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Agreed we shouldn't cherry pick countries. One interesting thing about France and Australia is that by the Ease of Doing Business Index over the last decade, F
by brownbat 9y ago
Agreed we shouldn't cherry pick countries.
One interesting thing about France and Australia is that by the Ease of Doing Business Index over the last decade, France is gaining on but still behind Australia. (FRA: 44 -> 31; AUS: 6 -> 14).
So suppose we agreed France was performing worse economically than Australia over the last decade. Then we might conclude that absolute position matters and liberalization is important. Or we might as likely conclude the complete opposite, that gains on the index don't matter and liberalization isn't important.
And that's not even bringing the Economic Freedom Index into things, which has a radically different ranking based on similar criteria.
It's almost as if a lot of of what people believe about economics on both sides is under-determined by the available evidence.
But eh, maybe that's too cynical. That's just two countries. I'd really like to see some data analysis on how much "ease of doing business" (or some similar metric) matters to GDP--and maybe also to surveys of feelings of job security / satisfaction as well. Looking across most countries, maybe hard patterns would emerge. Or maybe economics is all noise unless you're at Weimar levels of malfeasance, who knows.
South Korea, Georgia, and Macedonia have skyrocketed up the EoDB chart, so I guess for any of us who suspect there's a sufficiently strong link, we have an opportunity to put our money down.
- tajen 9y agoAnother relationship to study is between the quasi job-for-life laws we have in France and being the country with the most population under antidepressants in the world.
- Steve44 9y ago> France and being the country with the most population under antidepressants in the world. I was intrigued by this and decided to have a look at the figures and I can't find anything to support your statement. Where do you get your information from? From Business Insider graphing OECD figures for the number of people per 1000 who take antidepressants shows France to be 50/1000 which is 16th from the top. http://static3.uk.businessinsider.com/image/56b381f7dd0895c4558b46b0-1200-1183/ti_graphics_antidepressants-chart.png http://static3.uk.businessinsider.com/image/56b381f7dd0895c4... Directly from the OECD site is a page showing the dose consumed per 1000 people. It's very similar to the above, possibly the same data source but they are supposedly measured in different ways. https://asset.keepeek-cache.com/medias/domain21/_pdf/media2317/359829-ngn8xxdpav/large/186.jpg https://asset.keepeek-cache.com/medias/domain21/_pdf/media23... They both show France uses a lot less than many other countries,less than half Iceland and bout 2/3rds of the UK, Sweden, Canada and Australia.