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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

This article is pure speculative narrative.

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.

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"This article is pure speculative narrative. 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."

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'm on the other side of the A/B testing. Where's the evidence, if you don't mind hitting your back button and quoting some?

I'd like to see some of those solutions as well. Show a problem, talk about the change made, demonstrate the solution. Was that in the article?

"You can pull out these GDP per capita statistics and say that people in Mississippi are vastly wealthier than people in Frankfurt and Hamburg. That can’t be true. Just spend two months in Hamburg and spend two months in Tupelo, Mississippi. There’s something wrong if the statistics are telling you that the people in Tupelo are three times wealthier than the people in Germany."

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.

GDP is a terrible measure of a population's wealth.

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"

As long as we are speculating.

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.

There is probably a lot of national pride that manifests itself similar to NIH syndrome.

I spent four months living in Germany.

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.

My comment wasn't about Germany, but about countries which don't take influence from other countries in their own decision making. The United States could swallow some pride and seriously research and adopt policies that work in other countries rather than dismissing them immediately because that idea/method came from somewhere else (drug laws come to mind).

I think we agree on almost everything.

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.

> I'd wager their free healthcare doesn't contribute as much as their free education, ext.

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_health_care#Germany

Ah, you are right. Thank you for correcting.

While this story certainly isn't great for discussion (for the points you mentioned) I disagree with your last statement.

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.

Two interesting points from your comments.

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.

> Americans can work any kind of work week they want

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.

Herd effects, and company policies. Americans != programmers at startups.

> 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.

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.

I don't think he meant that literally. Your taking it as such made for funny reading though.

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".

Sweden isn't the example it used to be, in this regard. We currently have a (relatively) right-wing government that's privatising services, cutting social safety nets and creating a low-wage job market. This is having the same effects it did in the US.

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