How long do you think you have to work before you can have a beer? I don’t mean how long before you think it’s time to take a break and enjoy a pint. No, I mean how long do you think you have to work in order to earn enough money to buy yourself a beer?
In the Economist‘s Daily Chart, Thirsty Work, they detail the efforts of analysts at the Swiss Bank UBS to figure out how long the average German worker would have to work in order to buy him- or herself a half-litre of beer at Oktoberfest. They discovered that it would take “just under seven minutes of work.” But it’s not the same in every nation, as the chart below details. The avergae appears to be about 20 minutes of work for a beer, which doesn’t seem too bad. The worst place was India, where you’d have to work “nearly an hour” to make enough for a beer. The United States, I’m happy to say, is at the bottom, which is a good thing. It only takes us about 5 minutes to earn enough for a beer. Hell, I think I earned two beers just writing this post.
