La dolce vita may be coming to an end. Despite claims that many European workers already work 40-hour work weeks, the myth which leads many Americans to seek a better life on the other side of the Atlantic may be more fiction than fact. And if it’s still fact, it may not be for much longer.

Headlines on Bloomberg.com, DW-World.de, The Economist, The Christian Science Monitor, and USA Today proclaim the demise of the idyllic minimalist work week as though it marked the end of an era.

Perhaps it does. According to a nifty little chart in an article in USA Today, just about any European country has a better vacation plan than most jobs provide here in the United States. No wonder in Germany there’s been controversy over the concessions labor union heads have made in order to keep companies from moving where labor costs are cheaper than they are in Germany.

But if, as reported by   Noelle Knox in USA Today, workers in the Czech Republic average an extra five hours per week and earn only 40 percent as much as the typical German laborer, what incentive do large companies have to stay?

The frenzy over the state of the European economy is alive and well. Is it greed or is the economy really underperforming? The entry of 10 new European Union members on May 1st has been blamed for “tipping the balance” of an already delicate European Union economy, leading to fears of deflation, a rise in unemployment, and a lower quality of life as a result. Knox alludes to the stereotype that Europeans “work to live” rather than “living to work.”

Apparently the American economy’s overtime norm doesn’t yield the gargantuan advantages in productivity we had expected it would. Knox notes that, according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, seven of the most advanced European countries are “just as productive as … the USA” (the countries are France, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium).

She quotes OECD economist Paul Swaim as confirming the commonly held perception that Americans work about a third more than Europeans do:

“[W]e … found that average incomes in Europe were also about one-third lower, because output per hour was essentially the same … Obviously, the next question is: Who has it the best, on balance? Is it better to work less and live with less income?”

Now there’s a question worth answering.