America needs to be more like Europe (lazier and less religious, for starters)

Great Debates
81

On second thought the US spends more on R&D than the EU (2.8% vs 2%) and the unemployment rate is lower in the US. However worker benefits, vacation time and whatnot are most likely better in the EU so that probably makes up for it.

Does the EU measure unemployment differently than the US? I thought in the US if you signed up for a temp agency or you stopped collecting unemployment benefits you were not considered unemployed. Also all the people who gave up and either quit looking or went back to college aren’t included in the unemployed roster either. I have heard it said that when you include all these people that the unemployment rate is a few % higher than the official rate. I don’t know if the EU has the same problem or if their 10% rate is the real rate, or if its a false rate too.

82

It’s in the ballpark. There are international measuring guidelines for unemployment, and those show roughly the same gap.

83

Ok, allow me to raise those hands just a little. Just using information posted by others in this thread BTW.

1)America is last in life expectancy of developed democracies. However, just by a little bit. Combine this with our higher murder rate and other cultural factors, and you might actually have a better medical system.

2)Note (From BG’s post) that America is first in University graduates amogst these nations. That may not be the same as affordable higher education, but perhaps it is mroe effective higher education?

  1. Who was it that mentioned that it is easier for immigrants to become American citizens than it is to become citizens of most European countries. I’m not sure how you measure tolerance…

  2. I’m afraid I don’t know at all what you mean by high levels of contentement with employment. Do you mean that unemployment figures double those of the United states are satisfactory in some way?

5)From the article that BG linked to, America has more patents and more nobel prizes than all of the EU combined. Again, perhaps that is not what you meant by high spending on R&D, perhaps that qualifies as more effective spending on R&D.

Not to prove you wrong, really. This is just to call into question the assertions you made based on information already posted in this thread.

84

This depends on how you look at the population. With a more static demographic in Europe, it may be easier to have the sort of “satisfaction” you are suggesting.

This is not the case. From other threads, the BLS polls certain families on a continuing basis. They ask for each person if they are imployed and if not when was the last time they looked for work. Anyone without a job who has looked for work in the last 4 weeks is considered unemployed. Anyone with a job is considered employed. Everyone else are not considered part of the job market.

85

pervert: With a more static demographic in Europe, it may be easier to have the sort of “satisfaction” you are suggesting.

What do you mean by “a more static demographic”? Europe is actually getting more immigrants than the US at present, and I believe their immigration rate from non-Western countries is higher. Are you just talking about lower population growth overall?

86

My appologies. Here is an abstract of a cite I will try and find a better one.

87

Speaking as one who has worked for quite a few years in Denmark, in Germany and now in the US, I honestly don’t think I produced any less output from my work in Germany & Denmark, even though I enjoyed the requisite 5-6 weeks of vacation (and do I ever miss those!)

Unless you’re doing mindless assembly line work, there’s simply not a 1-to-1 correlation between “time spent at work” and “useful output produced”. (And even not then.)

The US model - speaking strictly from my own experience with two jobs in corporate America - seems to burn off untold hours on accounting and verifying and quantifying the output of those in the organization who actually do the grunt work. Adding, of course, the requirement of the grunt workers to spend even more time filling out time charts and making status reports, and adding to the organization an extra cohort of middle managers to correlate and massage the numbers. All of this work of course adds to the GDP, but I’m not convinced it makes better (or more) products.

It seems to be a matter of extreme importance to “know the metrics” used to judge your work in order to benefit from the US system. Right now, I should be working on bringing an ailing, overloaded, unstable campus ATM LANE network up to an acceptable level of stability. (Well, right now, I’m at home with a cold. Pity me. Also, if I’m posting gibberish, it’s the fever.) This really should be the focus of my time. Instead, I’m doing cable patches, because a “low turn-around time on trouble tickets” is an important metric for our group - and so, we have to go gunning for the easy ones. I can fix 20 cables in the time it takes to figure out a deeper problem. It produces great metrics for our group and bad service for the company. And my boss as well as I are going nuts over it, but we can’t do a heck of a lot about it.

In Denmark or Germany, the boss wouldn’t use “metrics” as anything but an indicator, if that. He’d be expected to look at the entire operation, see who was doing good work and who was doing badly, see what was important and what wasn’t, and then live up to his manager responsibility by making the calls based on his own judgement, not some spreadsheet.

And don’t assume we were lazy just because we weren’t watched. The 37-hour work week is not for those who want to go places - even in Europe. If there’s a deadline to meet or a service window at 2:00 AM or a customer in Japan, you get cracking. (My first 40-hour-week job in years was here in the US.)

As for the “lack of incentive to succeed” due to taxation, I think it’s severely overstated. The need to self-realize is present or it’s not, and people will strive to succeed - even though the incentives may not be quite as tangible in Euros and cents. Some just want to make something cool (engineers), some want to be top banana (managers), some want to make a name for themselves (entrepeneurs). I sure know a few of all the categories. All of them are making a nice living, too - but that’s not what drove them.

I dunno. Both systems work and the differences aren’t as big as all that. But I sure miss my vacations.

88

As for unemployment rates, the OECD uses a so-called “standardized rate” to compare unemployment in various developed countries. As of August 2004, the rates for Western European countries and the US were

US - 5.4%
Austria - 4.5%
Belgium - 7.7%
Denmark - 5.3%
Finland - 8.6%
France - 9.6%
Germany - 9.9%
Greece - (no monthly number; 9.3% in 2003)
Ireland - 4.5%
Italy - (no monthly number; 8.6% in 2003)
Luxembourg - 4.3%
Netherlands - 4.7%
Norway - 4.5%
Portugal - 6.4%
Spain - 10.7%
Sweden - 6.3%
Switzerland - (4.3% in June)
UK - (4.6% in July)

EU area: 8.9%

So you can see that for most of Western Europe, the unemployment rate is nowhere near twice that of the US, and for many European countries it’s lower than that of the US. What mostly kicks up their overall rate is high unemployment in parts of southern Europe. In most of the former communist countries of eastern Europe unemployment is higher still, over 15% in several cases (and the former East Germany may still be pushing up the rate for unified Germany).

But the low rates in other countries make it clear that high taxes and good social services don’t necessarily produce high unemployment.

89

That, actually, sums up this thread quite well!

I think we sometimes overestimate the effect of government regulations and underestimate the effect of culture on the way businesses operate. I’ve done a lot of business in Europe as well as Asia, and have travelled to both places quite a bit. You really cannot just look at government policy and ignore cultural practices. A German company operates differently than a French or Italian or British company, and they all operate MUCH differently from a Japanese or Chinese company.

90

JM: I think we sometimes overestimate the effect of government regulations and underestimate the effect of culture on the way businesses operate.

Well, that’s kind of heartening, actually. That seems to imply that if we wanted to, we could push through legislation that would mandate a minimum of 3 or 4 weeks vacation for all workers (5 or 6 weeks still seems too sybaritic, sorry Norm ;)), and our wonderful American economy ™ wouldn’t sputter and die. If culture makes the difference, then as citizens we actually have more latitude to legislate more leisure- and family-friendly policies without dire economic consequences.

And come to think of it, we did pass the Family and Medical Leave Act in 1993, and it didn’t seem to kill our economy. So courage, folks, that extra couple weeks of vacation may be within our grasp after all! :slight_smile:

91

Ease of finding a job, protections in the workplace, overall job stress levels, job security, etc. Essentially just a description of how content people are with employment in their respective countries. Unemployment alone isn’t a good picture of employment contentment.

92

Here, Kimstu, are some more stats.

America has a much higher rate of new citizens. Just over 4 times the rate of our closest competitor Canada.

I/m not sure where you get your numbers, and this is not exactly what I was looking for, But measured in net immigrants per 1000 population the US is towards the top of this list.. Certainly more green that most of Europe.

My recollection of sites is that America imigrates more people than Europe in general. And that it integrates them into American life more efficiently. Perhaps I am reading too much into the fact that more people per 1000 immigrate here and we have a much higher rate of new citizenships here?

93

Ok, but you are mentioning several different things. How exactly would you like to measure these things. Are you talking about some sort of satisfaction poll? Measurement of stress, jobe security, etc.?

94

Untrue. Some if not many of the experiments in privatization have been an utter disaster; see British rail. Something that people often fail to recognize is that private does not equal free market: a private monopoly (which is what most privatized industries end up being, as infrastructure like rail and power are not conducive to meaningful competition on account of physical reality) is different from government-run in only one way: the introduction of a profit margin and motive, which is almost destined to translate to shoddier service at a higher price.

95

Actually, from the datas I’ve read, the productivity per hour is significantly higher in France than in the US. But the productivity per year (and when you read “productivity”, it normally refers to the productivity per year) is significantly higher in the USA than in France. Actually, it’s true not only for France, but IIRC, for most western european countries.

As for the two weeks of vacations, that would be a complete nightmare. I choose not to work full time because it seemed to me I could easily get away with less money, and getting a three days weekend is largely worth that money. What could I do with only two weeks? Maybe a couple visit to my family…When would I rest? When would I go on vacations? I would have the feeling I’m spending all my life working (house duties, paperwork, transportation, sleep, etc…easily eat up most of the time left at the end of the day), with only one remote positive prospect : retirment.

I would really have a very hard time adapting to long work weeks and essentially no vacations. I’m willing to lose a lot in income to avoid such a situation. I wouldn’t acccept it in exchange for twice as much money.

96

Be careful about falling into this trap. It is the same trap some Republicans fall into when they see a map of the counties of the United States colord for which of them voted for Bush and which for Kerry. You cannot look at Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway and say that their relatively lower percentages lowers Europe’s total while Germany, France and Itally have numbers which are clearly very close to double America’s. The EU total you posted is not far off of double America’s.

Wesley Clark, Do any of these statistics speak to your labor satisfaction number?

The United States is 16 out of 30 OECD countries in Labor Force Per capita. It should be noted however, that there is very little variation amoungst the countries listed.

When we look at the total labor force, however, The united states is at the top of that same OECD list by a very wide margin. What I am suggesting is that given that the United states has such a large economy / labor pool, it is not surprising that we show up lower in lists which are averaged on a per capita basis. Some things do not necessarily scale linearly.

When we look at long term unemployment (more relavent to labor satisfaction IMO) we find the United States 26 ot fo 27 OECD countries.

If we look at regulations, we find the United States at 27 out of 27. Frankly I am not really sure what this measures. It purports to be “This statistic is an average of “Regulation - Hiring”, “Regulation - Firing”, and “Regulation - Employment Conditions”. Nations are listed with an Employment Laws Index between 1 and 100. The higher the index, the more the nation regulates Employment.”

We could look at strikes, America is 11 out of 16 in a ranking of the five year average of days not worked per 1000 employees. That might be a relatively good measure of labor satisfaction.

I’m not really sure if any of these statistics gets us closer to a measurement of “labor satisfaction”. They might be a good starting point for discussion though.

97

OK, I admit I’m having fun exploring the www.nationmaster.com. :wink:

According to this, Americans earn $33108.13 per person while their French brothers earn $23705.34 per person.

The only way this is a higher rate per hour is if the French work significantly fewer hours.

According to this, however, Americans work 1792 hours while their French brothers work 1453 hours.

Now these statistics are from different studies so the rest of this is back of the napkin sort of thing. But it looks to me that Americans are producing about $18.47 per hour. Meanwhile the French are producing $16.31 per hour. Maybe you were thinking of different stats?

98

Actually, the laws that implemented the 35 hours week included provisions allowing companies to do exactly that. You would work less on average, but you wouldn’t necessarily be paid overtime if you worked much more during a given week.

99

Nice try. :slight_smile:

I just wanted to emphasize that while it’s realtively easy* to compare dry economic statistics between countries, there are cultural factors that play a big role, too. If Japan and the US had identical governments, it’s unclear that their economies would produce identical results. In fact, they probably wouldn’t.

*and even then, there can be arguments about measurement methods

100

I’m not convinced it’s related to Europe being better at managing and organizing these things. It’s only my guess, but I would suspect the real reason is that american employees believe that the world would collapse if they weren’t in the office for more than a week and their bosses prefer to have them around most of the time just in case all other employees would die suddenly from food poisoning.
I see so much of this attitude over here, despite the long vacations we’re talking about, that I do not doubt that this attitude is likely to be prevalent in the USA too. There are only so much things that can’t possibly delayed for one week nor done in advance, and only so much people whose work can’t possibly be done by someone else. Both conditions aren’t that often met at the same time, though a lot of people like to believe otherwise.
“Graveyards are full of people who believed they were indispensable”