- no federally mandated six weeks of vacation time (though 4-5 weeks are the norm, even in private sector)
- University tuition has been introduced recently (though still low, but will rise as obvious source of gov revenue)
- Free nursing care / child care for a small percentage of toddlers only
- No labor minister of that name (he is undersecretary) etc.
The University tuition is about €500/year.
Nursing/Day care for the kids (we have 3.5 and 1.5 year old kids) is from free to €200/€500 per month for both of them (it depends of your income and where you live).
For the title "minister" or alike, this is always a translation issue, it is always hard to map the name from one country to another because the same name may mean something different (Prime Minister in UK and France for example).
vacation = 2 weeks
personal time = 6 days (sick time is considered personal time)
holidays = 7
We have also time off that I don't know how to categorize. It's specific to universities.
university shutdown between Christmas and New Year's = 7 days
Memorial Day until Labor Day we leave at 1pm on Friday, assuming no critical work needs to be completed.
University tuition ranges and often includes housing, which is necessary in less urban areas. $1000/class would be on the low end.
Day care for our 4.5 year old is about $250/week.
My work week is 40 hours but we're strongly encouraged to take a 1 hour lunch. However, with the exception of one other person in my social circle, everyone else works 45+ hours weekly.
EDIT: Applied line breaks again.
Really? I'd think campus housing would be more necessary in urban areas, just to provide subsidized living space in often expensive areas. I go to a rural university, and there are more than enough apartments around--just living by myself, I'm paying less than half for a studio apartment than I would for a bed in a dorm room.
Here in Pullman, Washington, student housing is cheap and readily available just because there's so much room to expand. There's always a wheat field you can turn into an apartment complex somewhere.
Developing in non-urban areas would be really subject to local zoning.
In any event, remove housing from the university cost - e.g. a student living at home - and you're still looking at a low of $10K per year. ($1K/class * 5 classes/semester * 2 semesters) That's not accounting for probably another $300 in miscellaneous fees. Factor in books and it could easily add another $500/semester.
You can probably find some scenarios in which the cost is lower, but $10K is really "bargain basement" nowadays in the US.
Maybe he was trying to be polemic?
I still agree with the sentiment of the article. European societies sacrifice a bit of growth potential and individual freedom to get better living conditions for all. I think that's a wise move, and going over the board into the opposite direction, as America sometimes feels, has the potential to truly damage society as a whole.
Economists can tell you that this can't scale up to the whole world. Paul Graham's article explains it very well. (The following is all quotation; I'm not italicizing, in the interest of readability)
If you want to reduce economic inequality instead of just improving the overall standard of living, it's not enough just to raise up the poor. What if one of your newly minted engineers gets ambitious and goes on to become another Bill Gates? Economic inequality will be as bad as ever. If you actually want to compress the gap between rich and poor, you have to push down on the top as well as pushing up on the bottom.
How do you push down on the top? You could try to decrease the productivity of the people who make the most money: make the best surgeons operate with their left hands, force popular actors to overeat, and so on. But this approach is hard to implement. The only practical solution is to let people do the best work they can, and then (either by taxation or by limiting what they can charge) to confiscate whatever you deem to be surplus.
...
At a minimum, we'd have to accept lower rates of technological growth. If you believe that large, established companies could somehow be made to develop new technology as fast as startups, the ball is in your court to explain how. (If you can come up with a remotely plausible story, you can make a fortune writing business books and consulting for large companies.)
Ok, so we get slower growth. Is that so bad? Well, one reason it's bad in practice is that other countries might not agree to slow down with us. If you're content to develop new technologies at a slower rate than the rest of the world, what happens is that you don't invent anything at all. Anything you might discover has already been invented elsewhere. And the only thing you can offer in return is raw materials and cheap labor. Once you sink that low, other countries can do whatever they like with you: install puppet governments, siphon off your best workers, use your women as prostitutes, dump their toxic waste on your territory-- all the things we do to poor countries now. The only defense is to isolate yourself, as communist countries did in the twentieth century. But the problem then is, you have to become a police state to enforce it.
I find that assertion illogical. If I raise the income niveau of low wage workers, income inequality does go down. I don't have to keep the top down to reduce inequality, that's just nonsense.
The interesting question is where that money will come from. Increasing lower wages take away from the income of the companies they work for (those people are usually not self employed). So what we will see is a little less income for large companies and their owners, who form the very top incomes anyway. Also, note that the incomes of the top 1% do not really affect the median (and also the average, to a lesser degree) income all that much.
I don't see how that is fundamentally keeping innovation from happening. Founding the next MS might be a little less profitable, but I don't think it'd have kept Bill Gates from doing what he did if he had a billion less by now. Also, Microsoft is quite the counter example: they pay their workers comparatively high wages.
As for the practical effects: I think we can see that Europe (and in particular the more egalitarian Northern Europe) does not necessarily fit his description of a poor country only offering raw materials and cheap labour. There is also lots of innovation happening, not necessarily in IT, but in other sectors (machine engineering, medical, the whole car industry, ...).
So, I think the theoretical point is illogical, and practice shows the effects it predicts do not happen. Colour me unconvinced.
The interesting question is where that money will come from.
That's quite the point. And to the degree that you limit income or profitability, you make it less likely that businesses will take risks.
Founding the next MS might be a little less profitable, ... we can see that Europe ... does not necessarily fit his description of a poor country
He also makes the point that this isn't binary, it's a spectrum. Making things "a little less profitable" makes innovation a little less likely.
Microsoft is quite the counter example: they pay their workers comparatively high wages.
A counter-example of what? I don't see how that relates to the argument at hand. We're discussing systemic inequality of income; the fact that one employer or another has different philosophies of compensation has little effect on the range of incomes through the USA or the world.
The problem with sacrificing growth rates ought to be that interest accumulate -- that is, Europe becomes further and further behind.
But that seems to be countered by a variant of "second mover advantage" -- it is easier to grow fast when you are far behind (see e.g. China).
The Americans might be beating down the path for us. Who knows how slow we would otherwise move...?
Would be interesting to read a serious analysis of this.
In Spain (another socialist economy by the article standards) University tuition is something between 600-1000 EUR a year and has not risen for a good decade now (except for the inflation).
Which is utterly false. The author is confusing business sector output and GDP.
It is 24 working days and since Saturdays count as working days: 24 / 6 = 4
It is called "Bundesurlaubsgesetz" -- my translation: Federal Vacation Law.
Does anything like that exist somewhere else?
Generally, if you live in the southern part of Germany, you also get several catholic hol(i|y)days, no matter if you are catholic or not.
Depending on the state you are living in you also get between 9 and 13 holidays. Some of those will fall on weekends from time to time but six weeks (30 days) of paid vacation seem not all that unrealistic in a good year (i.e. many holidays not on weekends) if you live in Bavaria (that’s the state with the 13 holidays, eight of them not on weekends in 2010, ten in 2011, twelve in 2012 – some great years coming up ;-).