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Comment by speedgoose | Hacker News Reader

Why US can't have better parental leave policies when Greece, France, or Mexico can?

> Nevertheless, the participation of Greek women in the labour market continues to be 8-10 percent below the average of E.U. countries

Unemployment in Greece is nearly triple what it is in the US (14%).

Policies don't exist in a vacuum. Everything has trade offs. Until you accept that you'll never have a productive honest conversation.

[0] https://ideas.repec.org/p/wiw/wiwrsa/ersa06p257.html

I don't understand the logic. Because Greece has some issues with its women employment rate, USA can't do anything about parental leaves? You even suggested in your initial post simple solutions for this problem, that work in other countries.

It's a damn clear logic to me. --Employers show reluctance to hire women of certain age--. It is same in India with govt's liberal policy of maternity leave, overall employment rate of Women has gone down.

Resources do not come out of thin air. Something has to happen for it to change:

1) Govt provide income to family engaged in child raising activity. -Need high level of tax base and political support to actually fund it.

2) Govt open free and quality child daycare. - Again need political support and competent administration to do it.

3) Force private employers to pay. - Only business survive are with high income and revenues. Not gonna work with conservative politics.

4) Go back to old joint family structures where grandparents stay in same home with couples and provide "free" child care. - Needless to say absolutely not gonna work. Its antithesis of progressive vision of society.

5) Keep giving examples of other countries. Useless until one look at whole societal structure and find why many other things work in USA but not in those countries.

> Its antithesis of progressive vision of society.

Could you expand a bit on this? My impression was that it just became a cultural norm in places that could afford this, driven by the basic need to cultivate own "spaces".

According to [1] USA is 86th in the world according to unemployment. Most of the countries with lower unemployment than USA have paid paternity leave. Please stop cherry-picking, you're not fooling anyone. 120 counties in the world have paid maternity leave, often about a year or more of it. That includes countries with higher standards of living than USA.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemploym...

Everything is on the margin.

All else being equal, providing a large benefit that's most likely to be exercised by one type of worker will discourage employers from hiring that type of worker.

This shouldn't be complicated or controversial. It's basic incentives.

Perhaps you are artificially limiting the scope of what incentives/disincentives exist with regard to parental leave such that your ideological model is maintained. There certainly seems to be a significant amount of evidence to suggest your fears are unfounded.

If you're going to cherry pick irrelevant metrics you can also say that higher gun deaths are related to lower unemployment. Just shoot your way into a job promotion.

> Unemployment in Greece is nearly triple what it is in the US (14%).

This implies that Greece's unemployment is a result of their parental leave policies, which is, of course, not true at all.

Greece is used as an example particularly because of its bad economy; If a country that's doing as badly as Greece can do it, why can't the US?

If you want examples of "successful" economies doing it, there are plenty of those too.

You might not want to use Greece or Mexico as a good example. One is literally a 3rd world country and the other had to be bailed out by the EU. So, no they actually can't monetarily support those policies.

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