Zebco Fuckface wrote:


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 chart; 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.