431–440 of 462 posts
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America needs sane ("first world") labor regulations (mandatory vacation/sick time, longer maternity/paternity leave, etc).
I have come to believe, for better or worse, that you cannot be the leading economical force with those things in place. I think it is needed for that.
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It's a common meme. The entire financial industry is only about 11% of the GDP (or around 7% if you use a different statistical method). That includes insurance, pensions, etc. The idea that Switzerland is propped up by tax evasion simply isn't true. The UK thought it was true and actually wrote proceeds from better Swiss cooperation over banking records into their budget .... then discovered there was a huge shortfa…
OK, but if a larger percentage of Swiss residents emigrated there for the favorable tax laws than emigrated to the US for the same reason, that could inflate Swiss GDP, i.e., make the Swiss per-capita GDP an overly optimistic measure of what life is like for Swiss residents who haven't acquired wealth outside Switzerland.
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I don't think trolling. I'm just saying I like being busy. I don't want hour and half lunches at the cafe. I don't want 6 weeks a year off. I like working, I like making stuff and I like making money. I like resting too. I rest especially well when I'm tired from work. It's a good feeling.
"You guys are lazy. I like work... because I'm American" is a pretty garden-variety troll.
I do like working. And this is a traditional characteristic of Americans. With all the America bashing that goes on (some admittedly deserved) this is a thing I'm particularly proud of about my country. I'm proud of what we have invented, what we have achieved in very short period of time. I'd like to be part of that tradition.
Your trolling accusation is entirely unfounded.
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This is laughable... I only checked your link and saw Poland's bottom 10% having a better life index than France's bottom 10% by quite a wide margin, and Poland's top 10% having a better life index than France's top 10%. It's a complete joke. There are at least a dozen countries I'd rather live than in the US when it comes to well being. And that's not bad by the way, for a country of over 300 million, to rank top 5…
How much do you know about life in Poland? It's a rapidly developing country. You might be surprised.
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The vast majority of Americans simply do not have that choice. They can't go to their boss and say, "hey boss, I want to take a 10% pay cut and get an extra 2 weeks off." American work culture simply doesn't allow that.
Any smart boss with decision making power should instantly give workers an additional 2 weeks off for a 10% pay cut. (Assuming the workers work more than 20 weeks a year and their duties can be taken up by someone else). It's pure profit at that point. That aside... there is always a choice. Don't ever think otherwise. You don't have to stay there. You don't have to drive a nice car. Always a choice. It's just a matt…
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A social structure that works well in a city of 100000 people will not be able to work the same way as a city with a population of close to 4000000.
Again, I don't see why it can't scale. Whether you've got 50 blocks of city employing a specific social structure or 500 blocks at a ground level its the same. Granted mega cities add a level of complexity, but on a very broad level I don't see why people here thing you can't scale a system employed by a 8m country to say 80m. Its just more of the same.
Imagine you had 1 team of 10 people working on ABC, or 100 groups of 10 people, working on ABC, yet having to cooperate between groups. It's really hard, it creates all kinds of friction, you need all kinds of overhead human capital to organise everything, everything moves slower, there's more resistance to change, and various of the smaller groups create their own working cultures and approaches, and squaring all of that into one cohesive vision is really tricky.
Then consider that companies are relatively dictatorial compared to the runnings of most OECD countries, where a CEO has more power to simply lay down a vision and expect everyone to get behind it, much more than a president or prime minister doing so.
I think that's mostly it. For a more academic approach look up diseconomies of scale, although I'm sure you're already familiar... It also applies to government. I do agree with you though, to a large extent I think we can scale, but there are limits and disadvantages at some point.
Beyond that I think to a large extent the differences can be numerically explained. It's not true that small countries do best across the board. Germany does better than Italy, Kenya does better than Malawi, China does better than Vietnam who does better than Cambodia etc... all larger countries that do better.
But imagine you have a list of 10 'large' countries, and 100 'small countries'. Obviously the large are less common, after all only two countries have more than 1 billion people, no other ones more than 500m, only 3 other countries have more than 200m, while more than 100 countries have less than 10 million people.
So imagine 10 large and 100 small countries, and they're randomly distributed. The chance of a small country in the top 10 is very large, as it is to be in the bottom 10, while for large countries the chance is really small to simply end up anywhere. Yet if you break up the US into 100 little regions of a few million people, like about 80 countries on the planet, similar to say Norway, Singapore, Finland (all 5m ish people), or Iceland (300k), you'd surely have many of those little regions hitting top 10 rankings for standard of living. Places like greater San Fransisco would probably do quite well.
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OK, but if a larger percentage of Swiss residents emigrated there for the favorable tax laws than emigrated to the US for the same reason, that could inflate Swiss GDP, i.e., make the Swiss per-capita GDP an overly optimistic measure of what life is like for Swiss residents who haven't acquired wealth outside Switzerland.
GDP is not a measure of the static wealth of the citizens of a country, it's a measure of economic activity (literally adding it all up).
Regarding (1), it is possible that living in a tax shelter gives residents without a fortune more opportunities to make money than living in a country like Germany or the US does, but I lean towards the possibility that per-capita GDP is simply inaccurate or flawed as measure of the economic prospects of the residents who don't have fortunes.
Also, Singapore's per-capita GDP is very high compared to the personal income of its human residents (I have read) and I figure that was because a large fraction of Singapore's businesses are owned by non-Singaporeans (which has been the case, BTW, since Singapore's founding by British trading interests).
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Pretty obvious no? Switzerland is a smallish country that acts as a moral-free world bank. It's easy for them to become rich in that situation.
Where I live, "moral-free" is called "immoral".
In other words, not all money held in Switzerland is ill-gotten - they don't care either way.
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The difference is in Switzerland you don't have to be mega rich to have a good life and because those places don't have different laws than the rest of the US, they only compare if you're rich enough for laws not to matter, at which point it's a moot point. Even the rich won't get paid leave or sane taxes or decent working hours, so to be comparable the level of richness has to put one beyond the necessity of work. I…
Can you explain how you think you need to be mega rich in America to have a good life? Most of the US has a low cost of living compared to eg Switzerland. In most of eg Texas - most of the US actually - you can live well on $50,000 to $60,000 per year. You're aware I'm guessing of the economic metrics of the top 50% in the US? It seems obvious to me that in fact you do not have to be mega rich to live well. The top 8…
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And the solution is not to split the country but to fix the broken system. Leaving aside the preposterous rewriting of U.S. history in your comment (the US was never like modern Switzerland, even when it was significantly more homogenous), your goal is not possible with the current size and cultural diversity of the US. If you want social safety nets, you need a homogeneous culture that stresses (irrationally) not ta…
I came from the other end wherein I believed social safety net and welfares breeds parasitic behavior. But now I've come to believe the benefits of those programs outweigh the negative aspect where a section may starts taking undue advantage of it. In the absence of such safety nets, I think people will go for more safer bets which make them financially stable as opposed to riskier bets which may bring innovation but…
Without a strong common culture that solves the prisoners dilemma of social safety-nets, they will collapse. If you want Switzerland, you need Swiss.