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	[quote name="Zebco Fuckface"][quote name="Lizard_King"][quote name="Zebco Fuckface"]France isn't the economic nightmare conservatives think it is; French productivity is close to that of the US, and higher than the UK's. Unfortunately, I can't find the source for this at the moment; I remember it was in an OECD table.[/quote] Individual productivity, sure. I can believe that. I bet I'd be more productive per hour if I only had 30 hours a week to work in, and was getting paid overtime for each hour beyond that. But I'd have to be delusional to think that an employment framework like that was efficient in the long term. It is the general economic stagnation, based around structural problems like the fact that the only growth sector at any given time in a long while has been the public sector, which creates the illusion of a profitable balance of employment in the country. The picture gets much worse when you remove the massive proportion of people that are simply representing a recycling of tax money rather than wealth creation. [quote]If you want to criticize France, criticize them for their unemployment rate. Those who do have jobs make about the same that we do.[/quote] Totally in agreement there. [/quote] You're right, marginal productivity goes down as hours worked go up, and this effect is noticable in European countries; lots of marginal workers (teenagers and other extremely low-wage types) that would have jobs in the US are out of the labor market, but the effect isn't that large. You could argue that our 40 hour work week is "inefficient in the long term", after all, using the exact same argument that their 35 hour work week is; it's just a societal decision where to place the cutoff. And plenty of sectors in France have had growth; French income does go up, year after year. Heck, check out this <a href="http://www.demographia.com/db-ppp-usf.htm">chart</a>; French GDP/capita as a fraction of US GDP/capita has stayed pretty much constant from 1975 on. It's not a super-strongly sourced website, but it's an example of what I'm talking about. As to "recycling tax money," I'm not sure what you're talking about; the market value of public goods and services isn't zero. Anyway, France isn't the backwater third-world hell people imagine; they're nearly as rich as we are. Most significantly, European median income is pretty much the same as ours - it's just that our average is a lot higher. Our rich are a lot richer, and our poor are a lot poorer.[/quote]