Bone-Tired? You Need a Job in Europe

Perhaps the most striking of all the differences between American and European working patterns relates to working hours. In 1999, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average American in employment worked just under 2,000 hours a year (1,976). The average German worked just 1,535 -- fully 22% less. According to a recent U.S. study, the average Frenchman works a staggering 32% less.

Twenty-five years ago, this gap between U.S. and European working hours didn't exist. Between 1979 and 1999, the average American working year lengthened by 50 hours, or nearly 4%. But the average German working year shrank 12%. The same was true elsewhere in Europe.

How are we to explain this divergence? The obvious answer is European legislation like the French 35-hour week or the recent British reduction of the hours worked by junior doctors. Another theory points to differences in marginal rates of taxation.

But I see another possible explanation -- one that owes a debt to the German sociologist Max Weber's famous essay on "The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," written a century ago.

Weber believed he had identified a link between the rise of Protestantism (and especially Calvinism) and the development of "the spirit of capitalism." I would like to propose a modern version of Weber's theory, namely "The Atheist Sloth Ethic and the Spirit of Collectivism."

You see, the most remarkable thing about the transatlantic divergence in working patterns is that it has coincided almost exactly with a comparable divergence in religiosity, both in terms of observance and belief.

According to the Gallup Millennium Survey of religious attitudes (conducted in 1999), 48% of people in Western Europe nowadays almost never go to church; the figure for Eastern Europe is just a little lower at 44%. In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Sweden and Denmark, less than one in 10 of the population now attends church at least once a month. Only in Catholic Italy and Ireland does more than a third of the population worship once a month or more often.

By contrast, more than twice as many North Americans as Europeans attend religious services once a week or more.

I do not say this is the sole explanation for the fact that London today is lethargic while New York toils away as usual. But there is surely something more than coincidental about the simultaneous rise of unbelief in Europe and the decline of Weber's work ethic.

If I weren't on holiday, I'd write a book about it.