Lizard_King wrote:

Zebco Fuckface wrote:


You're right, marginal productivity goes down as hours worked go up, and this effect is noticable in European countries; lots of marginal workers (teenagers and other extremely low-wage types) that would have jobs in the US are out of the labor market, but the effect isn't *that* large. You could argue that our 40 hour work week is "inefficient in the long term", after all, using the exact same argument that their 35 hour work week is; it's just a societal decision where to place the cutoff. And plenty of sectors in France have had growth; French income does go up, year after year. Heck, check out this chart; French GDP/capita as a fraction of US GDP/capita has stayed pretty much constant from 1975 on. It's not a super-strongly sourced website, but it's an example of what I'm talking about.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any online charts that deal with France alone, but it is this sort of thing that I am talking about. Some of that is surely Germany, but France must have a role in that pattern. While the American economy has its own distortions, from massive defense investments to an inefficient court system, I don't think they begin to measure up to having the massive percentage of capital locked up in socialist redistribution/minimally profitable (not that you could tell from any of their numbers) government enterprises.
As to the number of work hours...well, the reason I say that is that you will always have a hard time convincing me that a blanket government legislation about that can be as efficient as a more individualized level of choice. You can, of course, take it to absurd extremes, but when such a vast percentage of the economy is working overtime pay as a matter of course, it can't possibly be an efficient framework. It's like if every American industry were ruled by the UAW, x10.

As to "recycling tax money," I'm not sure what you're talking about; the market value of public goods and services isn't zero.

It's not zero, but it is a lot harder to calculate and justify (in terms of the balance between the money invested and money made) by its very nature; the hidden costs of having entire industries backed by the government dollar and therefore cheating in terms of marketing their products (as Airbus does quite brazenly) are difficult to quantify. We have our own comically inefficient government welfare, such as, oh, our farm industry, but it pales in comparison to its European counterparts.

Anyway, France isn't the backwater third-world hell people imagine; they're nearly as rich as we are.

Fair enough. It's still full of French people, which qualifies as some sort of hell.

Most significantly, European median income is pretty much the same as ours - it's just that our average is a lot higher. Our rich are a lot richer, and our poor are a lot poorer.

There are a lot of factors that tie into such an outcome, but one's ultimate opinion of it relies a great deal on ideological convictions about egalitarianism. Regardless, I am not saying that I want the Europeans to become like America; if it makes them happy and keeps them fed, more power to them. I simply wonder how sustainable their methods of doing things is in our steadily more globalized economy. Continually raising trade barriers is only going to play for so long. Again, America will have a lot of problems adapting to genuinely hungry competition again, but the French and EU will be significantly worse off.