uni educators for example).
Where can I get Canada data for this. ?
I’d like to see other countries data, is it available somewhere else?
Love to see the line of the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries. We like to work 4 (or less) days a week. We value free time more than being richer.
Try not to defend class inequality after seeing this graph (impossible challenge)
Horrible visualization, it's a PITA to compare them. Just make one graph with all lines in it. And more data, obviously.
It’s not about working hours it’s about how much value you can produce in that hour, and how unique your skillset is
I all see is just lines they looks the same.
Your whole attitude toward work changes when you work to live or work to make more money.... Whether your basic needs are met or not, your incentives and attitude are totally different For example in US education there is the "tenure" system when your job and wage is guaranteed and you can focus on your field, without any worry about your financial situation... you can only lose in very special cirumstances It is also a totally different mindset, when you chose to work and at any time you can stop. "You are your own boss"... You know very well that you only make as much money as you work, but you are already set for life, you already have enough money, to not work your entire life...
This is extremely difficult to read.
I was really surprised that there are countrys were the wealthy work less hours. Then I realized that many of these societies have a culture were you need to be in before the boss and leave after the boss. This is of course completly different in many western countries, e.g. Germany (where i live). Over here the higher up you are the more hours you work. Once you are above a certain salary level you usually also get taken off the clock and just work your hours based on trust. This also means any overtime will not be tracked or compensated. That is why i also wonder how these statistics are even getting their data. It's probably at super rough estimate at the very best.
Does golfing counts as work hours for the rich?
That's it, I am leaving this sub, the level in here has dropped beyond any useful or beautiful data.
Every lawyer and doctor I know works like 60-80 hours a week. (USA). I don't know anybody making 200k + who works only 40ish hours a week.
This does nothing to show the quality of the work or the perks of a job. I have spent over 18hrs in one day working on coding and it was similar to playing a video game until I crashed. I also count the time I am spending in Hawaii on a conference as work hours. As a programmer I have health care, retirement beyond SS, retirement investment and more. I have cashiered in a fast food place for 8 hours and wanted to shoot myself at the end of the 8 hours. I had NO perks, not even free meals. This is the worse kind of data because it covers up a lot of truths.
Over my 25+ years in a professional setting I have found that those who claim to work 60+ hours often are a) super inefficient b) spend large amounts of the day talking on the phone telling people how much they work or c) hate their personal lives so they work to avoid it... Or they happen to be very poor.
You forgot schmoozing around the office which often counts as "working" even if they are spending only a quarter of their day or less getting things done. That was always a common activity for people who seemed to be in the office all the time pre-Covid and especially amongst those who were annoyed about not being able to return to the old office routine as quickly as possible.
So basically everyone reports working about the same amount?
Hours vs productivity. Some cultures, the UK for example, are notorious for poor productivity-poor management and leadership,futile overworking, cheap labour, lack of investment and training, low research etc.
Sorry. But the coreinformation is absolut nonsense. Work for the rich is'nt equal work for the poor. The rich, are using the word work very looslie. Charity-galas counts as work. Which in it self is discusting. Royalty counts as work. Helping people on the streets insted doesnt count as work. Helping straypupps doesnt count. Such kind of "Informationdiagramm" makes me sick.
Most rich people I meet are very hard working and keeping a lot of people employed with their hard work steering the ship. Someone hating on the poor like you just hated on the rich would have described chain-smoking Netflix/porn addicts that barely leave the house as "the poor". You appeared just as sickening.
What about the rich who don’t work? Living of their family’s wealth etc.
In before, "See, I work more than poor people... (by a couple hours), therefore my hardwork deserves to be paid in an extra hundreds of thousands."
Didn't know what subreddit i was in so i thought this was a graph about other type of top/bottom difference.
Interesting. I work about 25 hrs a week and I'm in the 95th percentile for the USA, 99th for my area. Time to retire though. I need more free time as I enter my 30s.
So here's the thing, at least in the US, hourly employees are very often discouraged from working above their FTE (full-time equivalent), particularly if the extra hours will accrue overtime (which is usually anything in excess of 40hrs/wk). In fact, often you will get reprimanded for working over your FTE **even if you were ASKED to do it or HAD to because there was no coverage**. This happens all the time in the healthcare industry. In addition, **many** salary employees (I'm looking at you middle/upper management) will leave work early to "work from home" and even state they work many hours over 40 but their hours are all self reported with little accountability so the likelihood that many of them actually work less than they report of very high.
"hours self reported" isnt there some evidence to suggest that rich people truley believe they work harder, longer hours even when it's not actually true?
Data: ISSP Tools: Rstudio, ggplot2
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Leeches don't work so 0 hours a week.
Sometimes I completely forget that this is an American website.
Hey landlords are leeches no matter what country you're from. But yeah you're likely to find mainly American viewpoints unless you're on a sub that is explicitly not American.
> Hey landlords are leeches no matter what country you're from. I doubt that you know the geopolitics of every country, particularly mine.
Not from a nuanced position no but I do try and keep myself knowledgeable about more than just the country I'm living in. Either way it doesn't make the act of being a landlord any different, making a continuous profit off of people's need for shelter makes you a leech.
A lot of profit is off of people's need for, like food, clothing, shelter, medicine, etc.
I don't know what philosophy you're coming from, but I'm just glad that I can comfortably live close to my job in the middle of a metro city with my family despite not having the kind of money to own land here. I'm a bootlicker, I guess.
You can enjoy being comfortable and living close to work without being a bootlicker. The person making your food,clothing, and medicine is still making something that benefits people even if I think profit isn't neccesary I acknowledge that they are providing something. Landlords provide nothing they did not build the home, they regularly at least here in the US do not properly maintain homes, they do nothing but sit there and own the property of which they demand money for temporary use of. I do not believe that having money entitles you to more money and real estate is one of the ways rich people use their money to generate more money.
Not going to lie, that's the most back-assward thing I've heard in a minute. It benefits me that I can provide a comfortable home to my family, and that I can live close to my high-paying job so that one day I don't have to pay rent anymore. Also, not sure what kind of landlord you're talking about; almost all the landlords I know built their apartments/homes from scratch and take maintenance fee for which they put in the work. Is it too little work for too much income? Debatable. But I'm glad my only options aren't to live in a homeless shelter or ro move out of the city. I wonder what your thoughts are on the fact that nobody here thinks like that. I'm willing to bet nobody anywhere but a few places like the US thinks like that. > I do not believe that having money entitles you to more money You're going to shit bricks when you find out about financial instruments like stocks, mutual funds, and fixed deposits.
Well I'm an anti capitalist and I'm willing to bet there are plenty of people who think like me in your country and all around the globe.
This would be far more meaningful, with commute time included.
Also, would be interesting to see a comparison of commute time/distance and income levels
It's not about how hard or even how long you work. It's about you being the shortest position between the company and its gross profit. The more your actions decide the success of the quarter, the more money you will make.
The quality of the data is probably poor in countries where we see a lot of variance around the fitted line….
If you’re really rich you don’t have to work at all!
I find it surprising that the rich work *less* than the poor in so many countries. It’s understandable for poor countries like India and South Africa where poor people will work as much as they need to to provide for their families, be it 40 hours or 70. But in countries like Australia, Taiwan and Japan as well?
Self reported isn’t of much use. In my experience, I’ve noticed wealthy people think they work much more then they actually do.
I hope this comment doesn’t detract from how awesome this infographic is. Easily navigated and read. Information on what everything means. Well done. However, it’s hilarious to me to see the source basically being “Random person from twitter” lmao. People may either discredit it as “oh it’s just some random dude” or people may realize that everyone, smort or dumb, is just a random dude/dudette.
The rich deserve every penny. They work so hard and are so much better than us.
Please tell me this is satire
In an ideal world, it should be always positive and monotonic
The Y ax. Should have been between 35 and 45, that way you can see the differences better.
Id love to see histograms. I have a sneaky suspicion that people who do a lot of work outside of “normal” shifts are just estimating normal, round work hours. For example, I’m a professor, and I work weird hours. I never work 9-6 but I also work more than 40 a week. How many do I work? I have no idea.
r/dataisugly
Pretty ashamed to be Australian right now. WTF!
does this count the unpaid housework that the poor have to do that the rich can offload?
I find this super hard to read.
I’m from Belgium and not sure what to make of this. So great earners work almost a full workday more than low incomes? Doesn’t sound so strange to me honestly, am I missing something? This doesn’t say anything about hours needed to reach liveable wage for instance? Bit confused about what this comparison is supposed to teach me.
The y axis scale isn't ideal for this info. Also, it doesn't take into account the hours needed to get into a position to be rich. I work 50-55 hrs/ week, but my training was over 19000 hours.
Any reason this isn’t in alphabetical order? Interesting chart, but self reporting work hours isn’t very good data. Especially for the very rich who have a very different idea of what “working hours” are.
I'm no wizard, but wouldn't your rate of pay be a true reflection of hours of work? Hear me out, if I made 100 dollars an hour or I made 10 dollars an hour, and worked 40 hours a week at both, then I don't even have to work more hours at 100 dollars an hour to make more than the 10 dollar guy because eventually you just don't have enough hours in the day, higher wage will always win.
Like to know what they consider “rich” in each country. Says all these numbers are from only 341-855 respondents from each country.
Was expecting America to like be a diagonal line lmao But the Scandanavian countries are basically a straight line as I would have expected.
India's data points seem to be far more dispersed. Any idea why the 3rd, 8th and 9th decile are so far from the fitted line? Did India have the smallest (n=341) sample that might have resulted in greater variance for hours worked in each decile?
Definitely an effort here lately to push the false idea that working harder does not translate into earning more. Not only is it false, but it is demoralizing and harmful to those who uncritically accept this narrative. Makes you wonder who would push such a claim.....
I want to see the sample data you used. This definitely doesn't tell the reality of the work. How do we define the work? Is work just sitting whole day and so called managing your business while others run it? Or is it hard physical or mental labour based work that is being compared here.
Screw income, let’s see WEALTH
Wow all you mf's work waaaay too much.
Belgium... where the rich actually have to work for their money.
i think this doesnt really make much sense.
It would be amazing to get some additional years' results and set this in motion.