Europe scares me. We joke about how great it is to have several weeks of vacation a year and 36 hour work days, but there's a reason we don't. Apparently, Western Europe has a birth rate of only 1.5 children per woman of child-bearing age! (You need 2.1 to maintain the population, and that's about what the US has right now.) They have tons of people who've been unemployed for over a year. I'm a fan of social services, but I definitely think Europe has taken things too far. We need to balance them with self-sufficiency and productivity.
Or maybe I've just been brainwashed by childhood indoctrination about our frontier culture.
The interesting side of this from an engineering perspective is how hard it is to take away social services once the population's gotten used to them. It reminds me of worksheet I once saw in the Sacramento Bee that demonstrated how hard it was to balance a budget: You had a bunch of services, and you only had so much money. For each item, you had to decide whether to cut an essential service or increase taxes. It made it a lot more clear why we can have budget crises.
Comments (3)
But wait, doesn't the 36 hour work week and 2 months of vacation in Europe every year actually create jobs? If you limit the amount that someone can work to 36 hours a week, don't you need to hire more people to fill in the other hours of needed manpower? Isn't Europe's high unemployment rate due to the fact that (1) social welfare in the form of unemployment is widely available; (2) the high tax rate required to pay for such services drives people to unreported black market jobs; and (3) European labor is comparatively expensive, compared to 3rd world labor?
Posted by echan | June 17, 2005
Oh, I didn't intend to imply a direct cause-and-effect there. It's a collection of issues that I kinda mashed together.... though that's partly because they're all intertwined: People can afford to work fewer hours because there are more social services, for instance.
I'm not saying I fully understand the problem.. Just that I have a bad feeling about it. :)
Posted by ToastyKen | June 17, 2005
It's a collection of issues that I kinda mashed together Actually, I think Matthew Yglesias has written quite a bit about how we Americans have a tendecy of convoluting European style healthcare, European style labor laws, European style welfare, European style healthcare, and European style other things just because they're all sort of distinctly European and are rooted in a related group of attitudes. For Europe they're a tangled mess, and it might be difficult to extract empirical data about one or another policy from their system. But the emotional roots of a policy does not definite the policy, and I bet we could adapt a lot of European policies while not touching the really messed up ones. More vacation is quite possibly one of them. As we transition to an increasingly intellectual economy, I think it's going to become important for people to get more vacation.
I really don't understand the connection between the vacation and the low birthrate. I think there's got to be somethign else going on their, fundamentally cultural.
Posted by SSR | June 17, 2005