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.
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.
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 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it turns out you've been doing this a lot. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do it any more.
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.
https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights
(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.
So why are salaries in the U.K. so much lower than the US?
Seems like the only one paying for holidays is the worker.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Sweden#Demograp...
Norway is not significantly different when looked at in a similar light.
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.
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.
12 months paid leave at 67% of previous income plus 2 months if shared with the other parent.
There are so many companies you never hear about because you aren't in the industry they operate in.
In IT, I find it funny that Google has a higher market share in Europe than in the US.
The USA is below both Norway and Ireland in the rankings table of GDP per capita, pretty consistently over the different measurements.
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?
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.