There are several countries in Europe that give maternity/paternity leave and vacation time to all full time employees by law. The result is not a massive drop in productivity, on the contrary studies have indicated higher overall productivity in many cases. There are things besides short term business gain that societies can invest in that can end up with everyone better off in the long run, even economically.
What does that have to do with school start times? Do parents take “parental leave” every morning to take their kids to school later? Of course not.
And maternity/paternity leave has little to do with school age kids.
France has the “genius” idea to have school only 4 days per week in most places. So Wednesdays off. Parents have to figure out what to do with their kids — they can’t exactly take off every Wednesday. And why does this 4 day week persist? Not because of ideal learning outcomes but because of teacher unions.
Europe isn’t better at everything and America isn’t worse at everything as people often like to suggest. And all of those great “benefits” people like to point out — they aren’t free. Salaries are dramatically lower in Europe and taxes higher — so even when all of these benefits are tallied, Americans still have more disposable income along with lower unemployment and a far more robust economy.
For sure there are great things about Europe, but don’t minimize America because it’s fashionable. Look at actual numbers.
> Salaries are dramatically lower in Europe and taxes higher — so even when all of these benefits are tallied, Americans still have more disposable income along with lower unemployment and a far more robust economy.
I wonder what you mean by "Americans", I really don't see how a minimum wage American part time worker has "more disposable income" than someone in Europe with any measure of health insurance?
Minimizing America may be fashionable, but the awful situation of a lot of working people in America is not at all made up, and, no, the money doesn't compensate it. It just compensates it (maybe) for software engineers.
As another commenter suggests, this isn't the same as flexible working hours.
And also, it doesn't fairly compare because this is legally forced, instead of letting the market determine such needs. The comment you're replying to is suggesting that naturally, companies which start earlier and aren't as accompanying of flexible working for parents, will do better in the market. Your comment doesn't debunk this theory.
Let me guess, you believe governments should be run like companies, right?
Perhaps, ask yourself why you come down on the side of moneyed interests in every point you make.
When I see this kind of dogmatic badgering, Its almost like my brain is superimposing a Fast Fourier Transform frequency plot on that person, and all of the energy is found to be in a single bin.
Your single bin is money. As this pure tone, it is literally your equation.
I don't have to tell you that this makes you give whores a bad name.
This crosses into personal attack. Please resist the temptation to do that even when you disagree strongly. It's particularly bad when combined with ideological battle, which is off topic on HN to begin with.
This isn't an agreement or disagreement with your underlying views; it's that you can't go offside when expressing them. Same applies to the other team.
(I was actually shocked that Americans don't always get paid holiday.)
Note that we also have 6 months paid maternity leave, and 1 weeks paid paternity leave, with both of those extendable on a lower pay rate.
New legislation from the 2010-2015 government allows parents to share this leave, even if they work at different companies, and start/stop it during the time when it would be taken (so mum can take the first 3 months off, then dad take a month off, then mum again, etc). Sorry for the hetero-normative example, adoptive parents also get paid leave in the same way.
It's actually six weeks maternity on nearly full pay and then about nine months 'statutory maternity pay' which is about £145 per week. Paternity leave is the same level as statutory maternity pay. Obviously individual companies can offer better deals than this. I got four months full pay with my job for example.
That doesn't source the actual claim that these reforms increased productivity. Everyone knows about vacation time rules in Europe, few have read economic analyses of them.
According to Gallup in 2013 the median incomes in the US and UK were $15,500 and $12,400 adjusted. Considering that US citizens pay on average 10% of earnings on healthcare where the UK doesn't that makes it more akin to $14,000 vs $12,400.
Except here is something you didn't know - that British citizen isn't paying income tax at all. Their 0% bracket goes all the way to about $16,000 USD Today. That US citizen is paying about $1650 in income tax because there is no 0% bracket in the US. So in actual take home income they are almost exactly the same. The mess of tax code in both countries makes the calculations more complicated, plus other taxes, etc - but the point is that no, U.K. citizens are not being paid "so much lower" than the US on average, but they do get the benefit of never dying of preventable illness because they can't afford to see a doctor while having all that extra aforementioned paid time off and holiday benefits that US workers don't have.
Additionally, the US isn't even at the top of median individual income. Fennoscandia collectively has the US beat, by on average about 20%. Which is going to be offset by their average ~25%ish income tax, but still its comparable returns.
It turns out that if your economy is abusing you to get more productivity out of you that you don't get a better living out of it.
US doesn't have a 0% tax rate, but there is the standard deduction and other tax credits that mean a large chunk of money gets exempted from income tax, often much more than just $16,000 USD.
Posting this a day later, so probably won't get seen much, but I just looked at my 2017 tax return.
I made ~$80k USD and because of various tax incentives (3 children mainly), I paid almost exactly the $1650 ($1683) figure you mentioned for federal income tax.
So my intuition is that the tax burden for most poor families is almost nothing.
I would expect self reported income like that to be based on take home pay (so after taxes). And for many in the US, they will have health benefits that they don't include in the self reported figure (they may not even realize the amount their employer pays). That's hard to account for compared to the "everybody can use the NHS" included in the UK figure.
From your link: 'Gallup asked respondents in most countries the following question: "What is your total monthly household income in [local currency], before taxes? Please include income from wages and salaries, remittances from family members living elsewhere, farming, and all other sources. Again, please provide your total monthly household income."'
I don't have any argument to make about relative quality of life between the US and other countries, because that's largely subjective. That being said, Fennoscandia is an aberration. They are monocultures with virtually no 3rd world immigration. By comparison the US actively seeks immigration from third world countries. There's a lot of political turmoil right there over this issue, immigration policy changes due to being in the EU, bringing in lots of refugees, etc. has brought in a lot of workers who are only really prepared for low skill/wage work, but these countries simply don't have those kinds of jobs available. They're having a hard time figuring out what to do with them.
> That being said, Fennoscandia is an aberration. They are monocultures with virtually no 3rd world immigration.
Untrue for Sweden[1] and Norway[2], which have respectively 14.3% and 16.8% of their populations foreign-born. Not all of those foreign-born are from developing nations but developing nations figure heavily in the top-30 list for Sweden.
Sweden is such a monoculture that when you look at Swedish demographics all Swedes are considered the same and you only count the immigrants as different. The second largest group of immigrants after Syrians is Finns, so a very similar culture. In the US if you look up demographics you barely see the 13% of the population which is foreign born as an *. Instead you get 17% hispanic, 13% black, ~62% white, 5% other. There's no accounting for the difference between a Mexican and a Cuban or a German and an Italian American. If you looked at Swedish demographics the same way it would be more like 95% white, 5% other. The largest single Church in the US is Baptist which accounts for barely 10% of the population. Meanwhile the Swedish National Church accounts for over 60% of the population, the second largest group is "unaffiliated" at 30%.
Norway is not significantly different when looked at in a similar light.
And, by the way, Netflix gives an entire paid YEAR off for maternity.
I wonder why? Could it be that competition has inspired them to compete? My point: free markets are a powerful thing. When there is no differentiation and everyone is “the same,” then it stifles innovation. Working at Peugeot is no more interesting than working for Renault. Which means their cars are going to be average. But if Peugeot were offering some great benefit, the best engineers would flock to Peugeot and that would result in better Peugeot cars. Renault, in order to compete would have to try and top Peugeot, which then leads to great engineers going there.. and so on until competition pressures ultimately drive companies to higher and higher levels of success and innovation. Just like what happens in Silicon Valley. Instead, in Europe, you have this malaise, this equalitarianism that inspires nobody. There is a lack of ambition.
So 5000 Netflixers having pretty fantastic maternity leave is your answer for tens of millions of Europeans having pretty fantastic maternity leave?
Arithmetic is actually pretty useful for thinking about what more labor friendly laws might do in the US. Say you decide that every employee should get a paid day off if they work for 240 hours (this is 6 weeks full time, so someone averaging 30 hours a week would receive 6.5 paid days off each year). How much would that cost? It would cost right around 3% of what they are already being paid. And since we know people with no paid time off are working low leverage jobs, we can probably infer that it would come right out of the consumer surplus that their employee provides to customers.
But sure, let's pretend that some small baseline of non-hell would erode ambition in people competing for jobs at Netflix.
Unfortunately for your argument, companies in the UK also compete by offering paid maternity leave longer than the legal minimum - like PWC which offers an entire paid YEAR.
Why the focus on IT? Automobiles, trains, embedded controllers, space and commercial flight, weapon systems, high-tech manufacturing. All those are areas where Europe has at least one industry leader.
There are so many companies you never hear about because you aren't in the industry they operate in.
Because the question was about outcompeting. Automobiles, etc., there are many competitors, including some American. And weapon systems, there is a national security reason to maintain regional leaders, no matter how inefficient.
In IT, I find it funny that Google has a higher market share in Europe than in the US.
Why outcompete? Why the need for a quasi-monopoly? Why can't half a dozen companies work a market in competition and create better products for everyone? Many problems with Facebook and Google come from not it outcompeting other companies and making things worse for society as a whole.
About 1/4 of Norway's GDP is oil and gas (US is about 7%). Ireland is a particularly ironic choice given their recent GDP growth and subsequent dip were mostly from being a tax haven for wealthy US companies.
I wouldn't personally attribute either of these to better educational or societal systems.
Are we going to ignore the effects of immigration and the comparative policies of both nations here, or just pretend that a mostly-homogenous nation like Norway (or other Scandi countries) should be equally compared to the United States?
Comparing the USA as a whole to Ireland or Norway is ludicrous. Compare it to the EU, China, India, Indonesia, Brazil. If you want to compare Ireland to the US you should be looking at individual states. If you insist on comparing to individual countries at least look at ones that are at least a tenth of the population of the US, like France, Gernany, the U.K., Russia, Turkey, Italy, Ukraine.
Ireland’s gdp per capita overstates its wealth substantially as large parts of the economy by value is subsidiaries of US companies which repatriate profits back to the US. For economies like Ireland and Luxembourg better to use gross national product than gross domestic product.
Better again to use average individual consumption but statistics on that have only just begun to be gathered. Average household consumption makes the US look pretty great. The only country higher is the UAE and the top 5 is rounded out by Hong Kong, Switzerland and Luxembourg. Petrostates, city states and the US.
You can't value economic success solely on the size and influence of companies. In Germany (Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg especially) there are literally thousands of very successful small-middle tier engineering firms doing highly specialized work in very specific areas. It might not be Facebook or Google or even BMW in terms of size and influence, but they are the very core of the economic success in these states.
In EU we didn't have the same amount of military government spending that you folks had. Most of the technological base for the ICT revolution was paid by the US taxpayer on the grounds of beating - or at least keeping in check - the Russians in a war. But yeah, even Ayn Rand got her assistance from government, why not her followers?
