Have no cite-------just personal experience. I did service work for old farts for 10 years.
It always amazed me that those who worked the hardest, kept their noses to the grindstone at jobs they didn’t really like and finally reached their goal------retirement with nothing to do------usually died within 6 months of retirement.
Because they never learned how to “play” for their dotage.
I felt so sorry for them sitting in their expensive condos or in their cheap trailer parks -----the wife in charge now. Nothing to do, nowhere to go. Had not a clue as to have fun.
Everyone should start “playing” no later than 50. Use it or lose it.
I have to say though that even if the life expectancy was lower in France I’d still rather have a normal Joe Soaps’ working life in France that the US.
Naturally I’m speaking as a person who also comes from a country were you can’t just be fired on a whim, has a mandatory 21 days (it can and does go higher but this is the minimum) holidays with 9 publics one added and a pretty good safety net if you lose your job. The main difference is that my country unlike France has one of the healthiest rates of growth in the world for the last 10 years and basically full employment.
Thanks, yojimbo. Half of your work is done, ombre3. Now all you have to do is provide evidence that the difference between France’s and the US’ divorce and mortality rates are due to overwork, and not things like, for example, stricter French divorce laws or diet.
Keep plugging away there.
Wasn’t always so, though, was it? My wife’s family came to America some time ago in large part because the economy of your blessed isle sucked horribly.
The turnabout came because Ireland instituted some supply side reforms and attracted investment and industry. In other words, they became far less like France, and a good bit more like the U.S.
Off the top of my head, I think French divorce laws are a bit tougher, but there’s also a certain culture which says that cheating is acceptable, at least for some social classes (at least for men). Also, I’ve heard (no personal exprience here, so take it for what it’s worth) that there’s more focus on appearances in marriage: that even if the couple dislike each other, you have the requisite kids and ignore each other.
That’s why I said 10 years. Ireland was basically a 3rd world economy till the 70’s-80’s.
No question about it but both workers and non-workers have maintained and in most cases strengthened the benefits and protections that are alien to the US model but very similar to France. Any government who tried to get rid of them would fall very quickly. The public want them as I’m sure the French do to.
Low corporate tax, lower wages(relative to the US), English language and high level of education have helped turn it around. The low tax rates being the most important.
Anyway, this is about the Frogs and their patch not the Paddies. Sorry about the hijack OP’er.
I don’t know much of economics but some of the comments here seem to get a bit far fetched.
As I understand it, the French Model is roughly the Gaullist economic system starting from late 50s and early 60s. It is conservative, meaning that the state has a strong influence towards companies, the economy is protectionist and public sector big with high tax burden. It is also characterized as very resistant to communism, but on the other hand also rejects free market liberalism. Liberals often tend to call these types of economic systems socialist, but this isn’t true as a real socialist system would have all means of production including every company and also the fertile land state-owned. Of course this has never been true in any capitalist European country. What we are looking at is a capitalist system with certain elements of socialism. This can clearly be seen in Index of Economic Freedom which shows French economy as only “mostly free” when compared to liberal economies like those of US, UK and Australia. What’s interesting is that many countries with huge public sectors giving social benefits and welfare, like Germany, Switzerland and the Nordic five are also up there in the free bunch, thus showing that the US-style market liberalism isn’t necessarily the only way to economic freedom. Of course the French system also provides the world’s best healthcare and very good education, so it can’t be all bad.
France isn’t without problems: as everyone has already noted, the 10% unemployment rate is way too high, especially as it has been so for the last 15 years. This also ails much of the other European countries, as do the high dependency ratios. Answers to this kind of problems aren’t simple; if there’s actually no available work, who are we to tell the constanly looking-for-job unemployed that they just have to work more and everything’s well? On the other hand, not everything looks so grim: after all, the French workers are significantly more productive than workers in other countries. See for example this PDF form UK statistics where it’s shown that an average French worker is clearly more productive than British or German one, although American workers get an edge here; but furthermore (page 4 of the pdf) the French workers are above all others in productivity per hour worked. Difference to an average American worker is about 15% which isn’t a small amount in any way. One could argue that this actually represents both the success and the failure of the French Model: even though the French workers are more productive than everyone else (possibly because they have the opportunities to relax), they work less and vacation more, which gets things more even, and the fact that so many people are out of employment means that much of this extra wealth gets “wasted” to unemployment benefits and other associated costs.
Partly correct. Frecnh rate-of-growth was disappointing for the whole 19th century, and almost negative between the beginning of 20th century and the second world war (but all of the western world had very low birthrates during the 1930s). After it, though, France experienced a massive natural population growth between 1945 and 1970 (roughly), which has never fully stopped, although 1970s was a low time like, again, in everywhere of the western world. France’s sudden post-WWII booming growth both in population and economy was the reason why they allowed so many North and West African immigrants to pour in the country in 1956-1973 period. The African/Arab immigration has long since been effectively stopped because of all the problems it creates, and today the majority of new immigrants coming to France are European or Asians, especially Chinese. They don’t have much unemployment.
About pensions/retirements, I had always thought that the American savings rate is low, even alarmingly so, while Europeans (and Japanese) tend to make sure they are saving a lot. Also what you are saying about dodgy goverment promises might be true somewhere, but at least not here in Finland: yes, our national pension is state-funded, but that only kicks in if you don’t have any kind of other pension safety. For the normal working person, their pension comes from the worker’s pension system that they themselves have funded during all their years in workforce. Effectively this isn’t much different to putting some of your money away to wait for retirement.
You are fascinated by that term, ‘old Europe’. Does it mean Western Europe, European Union, former EU-15, continental Europe, the old EEC-6, Franco-German cooperation, or what? Does it have an opposite, and if yes, would that be ‘new’ or ‘young’ Europe? Because according to Wikipedia, these terms are coined by Donald Rumsfeld, and in his usage Old Europe refers to those countries who opposed Bush’s Iraq invasion, while the supporters are then New Europe; or when the terms are used in a more sober way, the old Europe is that Western Europe that wasn’t part of the Soviet Bloc before 1989.
Either way, speaking of Europe or even parts of it as if every country was similar is misleading. The demographic crunch is sure to create problems for everyone, but the size of those is probably exaggerated here. In fact, if today’s trends are anything to believe in, France might very well to be the one European country that has the least to fear demographically. Look at CIA’s total fertility rate estimates and noticeably France has the third highest fertility in Europe just below Ireland and Iceland. Compare this to any of the so-called new Europe countries, which have really appalling fertility rates, along with Italy and Spain. Germany also has rather low fertility rate. But France is much closer to USA than most of Europe in this measure. And here are some Eurostat figures from 2004 to show what effect these differences have to annual population increases, or, as is the case with much of Eastern Europe, decreases.
I don’t disagree that Ireland is a good country which market liberalisation has also made wealthy, but isn’t it a bit unfair to disregard the effect that large amounts of EU financial aid have had in boosting the Irish economy? It’s no coincidence that this process began soon after Ireland joined the EEC in 1973 and started receiving many forms of European aid for several decades.
True and false. I am an American and have only a few tens of thousands in the bank. That is to say in savings. I have several hogsheads of money is the market, something only rich people tend to do in Europe and Japan. In America, ‘normal’ people own shares.
My mother has lots of money in the markets, and even more in equity in her house. She feels these pay better yields than a savings accounts.
So in both cases, our savings rates are low. However when we buy a new car, we pay cash. We are doing OK.
I somehow doubt it. There’s no law I’m aware of that would prevent you from divorcing if you wanted to, whether or not your spouse agree. So, apart if the procedure takes a longer time in France than in the USA, I’m not sure how french laws might be tougher.
Actually, it’s not a hijack, since it shows that you can have both long vacations and a low employment. Hence that if there’s a issue with the “french model”, it’s not vacation time (or the safety net, etc…).
But it’s not true in France. Well… the pensions are also based on what the workers paid in the worker’s pension system, but the current pensions are actually paid by the current workers, not by some investment fund. So, ten or twenty years down the road, people retiring might want their money back, but it will have been used to pay current pensions, and their own pensions will have to be paid by the future workforce. So, a dramatical drop in the employed/retired ratio will indeed result in an unability to pay pensions as high as expected, or for as long as expected (retirment age being normally 60 ) or might require to bleed the workers white.
In one line you’ve completely dismissed France’s social policies as being part of the problem?
Of course you can have long vacations and low employment. France’s unemployment isn’t because they have long vacations. France’s unemployment is due to excessive taxation, a large percentage of the population that’s unemployable, and the difficulty in creation jobs because the job market is too heavily regulated.
One thing some Europeans don’t seem to understand is that the US has a welfare state too, although less cushy than in Europe. If you lose your job you get unemployment benefits, there are social security payments for the retired and disabled, there is food assistance, housing assistance, social services, goverment provided health care for some people, job training, etc, etc.
It isn’t like if you lose your job you’ll be living under a bridge with your starving children the next day. The unemployed poor in America are the fattest poor people in history. The statement “The US has no social safety net” is flat-out false.
What does the thread title mean? Is what a “failure of the ‘French Model’”? I assumed “this” meant the recent riots, but gitfiddle explicitly says in the OP, “I’m not questioning the riots.” And the OP presents nothing else that can be clearly identified as “this.”
BrainGlutton, you do have a point. It seems every day on the news and in the newspapers here in France, there is a new strike, another protest, and another statistic about unemployment. I was so emmersed in the issue, that I lost sight of the fact that everyone else might not be.
I come from a state’s rights state so there is not much talk of unions. I come from the South, where people often seem to look at protests as rude (that’s not a fact, that’s an opinion…when there are four or five people standing in front of city hall with signs about war or jobs, people tend to look at them like they’re foolish). It’s because of that, I felt that this is all huge, when it very well could be (and I’m often told it is) normal for the French. As someone told me today, France is the Country of Strikes (“Pays de la Greve” – sorry I don’t have accents on my keyboard).
That said, you can see from the conversation what my question is about.
Yes, the current situation is quite normal, protest and strike-wise. It’s what I’m accustomed to. I used to work near the Parliament, and there were protests all the time under our windows, ranging from a couple dozens to a couple hundreds of thousand people.
Actually, I’m pretty happy of the protest/strike culture in France, and would be very dissapointed if people stopped marching in the streets each time they’ve some reason to be angry. Thats just part of the local mores, and very healthy in my opinion. It doesn’t mean there’s no “malaise” currently but it doesn’t result in an abnormally tense situation.
(An abnormal situation would be strikes in several major sectors at the same time lasting for weeks, like during the winter of 1995 when 2 millions workers went on strike, in particular in the public sector, Paris was essentially paralyzed, major protests were held everywhere, and with more than half the population supporting the strikers despite major inconveniences)
