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Comment by tehwalrus | Hacker News Reader

The UK.

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.

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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.

The U.K. gets a “paid” holiday?

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.

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.

From http://news.gallup.com/poll/166211/worldwide-median-househol... ?

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.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Sweden#Demograp...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Norway

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.

That's great for high end software engineers. What about Walmart or McDonald's employees?

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