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Those policies are discussed in the open, don't generalize your countries dysfunctional political culture to the rest of the world. Also, don't assume then that
by brnt 6y ago
Those policies are discussed in the open, don't generalize your countries dysfunctional political culture to the rest of the world. Also, don't assume then that your legislators considered the externalities such as poverty and working poor of such a disparate society.
Europe is fine, don't confuse the absence of tophits for an absence of a strong middle class. I'm tempted to say Europe is in fact one of the most resilient economies at the moment for this reason, but that is not a very relevant debate here.
What people need should be for them to decide. Staying with your newborn until the age of 1 does not seem wildly out of the ordinary for us a species (we notably born prematurely anyway). And then requiring equality also does not seem unnecessary to me ( in order to give families the choice of whose career to sacrifice).
You couldnt demonstrate better why I will never leave Europe for work, I just don't share that Protestant work ethic to which so much seems to be sacrificed. There are other things in life. Perhaps not yours, but certainly in mine. I wish everybody to opportunity to have a life outside of work, even if they decline to make use of the right.
- jariel 6y ago"Those policies are discussed in the open, " It's the opposite. French labour policy for example is a giant political boondoggle. It's one series of short-signed populist back-room deals after the next. What 'serious reform' looks like is the 'Hartz concept' [1] - nothing like it exists really in the rest of the EU. The results of French labour policy mean consistently almost 2x the unemployment rate of US/UK/Germany, for example. [2] This is not an example of 'strong' it's an example of 'very weak' and it hurts quite a lot of people. A perfect example of shortsighted, populist, untenable policy: Hollande's 'Supertax' on the rich [3]. This was an an act of self-destruction, not construction. While Hartz is widely viewed as being a giant success, none of the French economic reforms made sense, and none of them have helped. And FYI Europe doesn't have a middle class, and remember includes places like Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Greece, S. Italy which are actually quite poor. European nations individually have 'decent' Gini coefficients, but if you do the 'EU-wide' coefficient it's quite bad. Average Slovak is nowhere near the average Swede. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartz_concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartz_concept [2] https://data.oecd.org/unemp/unemployment-rate.htm https://data.oecd.org/unemp/unemployment-rate.htm [3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/31/france-drops-75percent-supertax https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/31/france-drops-7...
- ebalit 6y agoThe EU gini coefficients don't seems that bad [0]. Did you take into account the difference in the cost of living in the different countries? [0] http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?lang=en&dataset=ilc_di12 http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?lang=en&data...
- inglor_cz 6y ago"Europe" in the sense you speak of just isn't. EU as an economic space has huge internal periphery with all the typical problems thereof (high unemployment, flight of young qualified workforce elsewhere). It is quite easy to visualize, actually. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Unemployment_statistics_at_regional_level https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... My wife is a huge fan of Spanish culture. We travel there often (pre-Covid, but hopefully also post-Covid). Andalucía is by far the worst region in Western Europe I have seen, as far as hopelessness and lack of future prospects goes.
- brnt 6y agoObviously Europe is not perfect, and any huge area has different problems, some large. But the specific problem I was responding to isn't, and may very well be the opposite (in large parts of Europe at least, Andalucia is of course well known for its problems, even within Spain).
- jariel 6y agoWho'd have thought that warm weather causes unemployment? Or perhaps being a post-Roman nation causes unemployment? Even though I'm partly kidding, I'm partly not. Some of these things are so consistent, I wonder if we gloss over them and should contemplate they are underlying issues whereas 'employment policy' may be less relevant than we think. Maybe in some cultures people like to work more than others.
- inglor_cz 6y agoWell Gibraltar has practically zero unemployment and actually needs the Spanish workforce from La Linea and Algeciras to commute in daily...