Not to mention that "15 days paid holidays" would be illegal in EU. 20 is the legal minimum, even for lowly jobs like people who sweep floors.
That sense of entitlement and cushy job seems to prevent people from taking risks. They'd rather just coast.
[Qualifier: I am a European now living in North America]
Israel has more startups per capita than any country in the world, but has socialized working laws. The legal minimum is 10 (I think), the exact amount for engineers varies from company to company, but it's usually at least 15-18 days of paid vacation per year with some of the bigger employers offering 20-30. We also get 3 months maternity leave, several months of unemployment, etc. Not as good as France or Holland, but much better than the US.
I'd say the approach of the US with regards to anything social can work against risk taking. e.g. Healthcare.
It's much easier to take risks when you have a social safety net.
At some point that also has to be accounted for when taking into account a country's economic conditions.
Western europe has used its economic prosperity to get more vacation days over the years, maternity leave, free education and other social goods. While in the US it seems to work in the exact opposite direction.
The extreme case is France, where they seem to be on constant vacation (>60 days!), get free university education, excellent free healthcare and all the good wine to the great dismay of the Chicago school economists that keep predicting its imminent collapse year after year.
Israel's history is also a counterexample, as it was very poor in its early years (1948 - 1980s) and much more socialistic than it is today. Surely Israel can afford MORE vacation days and other social benefits today than it could 40 years ago. But the trend is exactly the opposite. Unfortunately we have a US educated prime minister.
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About the magnitude of US foreign aid to Israel and its role in the economy, here are some numbers:
Total US foreign aid to Israel: about 3$ billion / year. [1] Total israeli budget: about 100$ billion / year. [2]
Even though this is serious money, canceling the US foreign aid would not make a huge dent in Israel's budget. e.g. 3$ billion can be taxed by increasing the VAT from 16% to 18.8%. [3]
In addition to that, as someone who watched how this foreign aid budget is spent in the military, one dollar of foreign aid is worth MUCH LESS than one real dollar. Since goods must be bought from a specific purchasing catalogue, and this catalogue is both limited and has highly inflated prices. e.g. more than 2500$ for a standard IBM desktop PC.
I think this follows partly from the requirement that at least 50% of the manufactured goods must be made in the US. So many products are made in China, then shipped to the US for repackaging (where their price is doubled) and then shipped back to Israel.
Note also that a large part of US foreign aid goes to purchasing very expensive fighter jets (F-15, F-16) and spare parts. A hugely important goal of the Israeli air force is to have more F-16 planes than the egyptians have. But the Egyptians also get their aircraft from US foreign aid. My interpretation of this state of affairs is that main reason congress is backing both sides of this arms race is in order to take taxpayer money and give it to the military-industrial complex.
Sources: [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93United_States_re... [2] (sorry, hebrew only) http://budget.msh.gov.il/#00,2012,0,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0 [3] http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4234752,00.html
Update: Sorry, 3% of budget. It's less than 3% of GDP, but still a lot.
Israel's GDP is around 250$ billion. So US foreign aid is around 1.2% of GDP.
However, as I mentioned in the previous post, this aid does not come in the form of actual dollars but in the ability to purchase goods with highly inflated prices and some strings attached. I'm pretty sure Israel would happily trade 3$ billion of US foreign aid with 1$ billion of actual money.
re: vacation days & prosperous countries -- no, I don't believe the two go hand in hand (poor folk get all kinds of vacation days in the form of funemployment), nor would I consider the U.S. on average a 'prosperous' nation, I'm merely stating that had the U.S. suddenly had outside funding for it's military for the past ~$x years there'd be far more liquidity to spend on other things like one month vacations for everyone.
When you take the prior obligations of Social Security, etc. the budget gets much smaller.
As far as innovations go, you should go look at the demoscene and a lot of the goofy but useful JS libraries to come out (say, three.js which I believe is Spanish in origin). So, again, I'm not sure where you get that from.
That sense of entitlement and cushy job seems to prevent
people from taking risks. They'd rather just coast.
Why do you seem to be implying that there is a moral highground to more strenuous and miserable work?
I can only speak for the UK (and lumping all of Europe together is pretty foolish given that it has a range of countries from borderline 3rd world to international superpowers) but in London the tech scene is very much alive and well. I myself work for a middle aged startup (going through some horrible growing pains just now), I love to get involved in the London tech scene and I've talked with plenty of people doing well from startups.
PS: Per person the US government spends as much on healthcare as many countries with 'national' healthcare so we are paying for it even if we don't have universal healthcare.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/numbers?units=p
PS: As a sanity check. Federal (24.33 GDP -3.72%GDP given to the sates) State spending is 8.97% of GDP, local 10.69%, which adds up to 40.27% GDP. Note: Actual revenue is only 32.61% GDP because we are just borrowing that much money but debt does get paid back one way or another. http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/year_revenue_2012USpn_13p...
What? Citation needed? In some countries they give money to startups, not the other way around.
And how you you explain "high tax rates" when Barack Obama refers to some countries in the EU as a tax haven?
So I imagine it hinders people from creating startups, but at the same time it helps hire people into them.
The difference between the US & Europe appears to be Silicon Valley, not a sense of entitlement and cushy job.
Can we please take this tired, idiotic old meme out back and put a few rounds in it?
It found US and Australian workers get 10 public holidays, Canadians nine, Chinese 11 and Japanese 15. However, there are regional variations in many of these countries and employment laws differ as to whether workers should be paid for these holidays.