Vacation? What’s that? Here in America, we’re in the “land of the overworked and tired,” and sadly, as Ezra Klein reports in an OP/ED in the Sunday L.A. Times:

THE MOST astonishing revelations in Michael Moore’s “Sicko” have nothing to do with healthcare. They’re about vacation time. French vacation time, to be precise.

Yes, it’s true, the French and most of the European nations take far more vacation time than the average Americans and we’ve created a society of overworked and tired people. While Michael is on vacation for a month, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at life in America, where month long vactions are not so common. Reading Michael’s news of his month long vacation, I thought to myself, what would that be like? A month of vacation? As a self-employed only parent, with a small business and a blog, I rarely take any time off and when I do, I still end up working on something, business or blog, because I always have something to catch up on. And given that, I find myself frequently being among the overworked and tired sect of Americans.

Honestly, there is something wrong with this picture, because as Ezra points out, we are the “richest nation” in the world. Shouldn’t we be doing better on the leisure time issue instead of laboring so hard to keep up with the Joneses or just simply to make ends meet? Shouldn’t large corporations in America realize by now that overworked employees are not productive employees and start offering more vacation time? And shouldn’t small business owners like myself feel they can afford to close shop a couple of times a year and take a vaction? Absolutely. But none of this is happening… Instead Americans are working more than ever and we are the “only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation“:

A recent report by Rebecca Ray and John Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research suggests that Moore is, if anything, understating his case. “The United States,” they write, “is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation.” Take notice of that word “only.” Every other advanced economy offers a government guarantee of paid vacation to its workforce. Britain assures its workforce of 20 days of guaranteed, compensated leave. Germany gives 24. And France gives, yes, 30.
We guarantee zero. Absolutely none. That’s why one out of 10 full-time American employees, and more than six out of 10 part-time employees, get no vacation. And even among workers with paid vacation benefits, the average number of days enjoyed is a mere 12. In other words, even those of us who are lucky enough to get some vacation typically receive just over a third of what the French are guaranteed.

This is strange. Of all these countries, the United States is, by far, the richest. And you would think that, as our wealth grew and our productivity increased, a certain amount of our resources would go into, well, us. Into leisure. Into time off. You would think that we’d take advantage of the fact that we can create more wealth in less time to wrest back some of those hours for ourselves and our families.

But instead, the exact opposite has happened. The average American man today works 100 more hours a year than he did in the 1970s, according to Cornell University economist Robert Frank. That’s 2 1/2 weeks of added labor. The average woman works 200 more hours — that’s five added weeks. And those hours are coming from somewhere: from time with our kids, our friends, our spouses, even our bed. The typical American, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, sleeps one to two hours less a night than his or her parents did.

This would all be fine if it were what we wanted. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. One famous 1996 study asked associates at major law firms which world they’d prefer: The one they resided in, or one in which they took a 10% pay cut in return for a 10% reduction in hours worked. They overwhelmingly preferred the latter. Elsewhere, economists have given individuals sets of choices pitting leisure against goods. Leisure doesn’t always win out, but it is certainly competitive. Yet we’re pumping ever more hours into work, seeking ever-higher incomes to fund ever-greater consumption. Why?

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This isn’t because people are stupid, or irrational, or don’t know what they want. Rather, it’s because the incentives are all fouled up. Frank calls it a “smart for one, dumb for all” problem, but it’s really just a classic failure of collective action. An individual would be made worse off were he to unilaterally opt out of the positional competition. But we would all be better off if we decided collectively to ratchet down the economic one-upmanship and instead devote a bit more time and resources to the leisure goods we claim to desire.

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So too with vacations. Very few individual workers in the United States can ask for four weeks of vacation. It is not only outside the benefits of their job but far outside the culture of our workplace. The incentives for most every individual, particularly if they want to keep their position and amass a reputation as a good employee, is to abide by those norms.

But if the crowd outside “Sicko” was any indication, most people would love a substantial increase in vacation time. This is what other advanced nations have pursued, using the government’s role as an enforcer of collective sentiment to legislate the preferences that individuals could not, on their own, enact.

In this country, we’ve left it to the individuals, and thus the average American worker only takes 13 days of vacation a year, and many get none. We could do better, but that would require sidestepping American individualism for a moment and engaging in some American collectivism.

So here’s a question readers: When was the last time you had a vacation?

Last summer I took a 5 day trip to Washington D.C. with my daughter — some business, some pleasure — but hardly a vacation. On Wednesday, I’ll be heading out to the beach for 5 days where I will at least escape my business for a few days, but I do plan to blog some from the ocean view deck of my friend’s condo where I will be house-sitting. I guess that might be a vacation of sorts…

Cross posted with edits from The Democratic Daily.