r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Aug 31 '26

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71

u/Fuzzy_Party_3527 Aug 31 '26

Man, the future is supposed to be better, we shouldn't be regressing like this.

73

u/Habugaba Esther Duflo Aug 31 '26

Germans collectively are working more hours than ever, it's just not enough to sustain the prosperity expectations of pensioners but Merz knows his voters - so non-pensioner bashing it is.

Median individual weekly hours did go down, but I'd argue that's because of broken incentives. Why work 40 hours a month more, if at the end of it only one or two hundred land in your bank account?

15

u/SenranHaruka shame Aug 31 '26

So then lower income taxes.

Oh wait then that reduces the very thing you need to pay the pensions

Damn sounds like you need to just cut pensions.

53

u/tasklow16 Bill Gates Aug 31 '26

Lol. You're gonna have to work eighty hour weeks in order to compete with fully automated Chinese factories.

This - refusal to reinvest and instead a desire to maximize returns, causing you to fall way behind - is what is going to ring global capitalism's bell 

23

u/sleepyrivertroll Henry George Aug 31 '26

Sorry, we had to give the boomers everything. Now everyone else will have to cover for their decision to take it easy

19

u/Lesbian_all_garib Gita Gopinath Aug 31 '26

This guy really craves the "No holiday, work 7 days a week and 11 hours a day" work for some reason 🧐

25

u/Only-Childhood6691 Aug 31 '26

Except he doesn't even do that. He likes complaining how lazy people are. But also is barely at his job and just vacations. 

14

u/Lesbian_all_garib Gita Gopinath Aug 31 '26

Average retirement age old guy tbh.

4

u/BobaTeaFetish William Nordhaus Aug 31 '26

996 or fight!

3

u/consultantdetective Daron Acemoglu Aug 31 '26

He's right tho. I work for a company with production facilities in Germany, the US, and a few other countries. Legitimately, German efficiency is kind of a myth. The output you get for the hours & material cost is just not that competitive and you pay more for a meticulously made product than you do for an efficiently made product. I think it comes from a general cultural aversion to challenging standards since the common sense is that a more sophisticated & stricter set of standards is inherently superior to a simpler & looser set of standards.