In the interest of time, I’ll keep this column short.
Maybe then more of you will find the time to read it. You, after all, have other things going on in your lives: More than 85 percent of you, if you’re male, and 66 percent, if you’re female, work more than 40 hours each week. On average, you work 137 more hours a year than your counterparts in Japan and 260 hours more than your friends in Britain. Don’t even get me started about Germany: If the average Berliner wanted to catch up, he’d have to put in a staggering 499 hours, which is slightly more than 20 days. Then there’s the absence of paid parental leave—a virtue we share with virtually no other industrialized nation on earth—and the pitifully small number of vacation days we take each year (13, as opposed to a cool 30 in Finland) and all the other predatory policies that make these here United States among the least amenable in the world to true family values.