

How do people in different countries spend their time? - nopinsight
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/04/time_use

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noahlt
Fascinating statistics. I wish the charts had been designed in a way that made
it easier to compare the numbers: for instance, I want to visually compare the
number of hours that each country spends sleeping, but these charts force me
to read the numbers instead of interpreting the graphics.

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pmjoyce
A classic example of a poor choice of visualisation. Pie and donuts aren't
always useless but they're very awkward to interpret here.

I made a quick'n'dirty replacement using a stacked column chart if anyone is
interested:

<https://demo.geckoboard.com/dashboard/CF6225A8BF97972D/>

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billybob
Better, but still hard to read, I think. If I want to compare the green bars
for two countries, they don't sit side by side, because the sections under
them are of varying heights.

I think this would be more ideal:

Country 1 Work :XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (X%)

Country 2 Work :XXXXXXXXXXXXX (X%)

Country 1 Sleep:XXXXXXXXXXXXXX (X%)

Country 2 Sleep:XXXXXXXXXXXX (X%)

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pmjoyce
OK, I've added detail charts - one for each metric - so you can easily compare
metrics for each country side-by-side.

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silentbicycle
Among other complaints (pie charts?), it seems odd that "eating / sleeping"
are combined. Seeing each individually would be far more useful.

The actual report (not the Economist summary) has better graphs and more info,
though - perhaps that should have been linked instead?

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igrekel
I can't support this enough. The economist's summary had me just saying "so
what", but after reading this comment I started looking at the actual report
and I must say it is much much more interesting.

[http://www.oecd.org/document/24/0,3343,en_2649_34637_2671576...](http://www.oecd.org/document/24/0,3343,en_2649_34637_2671576_1_1_1_1,00.html)

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silentbicycle
Primary sources are usually worth seeking out, anyway.

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igrekel
Yes definitely. But in this case just looking at the Economist's summary, I
didn't even feel it was interesting or worthwhile to look at the primary
source.

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Jach
They all look mostly the same, sure the French spend nearly double the time on
"Personal Care" as Americans but when you're talking about 0.7 hours vs. 1.3
hours that's really not a big difference. I'd be a lot more interested in
countries like Russia, China, and various places in the Middle East, Africa,
and South America. More precise age groups would also be interesting.

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mkuhn
I think the number on "Paid work and study" had quite significant differences
(Japan 6.3, Germany 3.9 (which is less than France and surprisingly low)) and
was very interesting.

But I definitely agree that numbers from a more diverse country sample could
be very interesting.

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mironathetin
"I think the number on "Paid work and study" had quite significant
differences"

It could simply mean that in Japan a higher percentage of people have paid
work compared to the other countries, like children work earlier, old people
die sooner after employment ends (in France many retire in their 50s), higher
percentage of employed women, less unemployment etc. pp.

Not very useful data.

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brunt
What exactly is "Other", and why does Germany do it so much more than other
countries?

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tybris
Conquering other countries.

More seriously, I can imagine it includes travel to work, which tends to be an
epic journey through traffic jams in densely populated countries like Germany,
Belgium, the Netherlands.

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Derbasti
Then again, my experience of living both in the US and Germany is that driving
plays by far a greater role in the US. Most places are 20-45 min away. In
Germany, things like grocery stores, theaters, schools or restaurants tend to
be closer to residential areas.

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briandon
Lumping in information gathered about people spanning such an enormous age
range (15 through 64) is a bit curious.

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Derbasti
How does the 'paid work' part relate to the average salaries in these
countries?

