Better quaff that wine quickly or the economy will take a nose dive!

File this under Studies Commissioned by Capitalist Pig-Dogs.

Last week, the New York Times‘ finance and economics blogger Floyd Norris wrote about a recent Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development study that claims a correlation between long lunches and slower economic growth. Here’s the money quote:

As the accompanying chart shows, the 10 countries where people spend less than 100 minutes eating and drinking each day have, as a group, consistently shown higher economic growth than those that took more than 100 minutes to savor their daily repasts.

Last year, as recession spread around the world, real gross domestic product in countries that ate rapidly fell by an average of 1.2 percent. Those that ate more slowly suffered an average decline of 2 percent. Moreover, the fast countries did better in every year from 2001 to 2008.

Not noted in the study: Those countries where people spend less than 100 minutes a day eating and drinking will see half their population die by the age of 50, all without producing children, thus leaving the aging country vulnerable to emerging superpowers.

I exaggerate, but someone‘s got to stop this information from going viral and landing into every middle manager’s hands.

Photo by emdot