Relax! It's the law.

The article speculates on whether Americans would like to work as little as Europeans. Josef Stalin, who rationalised the Soviet calendar in 1929, gave workers every fifth day off, but their shifts were staggered, so that factories could run without interruption. The staggered week appealed rather less to the people who worked it, however. A recent paper by Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, both of Harvard, and Bruce Sacerdote, of Dartmouth College.begin from the premise that Stalin unwittingly proved: people complement each other at work, and perhaps at play too. Couples want to go on holiday together; parents want time off when schools are out. As a result, the economists say, people do not make solipsistic decisions about how much labour to offer in the marketplace. Their choice depends on everyone else's. Glaeser and Sacerdote think this principle might help to explain why Europeans work so much less than Americans.