Asymmetrical Information

To ask the obvious question, what is the statistic for the United States?

What alkali said.

Indeed, 15 and 64 seem like odd endpoints. In the US, at least, most don't start working until they finish school at 18, 22, or beyond. And many retire at 62 or younger. And, of course, a lot of housewives (insert obligatory "AND HUSBANDS" -ed.) stay home with the kiddies.

As the others mentioned, I'd think a large portion of the 15 to 22 population is in school, and that there are a sizable number of stay-at-home mothers (or fathers).

What's the source of this statistic, and in what context was it presented?

15 and 64 are reasonable endpoints if you are doing a global comparison; I would imagine that a substantial number of 15-22-year-olds are in the labor force in most countries.

What I'd like to know is: are the collection of useless parasites who blocked the Tour de France route a few days back while protesting the well-deserved fate of some neo-Luddite criminal considered "employed?" From what I've seen, the problem in France isn't the nominally unemployed, but the fact that the country is held hostage by unions who consider it a God (or, more to the point: Marx)-given right not to have to put in a decent amount of work to get paid, and that encourage that attitude in their members.

The US number is 77% (assuming 50-50 women/men, which I think is close enough to right), according to this

http://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/gender/Class_Notes_Feb_4.pdf

It may be defined differently than the source of the factoid given, but the number for France is also about 65% on this reference.

The structure of the French school system doesn't really permit students to have after-school jobs the way American kids do. School days don't usually end until at least 4 and often 5 (and that's in-class time, not sports/activities). Since the vast majority of businesses close at 6 or 7 PM, there's not much point for them to hire kids who can only work an hour a day, especially considering the labor system. Also, the kids in the vo-tech high schools (lycees professionels) don't tend to graduate until age 20-21, so you don't have a large population of non-college-attending 18- to 22-year-olds.

The French government also pays a substantial stipend to stay-at-home moms with three or more children, so the working-mother labor force is smaller. I don't think it's entirely fair to criticize them for having a smaller labor force when it's partly the result of a policy intended to prevent a future decline in the labor force.

Now the Netherlands, on the other hand, clocks in somewhere below 50% if memory serves...

Yes, that doesn't seem quite fair. As I recall, the normal French retirement age is 60, isn't it? And maybe 20 would be a fairer lower limit.

Of course, the low French retirement age itself is a legitimate point of criticism.

Well, maybe it's not entirely fair to blame them for the low percentage, but there ought to be some partially fair reason to blame the French.

Unions, low retirement age and stipends for stay-at-home mothers were mentioned. No doubt rigidities in the labor market--besides very strong unions--like restrictions on hiring and firing, less temp or part-time jobs and a bloated and expensive social safety net. And no doubt their corporate culture is constrained by the mentality of socialism.

Plus Americans thankfully aren't buying as much Brie and French wine lately.

Question two is whether it is better to have a higher or lower number. There are advantages to having stay at home moms, and there are advantages (obvious ones!) of retiring at 60.

If the number is 77% in the US, it could actually be upped to 113%. How this? Easy, because so many US citizens have to work at two jobs to make ends meet. Or buy more cheddar and wine collers.

Difference with US is about half and half mothers at home, plus unemployed.

Remember that when you say:

>>but the fact that the country is held hostage by unions who consider it a God (or, more to the point: Marx)-given right not to have to put in a decent amount of work to get paid

you ought to take into account that the French ahve a very different concept of what is decent, and working 60 hours a week and never seeing your kids doesn't really fit into it. The French movement in favour of more pay for less work predates Marx by about fifty years, btw.

but it is funny to see how they're circling the toilet, but they can't come up with a better reason that its all the US' fault!

its not through malevolence that france has lost "la gloire"... its from sheer laziness

go protestant (and protestant inspired) work ethic! (actually its more like asian- and jewish- mother work ethic! do your homework... thwack!)

no more normandies, no more dieppes, nato out of france, france out of nato (totally, completely, and declare them "outside of our protection and interest")

frog bstards

Longest-serving Labour Prime Minister, perhaps? He'd pass Clement Atlee (1945-1951) but Margaret Thatcher governed continuously for 11 years. I can't even think of a technicality that would disqualify her.

Now, was Margaret Thatcher really a Labour PM?

The French and the other Old Europeans are lazy, cowardly, and deceitful. We have known this for a long time. Just ask the Iraqis who yearned for freedom. As I have said many times before: The United States is the preeminent power in the world not necessarily by design---but by default. The French are far too lazy to handle any of these responsibilities.

The French can at least shut up and stay out of the way. Americans have serious matters to resolve. We don’t have time for parasites who wish us harm.

There have only been five Labour PMs, period, so it's a pretty small sample:

James Ramsay MacDonald 1924-25 and 1929-30/34*
Clement Attlee, 1945-51
Harold Wilson 1964-70 and 1974-75
James Callaghan 1976-79
Tony Blair 1997-present

*Was "National" party 1930-4

http://www.psr.keele.ac.uk/area/uk/pm.htm

Insufficiently Sensitive, what on Earth are you talking about? I named her as an example of someone who clearly beats Blair by the standard that was mentioned and doesn't beat him by the one I suggested.

I see now what happened.

I.S., Jane saw my note and edited the entry to add "Labour" before you replied to my comment.

This whole subthread may as well be edited out of the comments board as it contributes nothing but confusion from now on.

Few quick comments on the French economy and polity, which you can find fleshed out at my web-site, http://wwww.thebuggyprofessor.org Search the archives in the left-hand sidebar, the link to foreign governments: France, Germany, the EU etc.

1) When the big divide in post WWII economic growth occurred in the mid-1970s --- reducing it by about 75% in Japan ever since, and in the EU by about 50% for the big economies (Germany, France, Italy, and for a while Britain) --- about a similar percentage of the working population (18-65) was employed on both sides of the Atlantic: roughly 62-63% in the US and EU.

2) Since then, the US has created about 60 million new jobs, most of them well-paying compared to the average job in the mid-1970s (adjusted for 2001 dollars). Simultaneously, the influx of women and new immigrants into the job market raised the US job-participation ratio from 63% to around 73%. In the EU, by contrast, a combination of harmful influences --- high minimum wages, high social security taxes (far worse in Germany than elsewhere), lack of entrepreneurial spirit, a growing aversion to risk-taking, rigid labor markets generally (better in Scandinavia, Holland, Ireland, and Britain by far), and slow economic growth --- have combined to reduce the participation ratio of the working population to under 60%, with a slight rise in the somewhat faster-growing late 1990s. In places like Austria, it's even below 50%!

3) The result in the EU is permanent structural unemployment, long-term and almost always 50% higher than US unemployment (which is largely short-term, less than a few months), and sometimes double or triple it, which hits the young especially hard . . . as well as immigrant minorities, increasingly stuck in ghetto-like conditions, alienated, attracted to Islamist fundamentalism and even crime and support for terrorism. (Believe it or not, UN stats prepared by careful surveys of crime-victims at a Dutch university every 4-5 years --- again, see the buggy prof site here --- show that violent crime is much higher in most of the EU than in the US. The US, to put it bluntly, ranks about 13th among 20 or so industrial countries, far behind Australia, Britain, and lots of Continental countries on this score; and you are 6 times more likely to be mugged on the streets of London these days than you are in New York. The US population also shows the least worries about going out into public spaces of all the industrial countries, and the most confidence in our police. We do stand out in homicides as the worst offender.

4)A professor of political science at UC Santa Barbara --- with a Ph.D. as well in economics --- I taught at a French university in the mid-1970s, and even in those days, my students were discouraged by the job market. These days, unemployment in the roughly 17-30 years category is probably in the 25-30% range, and maybe higher: it's hard to tell, what with disguised unemployment, such as government-sponsored makeshift jobs for a few months that go nowhere and end, or endless enrollments in graduate programs that are fraudulent. (Even in the mid-1970s, to illustrate, there were more Ph.D. students in France --- a country of fewer than 60 million --- than in the US, with four to five times that population.) In Germany, the age students now get their FIRST degree averages 29 years! At this rate, in a couple of decades or so, you'll get your first degree at one end of the podium at graduation and sign up for social security at the other.

5)Along with Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland, the US is the only industrial country to have improved its growth of GDP and productivity since the watershed years of the mid-1970s. The dynamism of the US labor market is without parallel. True, the current job market has performed poorly since the end of the recession in the fall 2001 . . . actually worsening for a variety of reasons right through the spring of this year (since which time it has stabilized). The reasons are sorted out in a series on the US economy's short-term prospects that you can find at http://www.thebuggyprofessor.org. So far, four fairly long articles have appeared. Two or three more are planned.

6) That's the short-run. In the long-run, the rising trends in US labor productivity --- which has more than doubled since the lackluster days of the 1975-1995 period (when, however, new jobs boomed and offset this dismal trend) --- bode very favorable for the future of the US economy. In the short-run, as the buggy articles note, it's allowed US firms with so-so sales so far to get by exploiting the greater labor efficiency and not hiring back laid-off workers or creating new jobs. That, however, will likely change soon.

7) Those who think the US is unique in having women work are wrong. The percentage working in the EU, France included, is about the same as here. The difference? Much higher unemployment generally, which hits both women and men and especially young ones.

8) One other cause of the rigid labor markets in the EU: essentially, insider-outsider differences, compounded by trade unions, high minimum wages, and the high social security taxes mentioned earlier (some of which are being reduced on the Continent, and which are much lower in Britain and Ireland). Essentially, if you have a public-service job or a private job protected by unions, and have much seniority, you have a fairly cushy guarantee of holding a job, long vacations, and a good pension. The costs are then passed on to outsiders --- the young looking to start a career, immigrants, single mothers suddenly divorced and in need of a job etc --- who can't get jobs easily, if at all.

9) One further observation, which complicates the US job market right now: the growing adverse impact of Chinese imports, artificially boosted by the Yuan being tied to the dollar and hence way overvalued. (The same is true of Japan, despite the floating nature of the Yen: the Japanese government has spent over $70 billion in Yen to buy dollars and keep the Yen cheap). In the long-run, a prosperous China will help the US economy: we have huge advantages in high-tech products, whether manufactured goods or services. In the short-run, the problems of the import surges from China and the rest of Asia are causing a big backlash here, and you'll find an article at the buggy prof site on this . . . a lengthy exchange with a visitor on this problem and what can be done about it other than outright protectionism. (I've also posted a lengthy message on it, about the same length as this one, in the latest article at Arnold Kling's very good site, http://econlog.econlib.org/)

-- Michael Gordon
The Buggy Professor

The comments about retirement age and schooling are beside the point. Or, rather, they are the point. The age range for this statistic should be set as wide as possible, I'd argue for 12 to 70, perhaps, but that's probably too unreasonable given western notions of child labor (but that's the point as well). The statistic is designed to give an estimate of the utilization of the potential labor force, and thus show how "hard working" a country is. Obviously, things like retirement laws, public pensions, schools, and, I would argue, child labor laws are one of the key elements modifying that percentage. Since France is a democracy and free to change its laws I think it's perfectly fair game to set the limits that broadly. I think some people think this statistic might be trying to poke fun at how "lazy" the French are (or aren't) individually, and there the detractors have some decent points, though, again, France is a democracy...

Also, note that while the difference between the American and French numbers is only about 11%, it's more appropriate to compare them proportionally to each other, and by that measure you see that if America had France's population it would have an 18% (!) larger labor force than France, and if France had America's population it would have a 16% (!) smaller labor force than America. And finally, since the US is 4.7 times more populous than France that 18% boon is magnified, so that the total number of surplus jobs America has is equal to fully 87% of the size of France's entire workforce. In other words, because Americans work more, and because there are more Americans, America's working force is bigger by nearly an entire "French workforce" than America's workforce would be if we worked only as much as the French.

You follow? Neither did I... Anyway, let's flip it around, what would be the relative advantage the other way? A France with an American work ethic (and laws) and an America with a French etc. Well, there the ratio of workforce sizes would be only 71% (!) of the ratio of the real situation. So, an American sized France would have a much smaller workforce than America and a France sized America would have a much larger workforce than France, pile those on top of each other and its clear that you get a dramatically different relation in workforce size as compared to now. Specifically, an American-work-ethic-French-work-force (or AWEFWF as I like to call it, for, ummm, convenience I guess) relative to a FWEAWF would be less weak (or much stronger, if you like) compared to the existing relationship, by about 40%. So a France sized America vs. an America sized France would be 40% "stronger" workforce comparison wise than France vs. America is today. Which is interesting, I think.

Anyway, the point is that either way you slice it, difference in work ethics plays an important role in the relative sizes and strengths of the respective workforces. Compared to a universal work ethic, America wins big and France looses big.

>>Compared to a universal work ethic, America wins big and France looses big.

Some people don't regarding working 60 hours a week and never seeing your kids as "winning big".

Very, very few people anywhere, let alone America, work 60 hours a week. Strictly speaking, the figure under discussion doesn't seem to include a measure of how much each worker works, only that they do work. If you did did take that into account, and calculated some sort of "average hours worked per week per able bodied individual" I suspect you'd see an even greater difference than 18%.

In response to your glib comment I will add my own: most people do not consider being limited to working only 35 hours a week or less and suckling at the teat of the government for damned near everything of necessity as all that great either.

Also, if an American (or Frenchman for that matter) worked 60 hours a week for several years they would, barring gross financial mismanagement, be able to retire quite early in life. Additionally, 60 hours a week is only 50% more than a normal (American *snicker*) work-week, unless it was very oddly scheduled it would still leave quite a lot of time in the evenings or weekends to see your kids. Figure in travel and whatnot each work-day (say an hour or two) and you get at most (assuming a non-insane commute) maybe a 1/3 to 2/5 decrease in "seeing the kids" time per week. But I suppose that sounds a lot less dramatic than "never seeing your kids! ever!"

"Very, very few people anywhere, let alone America, work 60 hours a week."

Correct. It's still true, however, that *all* the income gains of the lower middle class and poor in the United States since the 1970s or so are due to rising work hours, not increases in their pay rate.

French productivity is virtually the same as ours.

40% of men working in managerial or sales positions do more than 49 hours/week, according to a random website which shows up on a google search for "Americans work 60 hours a week". I'd guess that means that a material proportion of them do more than 60 hours, and that this would account for a fair chunk of the difference between USA and France.

An unlinkable random website?

Well gee d2, that "unlinkable random website" sounds very, very reliable, let's just assume that information is 100% accurate until it's proven otherwise. Oh, but wait, as I pointed out, work hours are not a factor in the statistic under discussion. If they were, of course, the difference would be even larger. According to an "unlinkable random website" (ok, well, here) US workers work ~2,000 hour per year on average, while French workers work ~1,656 hours per year. Put that on top of the other stat and you get a 43% difference in "average work hours per year per work capable person" between the US and France. Now, take that and factor in the population difference and what you end up with is an American work force which puts in two whole extra "French economies" (or the French and German economies put together, if you prefer) worth of work-hours than a fictional America which worked as much as the French do.

You might think that this last is a somewhat odd and questionably useful statistic. But consider how it plays into trade disputes and suchlike. If adopting European work norms would hurt us much worse than even a full severing of trade, then they have almost no leverage to get us to adopt such norms.

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