Comments on: Europe Still Better Than Here, FYI

By: pain

pain — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 03:39:43 +0000

@Koko Goldstein Okay, so I have to admit, when I first watched that movie, I was all, “noooo! he’s too ollldddd!” so I rewatched it last week and now I’m thinkin’ “Yeeeahhh, Brandon!” I wish I could come to your marathon.

By: cmcm

cmcm — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 09:43:00 +0000

@forget it i quit Also I am allowed to carry over 5ish days but they really just want you to use they. I should mention I work for a university, and in the UK.

By: cmcm

cmcm — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 09:39:53 +0000

@forget it i quit Btw I work in London. So the idea of only getting a certain number of sick days boggles my mind. Here, if you are sick they’re like ‘do not come to work and infect everyone else please!!’ I think they expect to see a doctors note if you’re out for a few days but you’re not penalised for having been sick.

By: stuffisthings

stuffisthings — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 19:32:14 +0000

@deepomega Yes, except that in a country with no paid vacation “lie”, if you go to your boss and say, “Boss, I can’t come in tomorrow, I need to take care of my sick kid,” they can say “OK, then you’re fired.” Whereas in any other developed country, they will say, “OK, take some of your legally-mandated paid time off!”

I specifically said about eight times, I’m not talking about recreating the whole social democracy model. I’m talking about bullshit arguments for why some SPECIFIC POLICY will not work in the United States, e.g. the “small country argument.”

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say something like “We should have a maternity leave policy more like Sweden’s.” For someone to then come back and say “Oh that policy would never work in the US because Sweden never had an enserfed peasantry in the 17th century” or some shit like that, it’s bullshit.

Especially because the very same people who make those kinds of arguments against Euro-style welfare policies are the ones who are then most likely to turn around the advocate an identical package of neoliberal policy prescriptions for any country in any economic situation (not necessarily talking about you @deepomega, so don’t get offended).

(Anyway, actually-existing social democracy seems like a better model to shoot for than the utopias imagined by libertarians, republicans, communists, anarchists, etc. Not to mention that historical evidence suggests it’s a more “natural” endpoint for economic development than Anglo-Saxon liberal capitalism.)

By: Logan Sachon

Logan Sachon — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 19:10:12 +0000

IT WILL BE A LONG LOOP (ricks is always dreamy)

By: deepomega

deepomega — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 18:52:50 +0000

@stuffisthings Did I use the word lazy, or decadent? No. Stop acting like this is some culture war bullshit. I think there should be a mix of economies and welfare states in the world. I DON’T think you can say “look, Germany is great!” and act like there’s no larger economic context (pharmaceutical companies and biomedical research, shit just the US’s research university system in general) that they are drawing on. Economics isn’t simple, and when people say “why can’t we just replicate the European social democracy” I want to shake them.

Re: vacations, see what I said below. Paid vacation is a lie.

By: stuffisthings

stuffisthings — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 18:44:55 +0000

@deepomega Look, we can play this game all day. You take away Norway because of the oil fields, I give you Denmark. You want to talk about Germany’s banking system (which, I would argue, is a mess), I’ll give you French total factor productivity.

The point is: lots of other countries at broadly similar levels of development to us have policies that would be nice to have over here, and the reasons people give for why they “wouldn’t work” over here seem incredibly flimsy to me. Especially the “small country” argument.

Japan has a statutory minimum 10 days of vacation. So does South Korea. (USA: None) How do they slot into the “lazy, decadent European city-state” trope?

By: deepomega

deepomega — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 18:27:09 +0000

@stuffisthings Listen, I’m 100% on board with broadening risk pools, decoupling health insurance from jobs, etc. etc. etc. But picking “socialized healthcare” as the cause of their low unemployment feels as arbitrary as picking “low immigrant population” or “not very many black people.” (As does assuming that all economic differences are because of policy, instead of, say, Norway’s insane oil fields and Germany’s insane banking system. In fact, I’d say Germany is basically the New York state of the EU.)

As for healthcare – I’m not 100% on board with saying “Canadian health care is better than the US” – it DOES have wait times, and that may be a trade-off we’re willing to make, but let’s not act like it is “the same only cheaper.”

By: stuffisthings

stuffisthings — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 18:20:25 +0000

@deepomega Or think about it this way: what is it about the specific policy in question that means it can work in a small country but not a big one? What is it about Norway’s small population that allows them to take more vacation days than us? Why can Canadians support a single-payer health care system that delivers better care at a lower cost with 35 million people, but we can’t with 300 million? Why can Denmark maintain full employment despite a very high minimum wage, high taxes, and few natural resources, but huge, diverse, naturally wealthy America can’t?

It’s especially silly considering most of these things seem to be clear cases where economies of scale would apply. Consider: would you rather be in an insurance pool with 5 people, or 5,000? 5 million or 300 million?

By: stuffisthings

stuffisthings — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 18:15:53 +0000

@deepomega That makes sense if you’re talking about, say, Luxembourg, but not a country of 6 (Denmark), 10 (Sweden), 17 (Netherlands), 65 (France), or 82 (Germany) million people. To say that each of these is a totally unique case from which we can learn nothing is a bit ridiculous. Especially when, compared to the US, they all have a number of differences in common (e.g. vacation days).