America's misguided culture of overwork
salon.com
salon.com
Americans will put in long hours, but then during the course of the day will play in the form of checking personal email, talking around the water cooler, etc.
You can cross ref. this with NASA's finding that programmers who were only allowed to work 5 days a week of 8 hour days were as productive and had less bugs in their code than those allowed to work more hours.
The 40 hour work week is standard because Henry Ford's productivity studies found that for repetitive, manual labour, that was the maximum amount of hours one could work before a drastic reduction in productivity. That bar was set nearly 100 years ago and yet we still follow it even though work has drastically changed.
I never understand people who work insane hours. They may be at work for X hours per day but I really doubt they are working all that time.
Then somebody forgot this and decided that if 40 was good 48 must be better.
My own experience is that I'm maximally focused for 6 hours each day but it's split into 2-3 hour bursts.
What? I’m pretty sure the European labour movement and the Social Democrats wouldn’t agree with that answer. On a list of possible explanations, I think ”You can thank the Americans for it” would rank rather low.
It's America-centrism to think that all welfare and modernism is brought to the world by the USA. One typical anecdote a former exchange student told me, that some high school kids in the USA believed (this was at the end of the nineties) that European countries do not have their own radio channels ;). Go educate yourself, the average Western-European citizen has more luxury, more free time, and better health-care than the average citizen of the United States (I know, I have visited the US often).
The primary advantage of the US is that it is far easier to set up a company, and make it really big. If you make it, you will be rich and wealthy. If you fail, you will hit rock bottom. It is a consequence of the system, wages, taxing, etc.
Help me educate myself. Provide some evidence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time
From those statistics it does look like the average citizen of the United States probably does work more hours in a year than the average citizen of the EU.
[Edited to remove the comment about "but not by a huge factor"]
No comment on the 'luxury' claim; that's too subjective for me.
Life expectancy in Japan is 83.
Hypothesis: ethnicity plays a strong role in determining life expectancy. The fact that Japan is 99.4% Asian while the US is only 5% Asian may drag the US down a bit.
If you compare the US with Canada, which has a similar mixed ethnicity, the dollars to life expectancy is still way better in Canada.
To save some time, I think the typical libertarian argument is to admit the system in the US actually does stink in terms of costs, and argue that if only we had a truly free market, where people could instruct their ambulance drivers to drive around shopping for the best price/performance ratio for their emergency surgery, then things would be better in the US.
This just goes around and around and around, though, doesn't it. I somehow suspect we won't see "health care economics problems solved on niche web site" as tomorrow's headlines.
I love to talk about this stuff with people in person, but the bandwidth of a web site is just too low - people write books on these subjects, for pete's sake.
False. Canada has more long lived Asians and far fewer short lived Blacks (and "some other race") than the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Canada
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...
In any case, I'm not asserting that ethnicity is the only factor affecting life expectancy. My claim is that many factors affect life expectancy and health care is way down the list in terms of magnitude (once you reach first world levels). Thus, using life expectancy as a proxy for health care is simply a terrible idea.
... and around ...
Much like free time, claims about costs are easily googleable.
I'm in the UK so I rather like knowing that everyone has access to pretty decent healthcare which is free at the point of delivery. If I want fancier stuff or a slightly nicer room or more quickly than what the NHS can provide I can always go private. However, I've never done that and I don't know anyone who has for anything major.
I'm surprised that what are generally considered the richest countries are all at the bottom: Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, France, Germany, etc. The difference in working hours between those and the US is huge: 1307 - 1362 hours/year compared to 1777 hours/year.
Also, in some countries there are many people working for themselves (such as in small businesses). These people generally work more than the official time.
I had a family member work for 14 hours a week (10 hours saturday and sunday) while starting their own business (this went on for two years).
Small business owners break the law a lot and work more than the allotted time.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Deve...
As he pointed out it's difficult to find objective data. But you can check:
* Human Development Index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Deve...): the USA is at position 13. It includes things like life expectancy and education.
* Satisfaction with Life index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfaction_with_Life_Index):the USA is at position 23.
* World Health Organisation ranking of health care: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHO%27s_ranking_of_health_care_...): the USA is at position 37
* Education index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Index): the USA is at 19
* Income inequality (Gini coefficient): (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient) USA has a score of 47 (out of 100 for maximum inequality). EU has an average of 31
I am sure there's many other indices. And I am also sure that a lot of complains could be thrown on each of these. But I think overall they paint a pretty consistent picture of the USA.
I would rather have the chance of making it big (or fail) than have the government take most of it away with huge taxes and strict rules that make it really difficult to have a successful business.
"It includes things like life expectancy and education."
Life expectancy is low because of the vast amount of people that eat crappy food (and don't exercise) in the US. I don't think this is going to change any time soon (unless it's mandated by the government).
"Income inequality (Gini coefficient)"
This to me just means that in those other countries, the government is re-distributing wealth. People aren't earning more wealth. The government is taking wealth away from people by force and giving it to the rest.
The only thing I do agree with is our bad education system system. However, our higher education institutions are some of the best in the world.
I also wonder sometimes if the reason our "satisfaction of life" index is low is because of liberal democrats that want us to be more like Sweden, Denmark, and Finland.
Would you rather be happier or have less freedoms?
I also find it really funny because Sweden, Denmark, and Finland are not only very homogeneous, but very racist. It's very difficult to go against what is considered "normal" (IE: groupthink).
Life expectancy is low because of the vast amount of people that eat
crappy food in the US.
Could it be that crappy food is sold starting from the school's cafeteria? Could it be that people don't have enough time to cook or eat at better restaurants?
This to me just means that in those other countries, the government is
re-distributing wealth
I would rather have the chance of making it big (or fail) than have the
government take most of it away with huge taxes and strict rules that
make it really difficult to have a successful business.
....
Would you rather be happier or have less freedoms?
I'm not saying one is better than the other, but it seems to me that you've got no idea of how Consumerism works.
When you're sunken in debt, how much freedom do you have left?
Having a government is not such a bad thing. Even Americans used to embrace regulations, until Reagan and the "get the government off my back" idea spread out. Regulations are what help internalise in the price externalities such as these. You could tax unhealthy food, or subsidise healthy food. But somehow this is felt as a wound to people's freedom of doing anything they want, including eating crap if they want.
And freedom is all great: pity for those poor people who are so poor that their only choice is eating crappy food, and who can't afford preventive measures such as cancer screening.
However I do agree that government should play a role in regulating second hand smoke, as that is an instance of one individual using coercive force over another (making me inhale your smoke in public). Although even that issue is a slippery slope. Do we ban cars because their exhaust is toxic?
Could it be that crappy food is sold starting from the school's cafeteria? Could it be that people don't have enough time to cook or eat at better restaurants?"
Crappy school food does need to be changed. If people "don't have enough time" to cook or eat better, it's because they are lazy. You need to make time for these things.
"It could also mean any number of things ... like a middle-class that is better represented, or that the distribution of wealth is more efficient."
Either way, it's not something I want.
"Oh, the freedom argument :)
I'm not saying one is better than the other, but it seems to me that you've got no idea of how Consumerism works."
I do know how consumerism works. I also know the alternative is having the government make those choices for me.
"When you're sunken in debt, how much freedom do you have left?"
I have tons of freedom, because I am responsible with my money (IE: no debt). The people "sunken" in debt got that way because they spent money they didn't have and were foolish enough to do it on a credit card with huge APR.
There were many people during the housing crises that knowingly got a mortgage they couldn't afford because "the banks let them do it". When those same people couldn't pay their bills, they blamed those same banks. This is pure stupidity.
No. I'm suggesting that there will always be stupid and lazy people wherever you go. Many countries in Europe attempt to legislate it away by taking away by making choices for you (More social programs and restrictions on private alternatives). For some, this is fine, because they will be better off. For others, it just means less freedom and less choices.
In the US, we are free to make our own choices (and for some people, this means failing).
Life expectancy may be low because people eat crappy food, but the eat crappy food because they are cheap. Sure it costs money for countries in the EU to push people towards better diet and you may object to that as a socialist government. But why should health care be only measured in terms of cures rather than prevention? I'd say both are important.
Second point. I perfectly agree with you, on the Gini coefficient and on other point. In EU countries there is a smaller gap. If you look at averages (what the original poster was talking about) the very skewed American distribution matters.
The USA has an excellent health care... if you can pay for it. It has an excellent education system... if you can pay for it. You can take plenty of holidays... if you don't need the extra money. And so on.
But the number of people that can afford those in the USA is so small that when you look at the average, most are worse off.
Do you not want to have wealth redistribution? Fine, don't. I don't live in the USA so it doesn't affect me. At your election vote whatever you prefer. But the article linked here was suggesting a different view of what may be a better balance. You like your way of living: suit yourself. shrug
People that don't have freedom and are stuck in one system don't know what they are missing.
"But the number of people that can afford those in the USA is so small that when you look at the average, most are worse off."
The majority of people (last I heard it was > 70%) have some form of health care in the US. Our health care system does need to be reformed, but to say the majority of the population has no health care is just wrong.
In how many countries have you lived in?
Having some form of health care is not the same as having good health care, and most definitely not the same as having the best health care that the USA provides.In fact, I am puzzled how you can quote a statistics like that with a straight face: you are saying that less than 30% of the population doesn't have any form of health care! That's A LOT!!!
A quick check online (I don't have time to find better data) gave me this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uninsured_in_the_United_States
which quotes around 15% of the population WITHOUT insurance. And to those you may need to add all those whose insurances don't cover everything you may have.
14 million are de-facto insured - they are eligible for medicaid but have not bothered to sign up. If they ever require insurance, they can sign up and medicaid will pay for their treatment (medicaid doesn't care about preexisting conditions). Another 23 million are uninsured for 4 months or less, presumably because they declined COBRA.
Fun fact, from the wikipedia page: the states with the biggest percentage of uninsured people border Mexico. I wonder how much of the problem could be solved by enforcing immigration law.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/25/who-are-the-...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_Press_Freedom_Index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#2008_rankings
The US does better in economic freedom indices, not surprisingly, since there is much more market regulation in the EU:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom_histo...
What do you prefer, freedom of speech and democracy, or economic freedom?
Oh, lovely, we’re very racist, are we? Compared to what, USA? I hear the same anti-muslim, anti-mosque rants from Americans that I hear from fellow Swedes. You complain about illegal immigrants, we complain Eastern-Europeans, ”They’re here to take our jobs”. We complain about paying for refugees and asylum-seekers, you complain about... I don’t know, do you have that issue?
FYI: muslin isn't a race.
"You complain about illegal immigrants, we complain Eastern-Europeans, ”They’re here to take our jobs”. We complain about paying for refugees and asylum-seekers, you complain about... I don’t know, do you have that issue?"
I'm glad we agree that it's not the paradise that so leftists claim it to be.
Oh, I know, it’s a fabric.
I'm glad we agree that it's not the paradise that so leftists claim it to be.
So you really didn’t have a point, did you? Just wanted to blurt out a few insults?
Go read the actual report: http://www.who.int/whr/2000/en/whr00_en.pdf
Only 37.5% of the ranking is even peripherally related to health care, namely health outcomes (measured by DALE, Disability Adjusted Life Expectancy) and responsiveness (how satisfied patients are). The US is #1 in responsiveness and #24 in DALE (4.5 years behind Japan at #1 and 0.5 years behind Germany at #22).
It's unclear how significant the gap in DALE is, since lifestyle and genetics strongly affect DALE. Fun fact: life expectancy for Japanese Americans is higher than for Japanese (84.5 in the US [1], 82.6 in Japan). Within the US, life expectancy varies from 44 (Lakota Men) to 86 (Chinese American Women), a gap of 42 years.
To actually rank health care, one would need to measure medical outcomes for specific medical diagnoses, adjusted for patient quality. E.g., it would need to answer questions like "given a group of non-overweight white males aged 45-55 with prostate cancer, how many survive at least 5 years?".
[1] http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/browse.aspx?lvl=2...
Your definition of health care is who got the best doctor. But the point is that there's a lot more than that to good health care. If a country has better diet, or a less polluted environment, or people are less stressed (which itself can cause further problems, including physical problems), then I think all of that should be included.
Why shouldn't the average health be counted? Is preventing an illness less effective than curing it? And what's the point of measuring how good are your doctors or facilities if a lot of people cannot afford those?
(edited for grammar.)
You provided more data unrelated to health care and luxuries. One of your data points looked (at first glance) to be directly on point, but on further examination it turned out not to be. I pointed this out. I'm sorry that you consider disputing your facts is impolite.
Preventing an illness is great, and I'm strongly in favor of it. However, you are expanding the term "health care" beyond it's normal use. A quick google search finds definitions for "health care" similar to the following: "The prevention, treatment, and management of illness and the preservation of mental and physical well-being through the services offered by the medical and allied health professions."
Being ethnically Japanese, visiting the gym or living in a less polluted environment is not health care by the usual definition, even though it affects health. If you want to define health care as "anything which improves health", be my guest. With that definition in mind, I agree that the US has a poor health care system. But when you use a non-standard definition of terms, it's helpful to clarify that.
I was simply arguing against the idea that the WHO rankings provide strong evidence that the US has poor health care, with health care defined as per the definition I quoted. The WHO rankings don't even attempt to study that question.
I agree health care is a badly defined word. And if you want to restrict yourself to services offered by medical professionals then I am fine.
Then I can argue with you that yeah, the USA is not so bad on the actual services provided. Although given the quality of the service changes with how much you can pay, we should really look at the average health care offered (hence those who can't pay and are not insured would count as horrible service). Also having universal health care helps simply because people can take much more advantage without worrying if it's worth the money. For example screening for diseases or cancer. And where I live now (UK) doctors will also check your weight, discuss how you can improve your diet and so on. Not sure then if these would count in your definition or not.
I think anyway that the guy you replied to meant a broader concept of health care. When the government subsidises screening or healthy food at schools then I would have counted those under health care.
Incidentally I guess that's why the WHO used those other data that you disliked. Financial inequality matters because richer people can afford better health care.
The way they calculate it is to take sum |marginal_spending[i] - avg_marginal_spending|^a (I think a is 3, but I'd have to double check, I do recall that a > 1). So if 50% of people pay $1000 out of pocket for health care and 50% pay $0, you are penalized for being unequal. If everyone pays $2000 in taxes, the inequality penalty is zero. That's nothing but a penalty for non-socialized medicine and for copayments.
It's such a screwed up measure that increasing health or responsiveness for some of the population (or lowering costs for some, but not all) can reduce your score (if the magnitude is large enough)!
If you want to measure the baseline level of healthcare in a country (e.g., the bottom fifth percentile, or something), go ahead and do it. The WHO didn't do that. They ranked nations in order of how closely their health care systems resembled what some WHO bureaucrats thought an ideal health care system would look like.
Before it was unified in 1870, Germany was made of a number of small independent kingdoms, loosely associated through the Holy Roman Empire until 1806, then through the German Confederation from 1815 until the unification under Prussia's dominance in 1870 [2].
This late unification (in comparison with France or England for example, which already had an embryo of a unified central state as early as the XIIIth century [3]) explains the non-centralised nature of the German state and economy. The Allies had very little to do with it.
1: http://countrystudies.us/germany/151.htm
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire#Modern_period
3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_France#Saint_Louis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck#Bismarck.27s_...
- no federally mandated six weeks of vacation time (though 4-5 weeks are the norm, even in private sector)
- University tuition has been introduced recently (though still low, but will rise as obvious source of gov revenue)
- Free nursing care / child care for a small percentage of toddlers only
- No labor minister of that name (he is undersecretary) etc.
In Spain (another socialist economy by the article standards) University tuition is something between 600-1000 EUR a year and has not risen for a good decade now (except for the inflation).
Maybe he was trying to be polemic?
I still agree with the sentiment of the article. European societies sacrifice a bit of growth potential and individual freedom to get better living conditions for all. I think that's a wise move, and going over the board into the opposite direction, as America sometimes feels, has the potential to truly damage society as a whole.
The problem with sacrificing growth rates ought to be that interest accumulate -- that is, Europe becomes further and further behind.
But that seems to be countered by a variant of "second mover advantage" -- it is easier to grow fast when you are far behind (see e.g. China).
The Americans might be beating down the path for us. Who knows how slow we would otherwise move...?
Would be interesting to read a serious analysis of this.
Economists can tell you that this can't scale up to the whole world. Paul Graham's article explains it very well. (The following is all quotation; I'm not italicizing, in the interest of readability)
If you want to reduce economic inequality instead of just improving the overall standard of living, it's not enough just to raise up the poor. What if one of your newly minted engineers gets ambitious and goes on to become another Bill Gates? Economic inequality will be as bad as ever. If you actually want to compress the gap between rich and poor, you have to push down on the top as well as pushing up on the bottom.
How do you push down on the top? You could try to decrease the productivity of the people who make the most money: make the best surgeons operate with their left hands, force popular actors to overeat, and so on. But this approach is hard to implement. The only practical solution is to let people do the best work they can, and then (either by taxation or by limiting what they can charge) to confiscate whatever you deem to be surplus.
...
At a minimum, we'd have to accept lower rates of technological growth. If you believe that large, established companies could somehow be made to develop new technology as fast as startups, the ball is in your court to explain how. (If you can come up with a remotely plausible story, you can make a fortune writing business books and consulting for large companies.)
Ok, so we get slower growth. Is that so bad? Well, one reason it's bad in practice is that other countries might not agree to slow down with us. If you're content to develop new technologies at a slower rate than the rest of the world, what happens is that you don't invent anything at all. Anything you might discover has already been invented elsewhere. And the only thing you can offer in return is raw materials and cheap labor. Once you sink that low, other countries can do whatever they like with you: install puppet governments, siphon off your best workers, use your women as prostitutes, dump their toxic waste on your territory-- all the things we do to poor countries now. The only defense is to isolate yourself, as communist countries did in the twentieth century. But the problem then is, you have to become a police state to enforce it.
I find that assertion illogical. If I raise the income niveau of low wage workers, income inequality does go down. I don't have to keep the top down to reduce inequality, that's just nonsense.
The interesting question is where that money will come from. Increasing lower wages take away from the income of the companies they work for (those people are usually not self employed). So what we will see is a little less income for large companies and their owners, who form the very top incomes anyway. Also, note that the incomes of the top 1% do not really affect the median (and also the average, to a lesser degree) income all that much.
I don't see how that is fundamentally keeping innovation from happening. Founding the next MS might be a little less profitable, but I don't think it'd have kept Bill Gates from doing what he did if he had a billion less by now. Also, Microsoft is quite the counter example: they pay their workers comparatively high wages.
As for the practical effects: I think we can see that Europe (and in particular the more egalitarian Northern Europe) does not necessarily fit his description of a poor country only offering raw materials and cheap labour. There is also lots of innovation happening, not necessarily in IT, but in other sectors (machine engineering, medical, the whole car industry, ...).
So, I think the theoretical point is illogical, and practice shows the effects it predicts do not happen. Colour me unconvinced.
The interesting question is where that money will come from.
That's quite the point. And to the degree that you limit income or profitability, you make it less likely that businesses will take risks.
Founding the next MS might be a little less profitable, ... we can see that Europe ... does not necessarily fit his description of a poor country
He also makes the point that this isn't binary, it's a spectrum. Making things "a little less profitable" makes innovation a little less likely.
Microsoft is quite the counter example: they pay their workers comparatively high wages.
A counter-example of what? I don't see how that relates to the argument at hand. We're discussing systemic inequality of income; the fact that one employer or another has different philosophies of compensation has little effect on the range of incomes through the USA or the world.
The University tuition is about €500/year.
Nursing/Day care for the kids (we have 3.5 and 1.5 year old kids) is from free to €200/€500 per month for both of them (it depends of your income and where you live).
For the title "minister" or alike, this is always a translation issue, it is always hard to map the name from one country to another because the same name may mean something different (Prime Minister in UK and France for example).
vacation = 2 weeks
personal time = 6 days (sick time is considered personal time)
holidays = 7
We have also time off that I don't know how to categorize. It's specific to universities.
university shutdown between Christmas and New Year's = 7 days
Memorial Day until Labor Day we leave at 1pm on Friday, assuming no critical work needs to be completed.
University tuition ranges and often includes housing, which is necessary in less urban areas. $1000/class would be on the low end.
Day care for our 4.5 year old is about $250/week.
My work week is 40 hours but we're strongly encouraged to take a 1 hour lunch. However, with the exception of one other person in my social circle, everyone else works 45+ hours weekly.
EDIT: Applied line breaks again.
Really? I'd think campus housing would be more necessary in urban areas, just to provide subsidized living space in often expensive areas. I go to a rural university, and there are more than enough apartments around--just living by myself, I'm paying less than half for a studio apartment than I would for a bed in a dorm room.
Here in Pullman, Washington, student housing is cheap and readily available just because there's so much room to expand. There's always a wheat field you can turn into an apartment complex somewhere.
Developing in non-urban areas would be really subject to local zoning.
In any event, remove housing from the university cost - e.g. a student living at home - and you're still looking at a low of $10K per year. ($1K/class * 5 classes/semester * 2 semesters) That's not accounting for probably another $300 in miscellaneous fees. Factor in books and it could easily add another $500/semester.
You can probably find some scenarios in which the cost is lower, but $10K is really "bargain basement" nowadays in the US.
Which is utterly false. The author is confusing business sector output and GDP.
It is 24 working days and since Saturdays count as working days: 24 / 6 = 4
It is called "Bundesurlaubsgesetz" -- my translation: Federal Vacation Law.
Does anything like that exist somewhere else?
Generally, if you live in the southern part of Germany, you also get several catholic hol(i|y)days, no matter if you are catholic or not.
Depending on the state you are living in you also get between 9 and 13 holidays. Some of those will fall on weekends from time to time but six weeks (30 days) of paid vacation seem not all that unrealistic in a good year (i.e. many holidays not on weekends) if you live in Bavaria (that’s the state with the 13 holidays, eight of them not on weekends in 2010, ten in 2011, twelve in 2012 – some great years coming up ;-).
In contrast, a startup I once worked for grew large enough to have an office in Germany. I went to work there one summer. The Germans simply didn't fuck around. They'd come in by like 8 am, crush the problems, crank out features and then go home. The Germans maybe weren't as "fun" as their US counterparts, but they were an order of magnitude more efficient.
I don't know what it is, but Germans seem to have a cold, efficient "Terminator" relationship to work. Americans have a dramatic bi-polar relationship to work, where they waste a lot of time when they are working and then worry and complain about their jobs are when they are not working.
It seems even in the US the state is paying for things (streets, school?), so the US is also socialist? It seems to me that by the definition that most US commentators seem to use, any country with taxes is socialist.
As for the health insurance, note that it is only mandatory for employed people. If you are a freelancer or business owner/entrepreneur, you can drop out of the social insurance system for the most parts (except if the government decides to use taxes to compensate for troubles with the pension plans, which is outrageous to me). In fact, it is a problem to get into the social insurance system if you are not employed.
While health insurance is expensive here, I don't think it makes us into a socialist country. In the real socialist and communist countries you were supposed to give up everything for the benefit of the state, and your idea of fun free time was hopefully voluntary farm work.
That is, whereas most essays make a thesis, then present evidence and arguments to support that thesis, this article presents a whole story spun out of thin air, involving FDR, national health insurance, vacations, the Chinese.
As such, it presents an interesting problem. You could argue with some detail --- such as the role Germany plays as a competitive partner in China -- and still it would have much of nothing to do with the rest of the essay. The thing is so loosely coupled it's impervious to criticism. I'm not sure whether to be impressed or disgusted.
I found this to be more of the same fairy tale we Americans have been telling ourselves for decades -- if only we were the Europeans. Things would be so much better. While Germans are doing some great things, we will never be Germany. Or Norway. Or Sweden. Personally I'd like to move beyond that and talk about the real country we live in.
Comparisons are useful, especially when they're disentangled from the politics. I don't really care about how Swedes are ethically superior because they have more mandated vacation and a shorter workday. What I care about are the effects. Is there a lower occurrence of burnout? Are Swedes more productive during working hours? Are work-related injuries (and related costs to employers) lower? etc.
These things are intertwined with other socio-policial factors, of course, so it can be difficult to divorce them... but not too difficult.
First, Americans can work any kind of work week they want. There's a book -- 4-hour-work-week -- that a lot of folks are trying to make work. In technology teams especially. I tell my teams that I don't care how much you work or don't: what matters is productivity and predictability.
Sure, lots of others don't feel that way, but it's up to each situation. If there were some good lessons to be learned from some example? Bring them on! I'm all for it.
Second, complex systems of hundreds of millions of people do very poorly as an engineering experiment. Or -- you can't decide how you want things to turn out and then pull some magic lever and have it turn out that way. It's never that simple. So discussions about huge generalizations are premised on a really bad flaw: that somehow we can massively change everything at one time.
[edit]As an example, you couldn't decide in 1970 that you wanted every person to have a notebook computer by 2020. You could decide to train more people in hard sciences. You could decide to make incentives for investing. But you can't take one complex system as an example and then tell another one to conform to it. That's just not the way complex systems work. And that's not meant as a political comment. That's just a rule of complex systems.[/edit]
It's much better to take all the new information you can find and incorporate it from the ground-up. Want a society with 20-hour work weeks? Cool. Go build one. Nobody is stopping you, and if it's wildly successful then others will very quickly copy it. This is a very easy thing. Actually from this angle I don't even see the point of the article.
The only other angle is that someone or somebody -- one presumes government -- should tell us how to do our work. From my own experience, technology is one of the few areas where we create our own reality. And time and time again, we make it sucky on ourselves. But it's our reality. I wouldn't want to take that ultimate ownership away from us, no matter how good the cause.
My guess is that there are actually some herd effects at work there: it would be pretty difficult in many places to take a 1 month vacation if no one else does, even if the person in question negotiated away some of their pay for extra time off.
In reality, there have been many societies with 20-hour workweeks (many hunter-gatherer societies) and many of them were wildly successful, as measured by the health and self-reported happiness of their members. But someone did in fact stop them.
If you try to set up a hunter-gatherer society with 20-hour workweeks in, say, Iowa, I guarantee you that someone will be stopping you in short order. There's plenty of grass seeds to gather and a certain amount of game to hunt, but you will inevitably come into land-use conflict with the other people nearby. Even if you are one of the tiny minority of people so rich as to be able to buy up a large chunk of central Iowa as a reserve for this purpose, you're likely to be prosecuted for permitting noxious weeds on your property, sued for allowing Roundup Ready soy to cross-pollinate onto your property, quite likely arrested for marrying your daughter off at 12, and perhaps committed to a mental institution.
(And then there's the difficulty of changing the culture of a group of people. Most utopian communities fail, because inventing a culture is difficult. People start with an existing culture and judge everything according to it. We don't even know what beliefs you'd need to adopt to live successfully as a hunter-gatherer, to say nothing of the knowledge.)
Wherever you go, you have to contend with the existing norms, laws, and resource allocations. You need a certain amount of natural resources to survive. The areas most richly endowed with natural resources are also richly endowed with groups of people who value their exclusive access to those resources and are willing to fight, or request others to fight, to preserve that exclusive access.
So, you know, it only takes a few hectares of most islands in Micronesia to support a human life, and collecting the coconuts, breadfruit, papaya, and so on is really pretty easy; you don't even need 20 hours a week. As a result, there are already people living off those hectares. If you try to "go build one" there, they will fight you, and the US government will ultimately back them up.
What I took him to mean was that there is nothing at all stopping you from forming your own company and instilling some edict that mandates 20 hour weeks. Ideally, if this is win-win for everyone it will become a standard and thus, you have "created a new society".
Huh. Maybe we're being A/B tested, because the article that I just read began with a clear thesis ("European social democracy – particularly Germany’s – offers some tantalizing solutions to our overworked age"), provided multiple lines of evidence and arguments to support that thesis, and didn't mention the "FDR" or "the Chinese" at all (it mentions, China, at the very end...but only to say that China isn't our enemy). If the article that you read is speculative and theoretical...well, perhaps you've got something from the Cato institute stuck in your browser cache?
It's also pretty interesting that you would lead with that statement, when your counter-argument is an assertion: "we will never be Germany". Maybe you're right, but I'm missing the part of your comment where you provide evidence and arguments to support your thesis -- or even an argument as to why we need to be Germany to adopt some of their ideas. Must be the A/B testing.
I stopped reading after this thinking along the same lines as the OP. I'm still not fully awake but this doesn't seem like a good argument, although to be fair you didn't say the arguments were good.
As a famous economist said - "the ideal GDP is a chain-smoking terminal cancer patient going through an expensive divorce whose car is totalled in a 20-car pileup"
What exactly is wrong with learning from the examples and failures of other countries.
True, maybe we can not generate the same economy as Germany. However, perhaps we could find a way to copy or mimic what is that makes Germany so effective.
The article would argue that is their social polices. It is probably a mix of harmful and beneficial. I'd wager their free healthcare doesn't contribute as much as their free education, ext.
The United States shouldn't strive to be any other country. However, effective methods are effective methods and we should embrace what is rational.
I see tons more national pride when I am in the United States.
The only national pride I have seen Germany conveyed was for their football team. Some Germans find it difficult to even discuss their recent history, they feel very shameful about it.
If anything struck me about Germany it was how everyone could agree on rational things. Everyone agrees to fund the train stations. Most of them use rational arguments in conversation. Even in emotionally distressing times, it is common for people to fall onto their reason.
That would be my guess. And the only connection to national I pride I see, is trying to be so rational as to ensure that the last time they had too much national pride never comes back.
But then again, who really knows? How many millions of little factors could all add up to the net changes we see in our cultures.
I was just theorizing that the magical force behind Germany's constant industrial success is having rationality deeply rooted in their culture.
I probably just misunderstood your comment.
Germany's healthcare system is universal, but not free.
Standard insurance is funded by a combination of employee contributions, employer contributions and government subsidies on a scale determined by income level. Higher income workers sometimes choose to pay a tax and opt out of the standard plan, in favor of 'private' insurance. The latter's premiums are not linked to income level but instead to health status.
On the other hand, I've heard local startups complain about the difficulty of finding people that are willing to put in the hours that you'd need in a startup.
For example, I can work 60 or 80 hours a week instead of 40, but it doesn't really make a difference because the effective output will stay more or less the same. Without sufficient leisure time I'm just slower and I'll make errors when working.
In addition, with progressive systems it doesn't even make sense to work that much. 20 hours more a week reduces my leisure time to effectively zero. On the other hand, even if this additional hours were paid, the effective difference would be minimal, due to the high taxes I'd have to pay for them.
In my view there are times in start-ups (I've been involved in two, once as a co-founder) there are times when you do have to go that extra mile (or ten), but I don't think coding is the area where this is really obvious.
For example, if there are a handful of people in the company and you try and get VC investment that takes a huge amount of effort so you end up having coding time round about other tasks. So even though your total code output doesn't go up that much you end up doing piles of other stuff (e.g. planning for a major deployment at a customer) thay someone technical has to do but which isn't coding. Something has got to give - so you work longer hours, not because you want to, but because you have to.
Looking back do I think expecting employees to work crazy hours makes them any more productive as developers - absolutely not. But as a founder/exec you have to do it.
European ideas about wealth are less about cash and more about (inherited/inheritable) tangible assets and connections to people at a similar level.
Of course we do. Just not any more than other poor people.
But our hypothetical ex-aristo would be rejected immediately if she tried to become working-class (tho' probably she could become a chav).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspon...
If Norway behaved like the US, most of the money from oil would probably go to a small handful of privileged people.
I could be wrong, though. Can anyone come up with an example of voluntary equal wealth distribution in a country relatively lacking in resources? (I say 'voluntary' because in poorer countries this sort of scheme has usually been enforced by dictatorships.)
I've always operated under the assumption that unequal wealth distribution ('fair' is a loaded word) has an economic cost, since equalities in wealth (+ economic freedom) encourage economy-expanding activities like entrepreneurship. [removed the last point as it is fair one on its own, but is not entailed from the previous statements.]
I could be wrong, though. Can anyone come up with an example of voluntary equal wealth distribution in a country relatively lacking in resources?
There is a game-theoretic problem with voluntary wealth distribution. I'm happy to give up my income if all my peers do, but I'm really not inclined to do this if my peers don't.
Anyhow, the Anglo idea-sphere seems to have a glut of free-market-is-the-best notions, and a vacuum where the counter-arguments lie. Here's one, for you, then: if there is more equal wealth distribution, then more people have more money (by definition), which almost always means that more people are better educated and have more economic opportunity. This means more people are free to invent stuff, to start businesses, and to generally innovate. It takes a particular level of education and economic opportunity to have the human capacity to support an Apple or a Google -- a level of education that is possessed by, conservatively, less than 20% of the population. Much of the American population is simply not equipped, by age 16, to have said opportunity. Imagine, then, what might happen if we doubled the size the base of people that could start/support an Apple or a Google -- wouldn't this lead to higher GDP and overall wealth?
The parent's inequality=economically-good assumes that the population's entrepreneurial spirit is static, and not affected by means or opportunity (while, granted, one can succeed in spite of a lack of opportunity, it does not follow that added opportunity will not encourage entrepreneurship or innovation).
My contention, thus, is:
more equality ==> a greater number of empowered people ==> more and better businesses and economic activity ==> more wealth.
I wonder if we could construct a decent model incorporating education level, economic freedom, income level, income equality, and entrepreneurship.
Presumably the first thing to figure out is what affects an individual economic agent's long-term output. There are definitely a lot of factors. Here are some off the top of my head, fwtw:
- capital available - education level - area of interest - availability of good mentorship - intrinsic emotional/psychological motivating force of income inequality (this is what you referred to earlier) - individual's exposure to "culture" of innovation/productivity
On the face of it: yes, it would lead to higher GDP. BUT you have to consider where that wealth to spread around came from in the first place. If I know that by becoming very wealthy I'm going to be taxed to kingdom come so my wealth can be "fairly distributed" then I don't have much of an incentive to become wealthy. Why would I, when I'd just end up back where I started?
Allow me the opportunity to become wealthy and let me retain control of my wealth and then I'm just limited by personal circumstance and ambition.
This argument is effectively:
"I will work my arse off if the tax rate is 5%, but not if the tax rate is, say, 45%. It's only worth it if I can become hyper-rich; super-rich just isn't good enough for me."
Where is the evidence that increasing income/wealth taxes from, say, 20% to 40% causes people to work less hard? And where is the evidence that, even if this were true, it outweighs the other economic benefits of wealth redistribution?
To your other question: whether nor not it outweighs any supposed benefits of wealth redistribution is irrelevant to the individual entrepreneur. Someone willing to work his ass off to start and run a successful venture isn't likely to think "I'll lose the majority of my profits to taxes, but I don't mind because at least it's being redistributed fairly."
Edit: The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund apparently owns 1% of global equities! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norw...
I'm only arguing that today their social democracy continues to do well - and isn't under the same pressure of other European states' - because of their wealth.
It is a basic difference between long term and short term thinkers being in charge. I think that's the true difference between countries like the US, UK and even those in Southern Europe, compared to other Northern European countries like Norway, Germany, Sweden etc.
I'm sure once the growth lessens the tone will change again - I'll enjoy it as long as it lasts.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/aug/13/german-econom...
Last years 'sick man' is now the healthiest man on the block:: IF the Keynsian stimulation favoured by America does not work.
Further, there are mounting concerns (valid or not) that China may not be the saviour some hoped. If that transpires, the situation will be bleak indeed for the indebted US and good for the 'austere' Germans. This may feel like being the 'best' survivors of a nuclear war however.
I think people are gently probing which entities will be the big players in the next few years and are trying to copy plays from their playbook.
One year, it's all fairy dust and unicorns, the next year doom and gloom. Seen from some distance, this sounds a lot like people who have no clue at all making long term predictions based only on what they see right now.
Which again confirms my suspicion that Economy as a science at least on that level doesn't hold much water. The predictions might as well be random.
I know: I know nothing :)
This is not said enough. We are wrong again and again, yet we keep coming back for more.
"You know, it’s 50,000 dollars for tuition at NYU and it’s zero at Humboldt University in Berlin. So NYU adds catastrophic amounts of GDP per capita and Humboldt adds nothing."
Granted, there are several approaches to calculating GDP but none of them ignores the government spending.
While it's easy to point out how much nicer life is in Europe, i worry that people forget how much of that lifestyle is fueled by American growth/consumption. In Greece we have an expression, when America sneezes, the world catches a cold. If America slows down, the European lifestyle, which is already in decline given its unsustainability, is going to completely disappear.
To me, an unsustainable system of life/rule/govt etc is bad by definition, regardless of whether or not it works "for now". European companies are falling behind their American counterparts in many of the next generation industries. The Chinese are lining up to trounce them further. It's going to get really bad unless they make some serious changes.
Just my perspective, not that it's worth much.
for me this is a pretty severe accusation. don't know on which data you are basing that on ...
European companies are falling behind their American counterparts in many of the next generation industries.
well, do they? do all of them? which industries? which companies? looking at green technology i.e., Europe (especially Germany) is in a very good position for the future. and this is one of the most promising industries ...
I found that I my line of work (software engineering), this is not generally true. I used to work more daily hours when I was still in Germany, and there was a culture of "You have to be in the office, otherwise we cannot verify that you are actually working".
Here I work from home when I like, work odd hours, work few hours (as long as I work focused during the hours I do work), and I am generally trusted to get my work done.
I suspect that because of certain prevalent American values (autonomy, distrust of authority, a bit of the Horatio Alger myth) they've naturally optimized to the work environment best suited to them. I further suspect that America could only switch to a German system very, very gradually. The country's just not currently suited for social democracy - they'd be terrible at it.
I still remember the time when the japanese were strong and everybody (europeans and americans) tried to become japanese, use their culture and work ethic.
In a decade or two, the american will forget the recession and wonder about wierd articles like this one.
"...turning Japanese, I think I'm turning Japanese, I really think so..."
GDP = private consumption + gross investment + government spending + (exports − imports)
So unless the government is managing not to pay the professors or pay any other money to make Humboldt happen, Humboldt is adding to the GDP, just as government spending rather than consumer spending.
Now, it may not cost the government $50k/student. But it doesn't cost them 0 either.
America is an exception. But perhaps it is "out of sync" with the world in the same way Google is out of sync with your average software corp.
Despite the numbers, social democracy really does work...
Yes, numbers, those pesky axioms that just won't obey when we legislate away the laws of physics.
Oh. My.
The housing market is ridiculous, both for renting and buying, especially compared to 10 years ago. For students it has become harder to both get accepted to university and to keep their student benefits. Foreign students have harder to get admitted, not competing fully with Swedish students and also soon have to pay tuition around 8000€/year. When you finish school you won't get unemployment benefits, but instead have to apply for welfare if you can't find a job instantly. I've heard it's a funny feeling having studied for five years and then being interrogated by welfare workers who can't understand why you're there in the first place. If you're young you basically won't get any help for the first three months of unemployment, which is when you want it.
Off the top of my head I know several people who has moved to Berlin explicitly for the cheaper housing and better quality of life. Swedish DJ Petter Nordkvist[1] has stated in interviews[2] that he moved to Berlin because "it is nearly impossible to find a flat [in Stockholm] if you don’t buy". An example even more relevant to this site is Soundcloud. The founders attended university and the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship in Sweden and then moved themselves and their company to Berlin, stating "since it was and still is affordable to live and work there"[3] as one of the reasons for moving.
[1] http://www.discogs.com/artist/Petter+Nordkvist [2] http://www.hrfq3.sakura.ne.jp/home//e_interview/petter02/ind... [3] http://blog.twingly.com/2010/05/18/from-stockholm-to-berlin-...