Derek does a really nice job of unpacking the numbers behind the international work-life comparisons. Compared to other countries, America has large numbers of over-whelmed and over worked single mothers.
The other finding is that leisure time is actually increasing, but only in certain groups. “Poor working men have more leisure time than ever, but the highest educated men have less downtime than they’ve had in 50 years.”
Apt. 11d 
Why are Asian countries never considered in these sorts of analyses? It’s very ethnocentric and untrue to the nature of the U.S. to compare us only to Europe.
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The article doesn’t mention all the countries included in the study, but the study does include all OECD members, including Japan and Korea, both of which ranked even worse than the US.
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If what Sandra says is true, that supports my point, that Derek has done a very selective analysis, either because of ethnocentrism or intellectually dishonest cherry-picking.
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I don’t know who this Derek is, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t in charge of picking countries for membership in the OECD.
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Oh wait. Derek is a reporter who wrote a story based on a report that the OECD made using data from OECD members because that’s who the OECD reports upon. This is all very clearly labeled and linked and takes literally thirty seconds to find. How that counts as either ethnocentrism or dishonesty, I can’t figure.
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Maybe I wasn’t clear. The article Laura linked to includes data from a handful of European countries, and compares the US unfavorably to those countries. As I understand, the article excerpted that data from a scholarly study, which included industrialized countries around the world, not limited to those in Europe. Inclusion of non-European industrial countries would have altered the conclusions in the article. To me, that seems like questionable cherry-picking.
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Most of the article is comparing the U.S. with itself over time. The portions that compare internationally typically use the index (i.e. all available countries). The graphs and examples do highlight European countries, but the OECD membership is overwhelmingly European countries.
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