Since this thread has already been taken off-topic about France’s “socialist” policies, I’d like to point out that using GDP-per-hour-worked as a metric is a great way to statistically hide your economic problems if one of the root causes of these problems is precisely the low number of hours worked. Which is the case for France (35 hour work week and all that) - the OECD gives 1,482 hours actually worked, on average, per worker per year for France (in 2015), compared to 1,790 in the United States. Combine that with earlier retirement (effectively 59.4 years for men in France, versus 65.9 years in the United States), and you’ll see that the average French worker produces considerably less GDP per capita over a lifetime than the average American worker. Which is part of the causes of France’s problems.
Working less is a bad thing?
Indeed. When you squash a great many humans together into a small space, it can lead to trouble.
Yeah, really. Most American workers don’t actually have a choice. The way the standard salaried position works, since the company is paying the worker’s health insurance and other bennies and a fixed salary, the company has the incentive to try to make each worker work as many hours per year as feasible. That incentive gets passed down through the management chain to your direct manager and in some jobs, it’s going to work out to a lot more than the standard 40 hours per week.
Even if it is the standard 40 and 2 weeks vacation, that’s 2000 hours per year.
If we really can get paid the same amount per hour, work only 1400 hours on average, and have health insurance, why not? Sounds pretty sweet. Basically all of the surplus GDP America produces doesn’t go to the highly productive workers, it goes to the company owners, which is precisely how capitalism works and is supposed to work. It’s even in the name…
If you want to boost your country’s competitiveness relative to other countries that work more, yes.
The point is: Can you? And can you sustainably, i.e., not just temporarily (even if the temporary period may run for many years) with the costs of the party simply being rolled over to the next generation by simply piling up debt? Many say you can’t.
Perhaps not. The USA is also piling up debt, because the voters are basically short sighted. A big chunk of the voting pool are senior citizens, and to be fair, they will likely die before any long term benefits from *not *piling up debt are reached. That is, if they raise taxes today, and cut spending (which means reducing the biggest ticket items - social security, medicare, and the military) to balance the budget, current senior citizens will get less than they are getting right now. So they will vote against it. And so on and so forth, into the future, as the debt piles higher and higher.
At each point it’s still more short term profitable to kick the can further down the road and borrow more money.
The sad thing is, the USA is fantastically wealthy. It could easily raise taxes a bit on the wealthy and balance the budget. For that matter, it could raise the taxes a little further and provide universe healthcare. (especially since it wouldn’t cost that much since under a single payer system, the government does not pay retail prices for healthcare)
How would you become more competitive by working more? It has been pointed out that France has one of the highest productivity per hour worked, while for instance the USA has one of the highest yearly productivity. Let’s assume French people work 1500 hours/year and Americans 2000 hours/year. Given that french people have a highest productivity per hour, it takes them one hour to produce one widget out of thin air, so the production cost of the widget is one hour wage, let’s say € 25, and they produce 15 000. If they begin to work like Americans, presumably the productivity/hour will fall accordingly. So, in 2000 hours, they will produce 1900 widgets, each taking a bit more than one hour to make, hence costing about € 26.3 to produce.
So, France became more productive (and presumably French workers come back home with a higher pay), but less competitive (so maybe the French workers will in fact lose their jobs because their widgets won’t sell and the company will go bankrupt)
Also consider that working more for more money doesn’t necessarily translate to an improved quality of life. In many cases, quite the opposite (Cats in the Cradle and all that). So to trade a somewhat lower GDP (whether total or per capita or per hour or whatever) for a higher quality of life isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Don’t confuse that with standard of living, which the USA tends to excel at while coming in quite low in quality of life measure. The difference is that standard of living is quantitative and generally based just on income and what that income can purchase (square feet per person, house size, number of bathrooms, cars, appliances, etc.) whereas quality of life is inherently qualitative (time spent with family versus commuting/driving, physical and mental well-being, having nice places to walk to or live in, variety of entertainment and restaurants nearby, etc.).
Besides, what this gets down to is the potential collapse of our economic models due to automation and concentration of wealth. That’s a discussion for another thread, but it’s related to the fact that workers are in general more productive than their ability to consume all of the products/services they produce. So if the benefits of such productivity accrue only to the top business owners, then it throws a monkey wrench into a system that requires everyone to work at 40-some hours a week just to be considered a contributing member of society. It may be necessary to literally spread the wealth through shorter work hours, more vacations, basic income, or some combination of them all just to keep everything running, so to speak. Heck, in the 1950s they predicted we’d only need to be working 20 hours per week, or maybe even less by now.
Right. Since the 1970s, productivity per worker has doubled while pay per worker has stayed about the same. (the delta is going to the rich capital owners. Where do you think the billions of dollars controlled by billionaires comes from? The money in a billionaire’s portfolio is mostly in assets, tangible and intangible. Somebody created those assets. If a billionaire owns a bunch of factories, somebody built them, and made all the machinery in them. If they own a bunch of houses, somebody made them. If they own a bunch of IP, same deal. For the most part, *most *of the assets a billionaire controls they did not create themselves)
So it would be completely possible to do what you describe, and having people living the same standard of living for half the work. Well, at least on paper. I do admit that the various attempts at this have had some serious problems.
What is the purpose of economic activity? What is the meaning of life?
While the U.S. is ahead of France by many measures, the poverty rate in France is 8%; in the U.S. it is 15%. France’s life expectancy is 82, vs 79 for the U.S. Under-five mortality is .65% in the U.S. compared with .43% for France. The high costs of education and healthcare are much less pressing concerns in France.
… And the French have more leisure time! If this were assigned a dollar value, France’s economy might be seen to outperform the U.S.!
Yes. When statistics are shown to demonstrate American prosperity, arithmetic means are often used — these give great weight to billionaires. I don’t think the American economy is so magical for people with low-paying jobs.
The average French worker produces less over a lifetime than the average American worker, simply because the average French worker works less. The statistics are quite clear and consistent on this. Normally, this should mean the average French worker should have a considerably lower material standard of living, simply because that standard of living has to be produced somehow. But of course French workers (and voters) want to eat the cake and have it at the same time: They want few work hours per week plus generous annual leave, sick leave, and strike absences plus universal healthcare plus early retirement plus the same present material standard of living as other countries which have much less of the aforementioned. That can only be done bykicking the can down the road, piling up debt, either explicitly (in the form of government debt) or implicitly (by hiding debt in the form of burdens for future generations in pay-as-you-go social welfare schemes). French politics is doing both to an irresponsible extent.
You’re entirely missing my point. You’re simply arguing that “it works right now”. Well, it does, but that is bcause France is kicking the can down the road by piling up explicit and implicit government debt. The blessings of the French system that you describe are funded on credit, it’s as simple as that, because at the end of the day the material standard of living has to be produced somehow. Of course a lot of countries are funding their present lifestle on credit, but French politics does so to a particularly large and irresponsible extent, and if the country does not change course, then France will be the next euro area country in line, after Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Cyprus, facing a full-blown economic crisis.
I can fully see the point that having more leisure time adds quality of life, and have never argued otherwise. My point is that French workers want both: They want leisure time plus the material standard of living that money buys, without working enough hours to earn that money which buys that standard of living. That’s the irresponsible part; if French politics were simply doing a choice between two options in a trade-off situation, that would be fine; but they want to eat the cake and have it at the same time.
And the US isn’t? It’s all a matter of priorities. Just that the European social democracies are prioritizing the welfare (literally and figuratively) of their citizens instead of an overbloated military and corporate cronies. We’re just as much on a trajectory to economic (and social) crisis, but only because the powers that be want nothing more than to cut taxes for those who need them the least.
Also you seem to be confusing standard of living and quality of life like I mentioned earlier. French standard of living metrics ARE lower than in the US, correlated to their lower amount of working hours, but they traded that for higher quality of life. That’s beautiful cities and countryside to live in, a huge focus on food quality and culture, language, arts, and family. Quality over quantity. The value of a culture can’t be measured on the dollar value of what they produce alone, that’s a very puritanical view of things.
I think the point a lot of us are making that you’re missing is that quantitative metrics aren’t everything, especially if you get more bang for the buck, so to speak, in one place versus another. It’s the same situation with healthcare, just because it’s the most expensive in the US doesn’t make it the best. Just because salaries are so high in the SF Bay Area doesn’t mean they’re the most productive. They’re wasting that on painful commutes and insane housing costs.