Today, the average Korean works a thousand hours more a year than the average German. A thousand. … That is the end of the Great Divergence.

Ferguson is using a striking labor-hours comparison (South Korea versus Germany) to dramatize a shift in the global economic balance. The “Great Divergence” is a historian’s term for the long period in which Western Europe (and later North America) pulled decisively ahead of much of Asia in income and productivity. By saying “That is the end of the Great Divergence,” he suggests that the old West–Rest gap is closing: high-growth, high-effort East Asian economies have caught up in output and competitiveness, while parts of Western Europe have chosen (or been able) to work fewer hours. The line is rhetorical rather than technical, implying that relative work intensity and growth momentum now run in the opposite direction from the classic divergence story.