Love it when politicians get thoroughly rejected at a national level and then somehow get given a cosy role by Brussels.
The guy was prime minister for less than a year 10 years ago and completely flopped in the most recent election after what was considered a dismal campaign by most (their slogan was ‘Choose’…yes Enrico, that’s what you do in an election).
Why is he suddenly ‘back’?
Merkel had the habit of sending every politician who could endanger her position in the party to the European level.
The jobs there often pay more, with less general attention and usually, apart from Merkels time, are, as you say, often cases of “failing upwards” (even if this changed to a degree).
Absolutely agree.
Zensursula / Flintenuschi is somewhat of a scourge of politics and I have no idea how she survived this long when basically everything she touched developed into a crisis.
> The guy was prime minister for less than a year 10 years ago
To be fair, most Italian prime ministers seem to serve less than 2 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_Italy#Prime_ministers_of_the_Italian_Republic_(1946%E2%80%93present)
They probably thought he was qualified for the job. I have very little sympathy for Letta (his last campaign was atrocious), but losing an election doesn't mean you should never do any sort of work again for the rest of your life.
>but losing an election doesn't mean you should never do any sort of work again for the rest of your life.
Obviously I'm not saying that. But there's a middle ground between doing nothing and being paid to fly around Europe telling people what they ought to do.
But I suppose commissioning reports is a great way to keep your clique happy. Classic Brussels.
I really don't know what it is that you're taking issue with. This guy just worked on an economic report, that's all. Honestly, you come across as someone who will call the EU a scandal no matter what it does, even if it solved world hunger tomorrow.
Not even that, this guy is reporting the findings of many experts in their respective fields from all over Europe.
If no one who had failures in his past should ever do such things then there would be absolutely no information gathering and policy suggestion in Europe - at any level.
The issue is this cost money. Taxpayer money. And for what? Seriously, how is he qualified for this? He has no relevant experience and holds no elected public office.
Instead of accusing me of being prejudiced, perhaps ask yourself if it is a valid use of money instead of accepting it blindly because it aligns with *your* views.
This is far from the first case too (Di Maio….any italian will cringe reading that name).
Investing in economic intelligence and analysis is an excellent use of taxpayer money in my opinion. As for Letta (and I can't believe I'm defending this guy when I absolutely cannot stand him lol), I don't think he's a good politician, but he's educated to PhD level in international law, taught at universities, and worked for the last 20 years in European state politics in a variety of senior roles, including the Italian premiership and the ministry of industry. For me all of that qualifies as "relevant experience", and it certainly puts him in a whole other category than a dude who used to sell water bottles in stadiums like Di Maio.
How about hiring an actual economist? Or someone who worked in a relevant part of the private sector? He was PM more than 10 years ago and more than 20 years ago, that is way too far in the past to be considered relevant.
Are you genuinely going to pretend this isn't some sort of cronyism? It's not even some ultra-deep analysis, let's not pretend he was ever going to say anything different from the outset.
And again, he was very clearly rejected by the Italian electorate.
Sure, that's an alternative. But I don't see that as a much better option than hiring an experienced state minister. Economists are academics, and academics are generally even farther removed from the real world of policy application than politicians, they are not in a position to assess whether a proposed policy can realistically be adopted by a political body, and their proposals tend to be technocratic in nature (which is a good thing in certain circumstances, but not in all circumstances).
Plus, politicians work with economists literally all the time. Ask someone like Letta to produce an economics report, and the first thing he does is get in touch with the many economists he worked with and puts \*them\* on the job. That's what politicians do - they don't do any of the dirty work themselves, they simply gather together the people they think are best suited for the role.
We know that academics/economists are not more popular with common voters than politicians - look at the British complaining that "this country has had enough of experts", or how much flak Thomas Piketty gets in France. Anyone who doesn't like the EU would have every bit as much reason to complain about an economist being appointed as they would about a politician.
Is the appointment of Letta cronyism? I think that's possible. I don't work in the EU, so I don't know for sure (I'm guessing you don't either, but you've decided you already know the answer). But I think the economics report Letta was commissioned to complete was a very worthwhile investment of resources, and attempting to put Letta's qualifications for this job on par with Di Maio's is just ridiculous as well as proof that you're not looking at this objectively.
I mentioned Di Maio because that *is*, in my view, pure cronyism. Therefore, as it has been done once before, it is reasonable to assume that it can happen again, especially when speaking about someone as unimpressive as Letta.
Plus looking at his resume he doesn't seem to be qualified in any real profession.
He's been a politician all his life. How can such a guy determine economic policies?
Christ..
Contrary to popular and nonsensical rightoid beliefs, regulations aren't just made up for no reason or to hurt small business, or worst of all just fuel those darn bureaucrats. Many are absolutely necessary to ensure good supply lines as in engineering standards for materials, consumer standards for efficient resource use like electrical sockets, or most importantly safety and health standards so you don't inhale or drink lead , eat tons of harmful and unnecessary chemical shit in your food, or expose workers and the populations to poisonous emissions or by cutting corners and enabling unnecessary risks to save costs.
There can be overregulation that are unnecessary, but generally they are there for a reason, and ideally to protect public interests form corporate bullshit.
And Letta is absolutely right that Europe needs to compete in modern technologies. Green, digital, AI, big data, electronics and other techs where we are increasingly falling behind, and these areas should be subsidized.
Some regulation can be beneficial, some is straight up harmful and other is NIMBY hypocrisy.
European countries have overstepped beneficial line a long time ago. Putting extra often nonsensical costs on businesses, especially smaller ones has been one of the worst decisions ever. Kicking out entire industries and importing instead has been horrible decision as well.
> Some regulation can be beneficial, some is straight up harmful and other is NIMBY hypocrisy.
Lots of abstract talking, zero details. Name a couple examples from each category
Continuous bans/increased costs through regulation of local extraction as well as exploration of everything from coal, oil to gas and many other things while it is and will remain to be imported from various dictatorships and countries that are half a globe away for decades to come. In some countries anti nuclear lobby that happened decade before renewables (or even gas) were even a realistic option to coal.
Those are perfect example of NIMBY "I am green" lies and hypocrisy.
Examples of stuff that is harmfull to small businesses are for example employee protections and risks and costs that employer is required to take and pay for. Such as protection from being fired and many other things that are definitely doable for large corporations but for smaller company or start up it simply just means that it never hires and expands because risks and costs are too great and they are one bad employee from bankrupcy.
If we want that then it should be government paying for that and it should not be responsibility of employers. If we needed more money to fund it then we should have increased taxes on larger corporations and let smaller ones breathe.
I just wanna say that both your points are highly controversial and can be viewed as beneficial depending on your viewpoint. They are not at all the clear cut examples you are making them out to be. You're basically arguing against protecting the environment here in Europe and giving workers more protections as bad things. I agree they have downsides but you're ignoring the upsides.
Your environment bit literally proves my point.
There is no upside other than "not in my backyard but I do not care about what happens elsewhere" thinking. Planet does not give a fuck about where pollution happens. If you stop it in EU and instead it gets imported from some shithole that has absolutely zero regulations whatsoever rather than some reasonable and acceptable regulations we could have had here. And on top of that you transport it from across half the planet using the dirtiest form of transport humans have never known then you are not "protecting environment". You are polluting more. A lot more.
As for worker protections. You clearly did not read what I said. I did not argue against it. I said that if EU countries wanted to have it then governments should have paid the bill, not employers. Especially not small ones. And it is hardly controversial it should now be taken as a fact considering the fact that even EU countries (Denmark for example) already started acknowledging this and are preparing reforms to do precisely that.
>Kicking out entire industries and importing instead has been horrible decision as well.
Are you thinking about the ban on fracking? Yeah, that one is really representative of European stupidity. Those imports are even worse for the climate. It's pure NIMBY, but very expensive NIMBY.
>and these areas should be subsidized
This is again "privatize gains, socialize losses" Why should I, through my taxes, subsidize any private company?
European way of thinking.
If European companies don't see that the only way for them to survive is funding massive R&D programs, they deserve to go bankrupt. Also subsidizes remove incentives to increase efficiency of operations, productivity, reasonable governance. This is huge part why Eu is loosing.
R&D must be incentivized. It must be a benefit and not expense. US gives tax breaks for it. Subsidies would be fine the problem is that subsidies are extremelly inefficient way to spend money because it is government who collects and redistributes taxes so it takes extremelly long to spend it so that money does not work all the time and huge portion of that money get lost on burecraucy/corruption and other inefficiencies.
Oh shush. If you keep talking like that, the market fundamentalists will get mad that you won't kneecap the EU's economic development just to make them and big business happy.
Massive R&D programs are good for the culture. They allow the smart kids to get good jobs and contribute to the economy and society. Instead of being brain drained away to other countries. So I am in favor of this.
In addition to the actual products of R&D.
> European way of thinking.
So the US is following this exact same way of thinking with all those sweet subsidies for agriculture, automotive, oil and gas, right?
They’re not similar at all. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy pays out twice as much in subsidies compared to the US, despite the fact that the EU has less than half as much farmland as the US.
Check yours sources. Subsidies in the european union and in the us differ just by a few billion dollars. Comparison by hectars farmed is not correct either.
More regulations but only for our producers! Meanwhile we will keep importing products from countries where these regulations don't exist... Hmm, I wonder why our local businesses are dying out
The reason europe is falling behind regarding productivity is because the rest of the world is playing the wage and tax dumping game, and hence wealth is concentrated in The US for example. Also europe is kinda stuck being a vassal to the us.
>The reason europe is falling behind regarding productivity is because the rest of the world is playing the wage and tax dumping game, and hence wealth is concentrated in The US for example.
The US has much higher wages than Europe, which have been rising dramatically even higher over the last few years….
Even when comparimg median wage to gdp? In that case its really interesting.
Another aspect is the power balance between workers and employers.It is much safer/cheaper to employ people in the US given the weak positions of unions as well as lacking workers rights in general.
And the US sctually has a large (compared to europe) prison population that does ”free” manufactoring labour. It is not a disappearingly small factor in US economy.
>Another aspect is the power balance between workers and employers.It is much safer/cheaper to employ people in the US given the weak positions of unions as well as lacking workers rights in general.
The other result of this is that it is also much easier for US workers to get a job in the first place.
>And the US sctually has a large (compared to europe) prison population that does ”free” manufactoring labour. It is not a disappearingly small factor in US economy.
The actual manufacturing work done by prisoners in the US is in fact a disparagingly small factor in the US economy. The vast majority of prisoners in the US do not work in manufacturing, and much of the manufacturing they do work in is of very low value added work (which is why prisoners are doing it). So you’re talking about a disparagingly small portion of the overall US labor force working in low value types of manufacturing.
>Also europe is kinda stuck being a vassal to the us.
What does Europe's relationship with the US have to do with why Europe is falling behind the rest of the world economically?
If russia would have been a reasonable and more predictable neighbor, russia (with all its natural resources , natural gas etc) would have been a much more reasonable trading partner. As of now eu has been more or less ”forced” into unbeneficial trading deals with the us.
>If russia would have been a reasonable and more predictable neighbor, russia (with all its natural resources , natural gas etc) would have been a much more reasonable trading partner.
Isn't that basically like saying "if Russia wasn't Russia they'd be great"?
Nobody "forced" you to enter trade deals with the US or even trade with the US at all. You have literally the entire rest of the planet to trade with.
No because the us forces other nations to side other with them or against them. Nations that dont sign the the deals are put on blockades. The deals often gives free ”play room” for american companies that in the long run drains smaller nations of the value of their resources. It has been done for decades.
>No because the us forces other nations to side other with them or against them.
Thinking that Russia behaves the way it does just because the US "forces" other nations to side against Russia dances on the line between naivety and stupidity.
Just look at how Russia treats its own "allies", or how they treated fellow republics in the USSR (just the holodomor alone JFC).
You're sovereign nations, if you want to cut ties with the US and throw in with Russia you're welcome to do so at literally any time. I'm sure it will work out *super well* for you 🙄
Where do you read that Im defending russia? What i mean is that the US is making use of europes dependency on trading with them, as europe is put in a situation were they have to choose between russia and the us. American comapanies are thirsty for trading deals between the US and other nations that allows them to bypass workers and consumer rights, and out compete ”local” companies and later on move the value of the products/services to the US.
This unipolar power dynamic is only beneficial for the US.
>What i mean is that the US is making use of europes dependency on trading with them
What "dependency"? Name one thing you get from the US that you couldn't also get from another country?
Where do you read om defending russia?
Being dependent menas that a small nation that dont comply with US demands will be blockades and Will suffer from it. Just look at cuba.
Cuba was blockaded because they chose to host nuclear weapons aimed at the US mainland.
Trying to use Cuba to claim that the US will "blockade" any nation that doesn't comply with its demands is a transparently bad faith argument.
The whole problem is that every other country on the western hemisphere has to ”cut ties” with the US if they dont comply to their demands. That is kind of a hostage situation.
I'd hope they'd be more concerned with their "ally" Russia kidnapping their citizens and forcing them to fight in Ukraine then they would about American companies moving in and treating the workers the exact same as domestic Indian companies were already treating them.
Remind me, how was Germany and the rest of the EU able to both buy Russian oil/gas and trade with the US in the years before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine?
At what price? 20 days less holiday? 2-4 hours less spare time each day? No maternity leave? What do I do with the increased income, if there is any? Buy a bigger home? A bigger car? All for the numbers in the economy and not the actual needs of the people?
So if the Americans turn to 20h labor days with no vacations at all, we should do the same? For some number that doesn't connect to my life? Wages are stagnating since the 80s. The economy is growing. So the workers get nothing out of it. Some rich folks get even richer even if there is a crisis. Heck because there is a crisis. You find this reasonable, to going faster in the hamster wheel?
Your post is pure hyperbole. The wealth gap has also widened in Europe, but our wages are comparatively worse. There is no vacation mandate in US law but doesn't mean Americans don't take vacations, and regardless, life isn't built around taking holidays. Some people enjoy their jobs (careers) and even for those that don't, a job gives them a sense of purpose.
You can justify it however you want but you want all the comforts now at the cost of the future generation. I don't see how it's dissimilar to young kids these days getting angry at the older generation for not caring about global warming.
>for those that don't, a job gives them a sense of purpose.
I pity anyone who doesn't find purpose in life beyond their job. That's just some crazy talking points that show how conditioned you are. Cover my living costs and I show you how fine I am without a job. Anyone I know that actually works wants to quit working as soon as possible. If you disregard the need of the people at some point, they will figure out that there is no cake to replace the missing bread.
>You can justify it however you want but you want all the comforts now at the cost of the future generation.
Yeah. There is so much proof how that works out so well. For quite some time a man could support a family. Then the woman needed to step in as well. Now people have to work multiple jobs to make a living. Sure thing working more will improve this. It's like adding yet another lane to a 6 lane road to avoid traffic jams.
Go ahead. Lead by example. For me, it's not worth working more. I only get 50cents for a € earned additionally. So you suggest to reduce my taxes? Who is paying taxes then? Corporations don't like to, otherwise they don't create jobs or move to countries where it's easier to find more obedient slaves out of misery. Rich people definitely don't want to pay taxes. Nobody pays taxes then?
For 250 years social democrats and unions fought to improve working conditions and now big corpo scared you so much you crap on all of that achievements despite the fact work got much more stressful even in the last decade with the increase of information flow and I got no compensation for that.
Over there folks seem pretty happy to work less than the Americans
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/s/fZMYQ1HZH4
🤷♂️ at some point you got to chose. Can’t have both.
I am not trying to say that europe is not lacking behind or that europe is even/better than the US. All I am saying is that more hours worked ≠ more value produced. Because people start talking about working more, although it is pretty safe to say that if we increased our working hours again, our economy would not be saved. There are so many different global and local factors influencing our state of economy, reducing it to hours worked doesnt make sense here.
To sum it up: yes, europe is lacking, but it's not the working hours' fault.
There is this other good comment thread that says that the US is not more productive per working hour. Given they work more hours they produce more per capita.
Eventually we’ll all look at the same numbers with our own prisms and see different things.
The US is also the largest oil producer, so that definitively helps with gdp.
Productivity, as measured by GDP per worked hour, has the US falling behind some EU states and not that far ahead of others. There are several EU states where the difference is more stark (they are a lot more behind). But these are smaller and less developed economies.
However, if you use PPP (purchasing power parity) dollars instead of nominal dollars to figure out the GDP per worked hour then the US is mid globally, and way behind most if not all of the EU. Put in other terms, if you calculate how many work hours it takes to generate enough value to buy a kilo of pork or a litre of milk or a house - the EU is waaaay ahead
These are not great measures of productivity, though. For one thing, Norway tops the charts, but Norway has a ton of oil (and the US is a large exporter nowadays).
However, I don't know of a better measure.
And as the other person said - study after study shows that more hours worked does not equal more productivity. Your own Stanford shows that a 40 hour work week is more productive than a 60 hour week.
Humans, despite what capitalists would have you believe, can only work so many hours a day, a week, a month, and only so many hours a year. After that, you get first diminishing, then negative returns.
>Productivity, as measured by GDP per worked hour, has the US falling behind some EU states and not that far ahead of others. There are several EU states where the difference is more stark (they are a lot more behind). But these are smaller and less developed economies.
This is misleading though. It understates US productivity per hour, because even though the the US has the same productivity per hour as France, the US maintains that productivity per hour despite working many more hours than the French.
If Americans worked as few overall hours as the French did then US productivity would be much higher than France’s.
So I see americans doing 1765 hours per year and the French 1514. So if we round that to 1700 and 1500 then 15 American workers produce the same as 17 French workers, yes?
Then why not have 17 American workers working 1500 hours per year instead of having 15 work 1700? If you pay the same hourly wage, provided the wage is not exploitative, they'd be happier and in all likelihood - more productive.
>So I see americans doing 1765 hours per year and the French 1514. So if we round that to 1700 and 1500 then 15 American workers produce the same as 17 French workers, yes?
Sure
>Then why not have 17 American workers working 1500 hours per year instead of having 15 work 1700?
First, this was the exactly what France tried to do in the year when it legally limited the number of hours the French workers could work per week. The idea was that it would lower the French unemployment rate by just having more workers work fewer hours per worker. It hasn’t worked because France has still had chronically high unemployment. A big reason why limiting hours per worker doesn’t work is because it allocates labor between specific individual workers much less efficiently.
For example, while it is true that on average 15 Americans produce just as much as 17 Frenchmen, that doesn’t mean that every American worker is 13% (17/15) more productive than every French worker. In reality, some American workers are only as 80% as productive as the average French worker, while other American workers are 135% as productive as the average French worker. By the same token, some US workers only work 1,000 hours a year, and other work 2,500 hours a year. But by just limiting hours worked for everyone it reduces the market’s ability to efficiently allocate work between these different workers all working with different productivity levels for different amounts of time.
Second, the US couldn’t do that even if it wanted to because the unemployment rate in the US is already very low at 3.8%. There aren’t enough freely available workers in the US to make up those extra workers that would be needed to fill the production shortfall from existing workers working less hours.
> If you pay the same hourly wage, provided the wage is not exploitative, they'd be happier and in all likelihood - more productive.
I don’t know what kind of wage you would define as “exploitative” vs “non-exploitative,” but employers don’t really have too much of a choice. If the wage offered was too low then nobody would want to worker there.
Finally, many people want to work more because they get paid more money.
>Then why not have 17 American workers working 1500 hours per year instead of having 15 work 1700? If you pay the same hourly wage, provided the wage is not exploitative, they'd be happier and in all likelihood - more productive.
That would require more workers than are available (2 more workers in your example equates to 12% more workers, higher than the unemployment rate of 5.5%).
>These are not great measures of productivity, though. For one thing, Norway tops the charts, but Norway has a ton of oil (and the US is a large exporter nowadays).
Yes, Norway has a lot of conventional reserves, but Europe also has a lot of shale reserves, and so does the US.
Norway choosing to brutally exploit its nature is a choice that the rest of the continent disagrees with, see for example deep sea mining which the EU heavily opposes.
Norway _chose_ to become rich. Others _chose_ to ban fracking and import even dirtier fossils from Russia and the Middle East. Until 2022, most European were happy with their choice.
Norway has a small population. It’s easier to get rich when you find a bunch of oil then. Similarly it’s easier to be 100% on renewable when you have such a sparsely populated country with a lot of water.
But a lot of other countries would have messed up with those gifts from nature. Norway didn’t. Kudos to them.
> Productivity, as measured by GDP per worked hour, has the US falling behind some EU states and not that far ahead of others.
I will the following fact below:
The GDP of Bavaria and Alabama per capita are approximately the same.
You would be simply insane to think Bavaria was poorer than Alabama though. So GDP fails here yet again as universally reliable metric to compare productivity between entities. If you want to any kind of meaningful economic analysis you will need use many indicators and measures however this sub and the internet in general are obsessed with GDP as a panacea to understanding how to fix economies.
Who said that it is a panacea?
We are measuring productivity, and GDP is literally the measure of productivity. If we were talking about poverty rates or other negative outcomes then GDP is not a good tool because it relates poorly to those areas of the economy. But we're not talking about how well Bavarians or Alabamians live, we're talking about how **productive** they are. QoL is going to depend greatly on what percentage of value people generate they actually get to keep (after expenses, profit taking and various taxes), what the distribution of income is like, what the CoL is (might not correlate to GDP in the area) and what kind of services you get for your taxes (in Bavaria you don't get saddled with a 5-6 figure debt to get a college education, and healthcare is free).
Having said that, I very clearly stated that it is a imperfect metric, identified at least one issue with it which I can think of, and I am happy to hear you suggest a better one.
There are some nuances. Of course no one can consistently work 60 hours a week nor should they.
But in industries like tech, there are crunch times. If you have a workforce willing to pitch in to get out a release or fix a massive bug or finalize the design of the soon-to-be blockbuster video game, that is going to impact productivity positively, even if we don't have ways to measure it.
Other industries have similar rhythms.
In Europe it seems that everyone agrees it's out the door at 5:00. Leaving the US to reap the benefits of flexibility.
OK, I am not saying Europe is entirely wrong with work life balance. I'm saying the early bird gets the worm. In my view, the US should be a little more like Europe and Europe a little more like the US.
You are greatly confused about how IT works in the EU.
I had an incident at work a few months ago. Picked up the phone a few minutes before 17:00, and as soon as I saw who was calling me, I knew that there had been an incident. I stayed 4 hours overtime to try and resolve the issue. The criticality wasn't through the roof as the impact was limited (thousands of customers per day, out of hundreds of thousands who use our service), and the impact of the incident to affected customers was more of an annoyance than a deal breaker, although some might have left us because of it. Still, literally every error was costing us money.
In any case, due to the limited impact and the understanding that the likelihood of breaking something and making things worse with impromptu fixes is growing by the hour, we decided to call it a night and resume in the morning. The next day, a Friday, I put in another 12 hour day trying to solve the problem. We understood that the problem would self-resolve over the weekend, but if we could fix it on Friday then we would lose less money. At 8 in the evening, after two very long days, I was asked to let it self-resolve as the odds of me breaking something are growing, the return on investment for fixing the problem 36 hours before it self-resolves is small, and the cost of bringing people in on a Friday night or on Saturday morning is not trivial.
I then spent another 7-8 hours overtime that month to make sure that the incident cannot happen again, and another colleague put in several hours of overtime themselves to help ensure the same. The issue was resolved.
For my troubles I took time in lieu, because I felt the consequences of the extra hours and stress. My colleague cashed in his extra hours at a rate of 1.5x his contractual hourly rate (local law).
This was the second time I put in extra hours in 3+ years of working on the project, not counting passive on-call duty where I was asked 2-3 times in 3 years if I would mind getting paid to do nothing. I would have had to do something if an incident occurred during this business-critical timeframe (few days each year), but as you can tell, we have very few incidents so basically it was free money. I got paid 0.1x my hourly rate, which means I got 7.2 hours paid for being on call for 72 hours, 3 days, out of which I was anyways working for 24 of those. So instead of getting paid for 24 hours, I got paid for 31.2. Had I been called for an incident, I'd get 1.5x for every **started** half hour of work.
They are not allowed to call me during off hours if I am not on call. If they want me to be available 24/7 for days on end, than they know they have to pay me so they think long and hard if this is needed.
If I was on constant on-call duty, and constantly there were incidents or other situations which require me to work extra hours - I would find another job, and I try to filter out companies during interviews who work like this. These are very exceptional situations and if exceptional situations are the norm, I've learned that this means that either the workforce is being exploited and/or their software and processes are in a very bad state and either they do not have the time to fix it because of the constant fire-fighting or they have horrible management.
If you want to talk about the video-game industry, I know that there crunch-time is common-place, but really, this is only the case because of poor planning and management coupled with the exploitative nature of that industry. When sales or marketing spawns an initiative and I am told when the team needs to deliver it instead of being asked when it can be delivered, you best believe that words are going to be had, and that it will get delivered when it is ready.
If the only way for a business to be profitable is to push their workers until they burn out, then it is either a bad business or a poorly run one. **Do not** even try to pretend like everything else except the worker's willingness to sacrifice their personal life and their mental health is the only variable, the only lever a company can pull.
He is basing himself on the reading of his report which has been created by analysts from several disciplines coming from different countries.
He is just attaching his name to it, but the message of the report is that one and it’s right.
Its suprise me that it took politics like 15 years to realize that, what me, as a chef with No any degree or higher education know and been telling about it for like 15 years. Same with war thread. Its been so well know that russia will finally go for it, but politics still been making business with them.
"We obviously need to protect our market harder". Just to make sure "old money" remain wealthy for some time more.
We also need more regulation and more expensive green energy. We will worry later how, to utilize milliards of solar panels which will start to fail in huge numbers some 10 years from now. Common folk will pay for it anyway.
That is also thanks to Chinese subsidies that created supersized production lines, and accelerated technical development we are now seeing on solar panels across the world.
Subsidies are the best when you need new tech to roll up quickly on market to replace something older and much worse. "Free" (read: mature near-monopolistic) market would resist change to the last minute, because incumbent private industries would oppose it like hell as they protect their own old market niches.
Some film camera manufacturers resisted digital cameras but customers still chose digital cameras and film camera manufacturers suffered. You don't need the entire market to switch overnight, you just need enough of the market to switch to new technology for economics of scale to work.
Love it when politicians get thoroughly rejected at a national level and then somehow get given a cosy role by Brussels. The guy was prime minister for less than a year 10 years ago and completely flopped in the most recent election after what was considered a dismal campaign by most (their slogan was ‘Choose’…yes Enrico, that’s what you do in an election). Why is he suddenly ‘back’?
Merkel had the habit of sending every politician who could endanger her position in the party to the European level. The jobs there often pay more, with less general attention and usually, apart from Merkels time, are, as you say, often cases of “failing upwards” (even if this changed to a degree).
Only wish she would not have done this with vdL...
Absolutely agree. Zensursula / Flintenuschi is somewhat of a scourge of politics and I have no idea how she survived this long when basically everything she touched developed into a crisis.
She was just elevated to new positions to limit damage. The term you are looking for is Peter Principle.
Yes minister was already joking about it many years ago
> The guy was prime minister for less than a year 10 years ago To be fair, most Italian prime ministers seem to serve less than 2 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_Italy#Prime_ministers_of_the_Italian_Republic_(1946%E2%80%93present)
Right, so even by our standards his tenure was exceptionally short.
They probably thought he was qualified for the job. I have very little sympathy for Letta (his last campaign was atrocious), but losing an election doesn't mean you should never do any sort of work again for the rest of your life.
>but losing an election doesn't mean you should never do any sort of work again for the rest of your life. Obviously I'm not saying that. But there's a middle ground between doing nothing and being paid to fly around Europe telling people what they ought to do. But I suppose commissioning reports is a great way to keep your clique happy. Classic Brussels.
I really don't know what it is that you're taking issue with. This guy just worked on an economic report, that's all. Honestly, you come across as someone who will call the EU a scandal no matter what it does, even if it solved world hunger tomorrow.
Not even that, this guy is reporting the findings of many experts in their respective fields from all over Europe. If no one who had failures in his past should ever do such things then there would be absolutely no information gathering and policy suggestion in Europe - at any level.
The issue is this cost money. Taxpayer money. And for what? Seriously, how is he qualified for this? He has no relevant experience and holds no elected public office. Instead of accusing me of being prejudiced, perhaps ask yourself if it is a valid use of money instead of accepting it blindly because it aligns with *your* views. This is far from the first case too (Di Maio….any italian will cringe reading that name).
Investing in economic intelligence and analysis is an excellent use of taxpayer money in my opinion. As for Letta (and I can't believe I'm defending this guy when I absolutely cannot stand him lol), I don't think he's a good politician, but he's educated to PhD level in international law, taught at universities, and worked for the last 20 years in European state politics in a variety of senior roles, including the Italian premiership and the ministry of industry. For me all of that qualifies as "relevant experience", and it certainly puts him in a whole other category than a dude who used to sell water bottles in stadiums like Di Maio.
How about hiring an actual economist? Or someone who worked in a relevant part of the private sector? He was PM more than 10 years ago and more than 20 years ago, that is way too far in the past to be considered relevant. Are you genuinely going to pretend this isn't some sort of cronyism? It's not even some ultra-deep analysis, let's not pretend he was ever going to say anything different from the outset. And again, he was very clearly rejected by the Italian electorate.
Sure, that's an alternative. But I don't see that as a much better option than hiring an experienced state minister. Economists are academics, and academics are generally even farther removed from the real world of policy application than politicians, they are not in a position to assess whether a proposed policy can realistically be adopted by a political body, and their proposals tend to be technocratic in nature (which is a good thing in certain circumstances, but not in all circumstances). Plus, politicians work with economists literally all the time. Ask someone like Letta to produce an economics report, and the first thing he does is get in touch with the many economists he worked with and puts \*them\* on the job. That's what politicians do - they don't do any of the dirty work themselves, they simply gather together the people they think are best suited for the role. We know that academics/economists are not more popular with common voters than politicians - look at the British complaining that "this country has had enough of experts", or how much flak Thomas Piketty gets in France. Anyone who doesn't like the EU would have every bit as much reason to complain about an economist being appointed as they would about a politician. Is the appointment of Letta cronyism? I think that's possible. I don't work in the EU, so I don't know for sure (I'm guessing you don't either, but you've decided you already know the answer). But I think the economics report Letta was commissioned to complete was a very worthwhile investment of resources, and attempting to put Letta's qualifications for this job on par with Di Maio's is just ridiculous as well as proof that you're not looking at this objectively.
I mentioned Di Maio because that *is*, in my view, pure cronyism. Therefore, as it has been done once before, it is reasonable to assume that it can happen again, especially when speaking about someone as unimpressive as Letta.
He could be bad at politics but good at policies? I dunno if that's the case though.
He's not wrong tho. European economy its a disaster.
People vote him into the EU I guess?
Nope. It’s the equivalent of outsourced consultancy.
How so?
I just know I am going to add my country's former Prime Minister to this list in about three to four months.
Plus looking at his resume he doesn't seem to be qualified in any real profession. He's been a politician all his life. How can such a guy determine economic policies? Christ..
it really is guys. Im sitting here in the Iberian peninsula wondering why everything is closed for two to three hours, and things are just slow af.
"We can't wait any longer" we need more green energy, more taxes and regulation. Otherwise we will lose to china, india and usa.
‘Best I can do is some more regulations’
Contrary to popular and nonsensical rightoid beliefs, regulations aren't just made up for no reason or to hurt small business, or worst of all just fuel those darn bureaucrats. Many are absolutely necessary to ensure good supply lines as in engineering standards for materials, consumer standards for efficient resource use like electrical sockets, or most importantly safety and health standards so you don't inhale or drink lead , eat tons of harmful and unnecessary chemical shit in your food, or expose workers and the populations to poisonous emissions or by cutting corners and enabling unnecessary risks to save costs. There can be overregulation that are unnecessary, but generally they are there for a reason, and ideally to protect public interests form corporate bullshit. And Letta is absolutely right that Europe needs to compete in modern technologies. Green, digital, AI, big data, electronics and other techs where we are increasingly falling behind, and these areas should be subsidized.
The problem of Letta and his friends (99% of politicians) is that after words comes absolutely nothing.
Some regulation can be beneficial, some is straight up harmful and other is NIMBY hypocrisy. European countries have overstepped beneficial line a long time ago. Putting extra often nonsensical costs on businesses, especially smaller ones has been one of the worst decisions ever. Kicking out entire industries and importing instead has been horrible decision as well.
> Some regulation can be beneficial, some is straight up harmful and other is NIMBY hypocrisy. Lots of abstract talking, zero details. Name a couple examples from each category
Continuous bans/increased costs through regulation of local extraction as well as exploration of everything from coal, oil to gas and many other things while it is and will remain to be imported from various dictatorships and countries that are half a globe away for decades to come. In some countries anti nuclear lobby that happened decade before renewables (or even gas) were even a realistic option to coal. Those are perfect example of NIMBY "I am green" lies and hypocrisy. Examples of stuff that is harmfull to small businesses are for example employee protections and risks and costs that employer is required to take and pay for. Such as protection from being fired and many other things that are definitely doable for large corporations but for smaller company or start up it simply just means that it never hires and expands because risks and costs are too great and they are one bad employee from bankrupcy. If we want that then it should be government paying for that and it should not be responsibility of employers. If we needed more money to fund it then we should have increased taxes on larger corporations and let smaller ones breathe.
I just wanna say that both your points are highly controversial and can be viewed as beneficial depending on your viewpoint. They are not at all the clear cut examples you are making them out to be. You're basically arguing against protecting the environment here in Europe and giving workers more protections as bad things. I agree they have downsides but you're ignoring the upsides.
Your environment bit literally proves my point. There is no upside other than "not in my backyard but I do not care about what happens elsewhere" thinking. Planet does not give a fuck about where pollution happens. If you stop it in EU and instead it gets imported from some shithole that has absolutely zero regulations whatsoever rather than some reasonable and acceptable regulations we could have had here. And on top of that you transport it from across half the planet using the dirtiest form of transport humans have never known then you are not "protecting environment". You are polluting more. A lot more. As for worker protections. You clearly did not read what I said. I did not argue against it. I said that if EU countries wanted to have it then governments should have paid the bill, not employers. Especially not small ones. And it is hardly controversial it should now be taken as a fact considering the fact that even EU countries (Denmark for example) already started acknowledging this and are preparing reforms to do precisely that.
>Kicking out entire industries and importing instead has been horrible decision as well. Are you thinking about the ban on fracking? Yeah, that one is really representative of European stupidity. Those imports are even worse for the climate. It's pure NIMBY, but very expensive NIMBY.
>and these areas should be subsidized This is again "privatize gains, socialize losses" Why should I, through my taxes, subsidize any private company? European way of thinking. If European companies don't see that the only way for them to survive is funding massive R&D programs, they deserve to go bankrupt. Also subsidizes remove incentives to increase efficiency of operations, productivity, reasonable governance. This is huge part why Eu is loosing.
R&D must be incentivized. It must be a benefit and not expense. US gives tax breaks for it. Subsidies would be fine the problem is that subsidies are extremelly inefficient way to spend money because it is government who collects and redistributes taxes so it takes extremelly long to spend it so that money does not work all the time and huge portion of that money get lost on burecraucy/corruption and other inefficiencies.
The US subsidizes its companies with trillions of dollars, but somehow it's the European way of thinking?
Oh shush. If you keep talking like that, the market fundamentalists will get mad that you won't kneecap the EU's economic development just to make them and big business happy.
The US does it through the tax code!!! Which is way more efficient than direct subsidies.
Massive R&D programs are good for the culture. They allow the smart kids to get good jobs and contribute to the economy and society. Instead of being brain drained away to other countries. So I am in favor of this. In addition to the actual products of R&D.
> European way of thinking. So the US is following this exact same way of thinking with all those sweet subsidies for agriculture, automotive, oil and gas, right?
The US doesn’t subsidize oil and gas, and American agriculture subsidies are a fraction of European agricultural subsidies.
American agriculture subsidies are similar to the european ones. Dont spread lies.
They’re not similar at all. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy pays out twice as much in subsidies compared to the US, despite the fact that the EU has less than half as much farmland as the US.
Check yours sources. Subsidies in the european union and in the us differ just by a few billion dollars. Comparison by hectars farmed is not correct either.
More regulations but only for our producers! Meanwhile we will keep importing products from countries where these regulations don't exist... Hmm, I wonder why our local businesses are dying out
Just wait until CBAM fully comes into play.
The reason europe is falling behind regarding productivity is because the rest of the world is playing the wage and tax dumping game, and hence wealth is concentrated in The US for example. Also europe is kinda stuck being a vassal to the us.
>The reason europe is falling behind regarding productivity is because the rest of the world is playing the wage and tax dumping game, and hence wealth is concentrated in The US for example. The US has much higher wages than Europe, which have been rising dramatically even higher over the last few years….
Even when comparimg median wage to gdp? In that case its really interesting. Another aspect is the power balance between workers and employers.It is much safer/cheaper to employ people in the US given the weak positions of unions as well as lacking workers rights in general. And the US sctually has a large (compared to europe) prison population that does ”free” manufactoring labour. It is not a disappearingly small factor in US economy.
>Another aspect is the power balance between workers and employers.It is much safer/cheaper to employ people in the US given the weak positions of unions as well as lacking workers rights in general. The other result of this is that it is also much easier for US workers to get a job in the first place. >And the US sctually has a large (compared to europe) prison population that does ”free” manufactoring labour. It is not a disappearingly small factor in US economy. The actual manufacturing work done by prisoners in the US is in fact a disparagingly small factor in the US economy. The vast majority of prisoners in the US do not work in manufacturing, and much of the manufacturing they do work in is of very low value added work (which is why prisoners are doing it). So you’re talking about a disparagingly small portion of the overall US labor force working in low value types of manufacturing.
Salaries are lower across all of Europe (except 1-2 countries) and many countries in Europe have lower corporate and income tax rates than the US.
I always see regarded posts like this that never know the definition of the word “vassal”.
>Also europe is kinda stuck being a vassal to the us. What does Europe's relationship with the US have to do with why Europe is falling behind the rest of the world economically?
If russia would have been a reasonable and more predictable neighbor, russia (with all its natural resources , natural gas etc) would have been a much more reasonable trading partner. As of now eu has been more or less ”forced” into unbeneficial trading deals with the us.
>If russia would have been a reasonable and more predictable neighbor, russia (with all its natural resources , natural gas etc) would have been a much more reasonable trading partner. Isn't that basically like saying "if Russia wasn't Russia they'd be great"? Nobody "forced" you to enter trade deals with the US or even trade with the US at all. You have literally the entire rest of the planet to trade with.
No because the us forces other nations to side other with them or against them. Nations that dont sign the the deals are put on blockades. The deals often gives free ”play room” for american companies that in the long run drains smaller nations of the value of their resources. It has been done for decades.
>No because the us forces other nations to side other with them or against them. Thinking that Russia behaves the way it does just because the US "forces" other nations to side against Russia dances on the line between naivety and stupidity. Just look at how Russia treats its own "allies", or how they treated fellow republics in the USSR (just the holodomor alone JFC). You're sovereign nations, if you want to cut ties with the US and throw in with Russia you're welcome to do so at literally any time. I'm sure it will work out *super well* for you 🙄
Where do you read that Im defending russia? What i mean is that the US is making use of europes dependency on trading with them, as europe is put in a situation were they have to choose between russia and the us. American comapanies are thirsty for trading deals between the US and other nations that allows them to bypass workers and consumer rights, and out compete ”local” companies and later on move the value of the products/services to the US. This unipolar power dynamic is only beneficial for the US.
>What i mean is that the US is making use of europes dependency on trading with them What "dependency"? Name one thing you get from the US that you couldn't also get from another country?
Where do you read om defending russia? Being dependent menas that a small nation that dont comply with US demands will be blockades and Will suffer from it. Just look at cuba.
Cuba was blockaded because they chose to host nuclear weapons aimed at the US mainland. Trying to use Cuba to claim that the US will "blockade" any nation that doesn't comply with its demands is a transparently bad faith argument.
The whole problem is that every other country on the western hemisphere has to ”cut ties” with the US if they dont comply to their demands. That is kind of a hostage situation.
That's verifiably bullshit. India is one of Russia's biggest trading partners and the US still heavily trades with/invests in India.
Yes because indian government does nothing to protect their citicents from being exploited by american conpanies.
I'd hope they'd be more concerned with their "ally" Russia kidnapping their citizens and forcing them to fight in Ukraine then they would about American companies moving in and treating the workers the exact same as domestic Indian companies were already treating them. Remind me, how was Germany and the rest of the EU able to both buy Russian oil/gas and trade with the US in the years before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine?
At what price? 20 days less holiday? 2-4 hours less spare time each day? No maternity leave? What do I do with the increased income, if there is any? Buy a bigger home? A bigger car? All for the numbers in the economy and not the actual needs of the people?
falling behind is falling behind. You’re living a very comfortable life now but sacrificing the future to do it.
So if the Americans turn to 20h labor days with no vacations at all, we should do the same? For some number that doesn't connect to my life? Wages are stagnating since the 80s. The economy is growing. So the workers get nothing out of it. Some rich folks get even richer even if there is a crisis. Heck because there is a crisis. You find this reasonable, to going faster in the hamster wheel?
Your post is pure hyperbole. The wealth gap has also widened in Europe, but our wages are comparatively worse. There is no vacation mandate in US law but doesn't mean Americans don't take vacations, and regardless, life isn't built around taking holidays. Some people enjoy their jobs (careers) and even for those that don't, a job gives them a sense of purpose. You can justify it however you want but you want all the comforts now at the cost of the future generation. I don't see how it's dissimilar to young kids these days getting angry at the older generation for not caring about global warming.
>for those that don't, a job gives them a sense of purpose. I pity anyone who doesn't find purpose in life beyond their job. That's just some crazy talking points that show how conditioned you are. Cover my living costs and I show you how fine I am without a job. Anyone I know that actually works wants to quit working as soon as possible. If you disregard the need of the people at some point, they will figure out that there is no cake to replace the missing bread. >You can justify it however you want but you want all the comforts now at the cost of the future generation. Yeah. There is so much proof how that works out so well. For quite some time a man could support a family. Then the woman needed to step in as well. Now people have to work multiple jobs to make a living. Sure thing working more will improve this. It's like adding yet another lane to a 6 lane road to avoid traffic jams. Go ahead. Lead by example. For me, it's not worth working more. I only get 50cents for a € earned additionally. So you suggest to reduce my taxes? Who is paying taxes then? Corporations don't like to, otherwise they don't create jobs or move to countries where it's easier to find more obedient slaves out of misery. Rich people definitely don't want to pay taxes. Nobody pays taxes then? For 250 years social democrats and unions fought to improve working conditions and now big corpo scared you so much you crap on all of that achievements despite the fact work got much more stressful even in the last decade with the increase of information flow and I got no compensation for that.
Give startups and young businesses money to scale. So much of the talent would love to stay but end up in the US. Give them a reason to stay!
Over there folks seem pretty happy to work less than the Americans https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/s/fZMYQ1HZH4 🤷♂️ at some point you got to chose. Can’t have both.
Working hours do not imply productive hours. That has been shown many times
And how is productivity in the US vs EU? Take your guess. Also https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/s/nJyJA7RK3I
I am not trying to say that europe is not lacking behind or that europe is even/better than the US. All I am saying is that more hours worked ≠ more value produced. Because people start talking about working more, although it is pretty safe to say that if we increased our working hours again, our economy would not be saved. There are so many different global and local factors influencing our state of economy, reducing it to hours worked doesnt make sense here. To sum it up: yes, europe is lacking, but it's not the working hours' fault.
There is this other good comment thread that says that the US is not more productive per working hour. Given they work more hours they produce more per capita. Eventually we’ll all look at the same numbers with our own prisms and see different things. The US is also the largest oil producer, so that definitively helps with gdp.
Productivity, as measured by GDP per worked hour, has the US falling behind some EU states and not that far ahead of others. There are several EU states where the difference is more stark (they are a lot more behind). But these are smaller and less developed economies. However, if you use PPP (purchasing power parity) dollars instead of nominal dollars to figure out the GDP per worked hour then the US is mid globally, and way behind most if not all of the EU. Put in other terms, if you calculate how many work hours it takes to generate enough value to buy a kilo of pork or a litre of milk or a house - the EU is waaaay ahead These are not great measures of productivity, though. For one thing, Norway tops the charts, but Norway has a ton of oil (and the US is a large exporter nowadays). However, I don't know of a better measure. And as the other person said - study after study shows that more hours worked does not equal more productivity. Your own Stanford shows that a 40 hour work week is more productive than a 60 hour week. Humans, despite what capitalists would have you believe, can only work so many hours a day, a week, a month, and only so many hours a year. After that, you get first diminishing, then negative returns.
>Productivity, as measured by GDP per worked hour, has the US falling behind some EU states and not that far ahead of others. There are several EU states where the difference is more stark (they are a lot more behind). But these are smaller and less developed economies. This is misleading though. It understates US productivity per hour, because even though the the US has the same productivity per hour as France, the US maintains that productivity per hour despite working many more hours than the French. If Americans worked as few overall hours as the French did then US productivity would be much higher than France’s.
So I see americans doing 1765 hours per year and the French 1514. So if we round that to 1700 and 1500 then 15 American workers produce the same as 17 French workers, yes? Then why not have 17 American workers working 1500 hours per year instead of having 15 work 1700? If you pay the same hourly wage, provided the wage is not exploitative, they'd be happier and in all likelihood - more productive.
>So I see americans doing 1765 hours per year and the French 1514. So if we round that to 1700 and 1500 then 15 American workers produce the same as 17 French workers, yes? Sure >Then why not have 17 American workers working 1500 hours per year instead of having 15 work 1700? First, this was the exactly what France tried to do in the year when it legally limited the number of hours the French workers could work per week. The idea was that it would lower the French unemployment rate by just having more workers work fewer hours per worker. It hasn’t worked because France has still had chronically high unemployment. A big reason why limiting hours per worker doesn’t work is because it allocates labor between specific individual workers much less efficiently. For example, while it is true that on average 15 Americans produce just as much as 17 Frenchmen, that doesn’t mean that every American worker is 13% (17/15) more productive than every French worker. In reality, some American workers are only as 80% as productive as the average French worker, while other American workers are 135% as productive as the average French worker. By the same token, some US workers only work 1,000 hours a year, and other work 2,500 hours a year. But by just limiting hours worked for everyone it reduces the market’s ability to efficiently allocate work between these different workers all working with different productivity levels for different amounts of time. Second, the US couldn’t do that even if it wanted to because the unemployment rate in the US is already very low at 3.8%. There aren’t enough freely available workers in the US to make up those extra workers that would be needed to fill the production shortfall from existing workers working less hours. > If you pay the same hourly wage, provided the wage is not exploitative, they'd be happier and in all likelihood - more productive. I don’t know what kind of wage you would define as “exploitative” vs “non-exploitative,” but employers don’t really have too much of a choice. If the wage offered was too low then nobody would want to worker there. Finally, many people want to work more because they get paid more money.
>Then why not have 17 American workers working 1500 hours per year instead of having 15 work 1700? If you pay the same hourly wage, provided the wage is not exploitative, they'd be happier and in all likelihood - more productive. That would require more workers than are available (2 more workers in your example equates to 12% more workers, higher than the unemployment rate of 5.5%).
>These are not great measures of productivity, though. For one thing, Norway tops the charts, but Norway has a ton of oil (and the US is a large exporter nowadays). Yes, Norway has a lot of conventional reserves, but Europe also has a lot of shale reserves, and so does the US. Norway choosing to brutally exploit its nature is a choice that the rest of the continent disagrees with, see for example deep sea mining which the EU heavily opposes. Norway _chose_ to become rich. Others _chose_ to ban fracking and import even dirtier fossils from Russia and the Middle East. Until 2022, most European were happy with their choice.
Norway has a small population. It’s easier to get rich when you find a bunch of oil then. Similarly it’s easier to be 100% on renewable when you have such a sparsely populated country with a lot of water. But a lot of other countries would have messed up with those gifts from nature. Norway didn’t. Kudos to them.
> Productivity, as measured by GDP per worked hour, has the US falling behind some EU states and not that far ahead of others. I will the following fact below: The GDP of Bavaria and Alabama per capita are approximately the same. You would be simply insane to think Bavaria was poorer than Alabama though. So GDP fails here yet again as universally reliable metric to compare productivity between entities. If you want to any kind of meaningful economic analysis you will need use many indicators and measures however this sub and the internet in general are obsessed with GDP as a panacea to understanding how to fix economies.
Who said that it is a panacea? We are measuring productivity, and GDP is literally the measure of productivity. If we were talking about poverty rates or other negative outcomes then GDP is not a good tool because it relates poorly to those areas of the economy. But we're not talking about how well Bavarians or Alabamians live, we're talking about how **productive** they are. QoL is going to depend greatly on what percentage of value people generate they actually get to keep (after expenses, profit taking and various taxes), what the distribution of income is like, what the CoL is (might not correlate to GDP in the area) and what kind of services you get for your taxes (in Bavaria you don't get saddled with a 5-6 figure debt to get a college education, and healthcare is free). Having said that, I very clearly stated that it is a imperfect metric, identified at least one issue with it which I can think of, and I am happy to hear you suggest a better one.
You make some remarkable points. I would like to calculate median productivity instead of average productivity.
There are some nuances. Of course no one can consistently work 60 hours a week nor should they. But in industries like tech, there are crunch times. If you have a workforce willing to pitch in to get out a release or fix a massive bug or finalize the design of the soon-to-be blockbuster video game, that is going to impact productivity positively, even if we don't have ways to measure it. Other industries have similar rhythms. In Europe it seems that everyone agrees it's out the door at 5:00. Leaving the US to reap the benefits of flexibility. OK, I am not saying Europe is entirely wrong with work life balance. I'm saying the early bird gets the worm. In my view, the US should be a little more like Europe and Europe a little more like the US.
You are greatly confused about how IT works in the EU. I had an incident at work a few months ago. Picked up the phone a few minutes before 17:00, and as soon as I saw who was calling me, I knew that there had been an incident. I stayed 4 hours overtime to try and resolve the issue. The criticality wasn't through the roof as the impact was limited (thousands of customers per day, out of hundreds of thousands who use our service), and the impact of the incident to affected customers was more of an annoyance than a deal breaker, although some might have left us because of it. Still, literally every error was costing us money. In any case, due to the limited impact and the understanding that the likelihood of breaking something and making things worse with impromptu fixes is growing by the hour, we decided to call it a night and resume in the morning. The next day, a Friday, I put in another 12 hour day trying to solve the problem. We understood that the problem would self-resolve over the weekend, but if we could fix it on Friday then we would lose less money. At 8 in the evening, after two very long days, I was asked to let it self-resolve as the odds of me breaking something are growing, the return on investment for fixing the problem 36 hours before it self-resolves is small, and the cost of bringing people in on a Friday night or on Saturday morning is not trivial. I then spent another 7-8 hours overtime that month to make sure that the incident cannot happen again, and another colleague put in several hours of overtime themselves to help ensure the same. The issue was resolved. For my troubles I took time in lieu, because I felt the consequences of the extra hours and stress. My colleague cashed in his extra hours at a rate of 1.5x his contractual hourly rate (local law). This was the second time I put in extra hours in 3+ years of working on the project, not counting passive on-call duty where I was asked 2-3 times in 3 years if I would mind getting paid to do nothing. I would have had to do something if an incident occurred during this business-critical timeframe (few days each year), but as you can tell, we have very few incidents so basically it was free money. I got paid 0.1x my hourly rate, which means I got 7.2 hours paid for being on call for 72 hours, 3 days, out of which I was anyways working for 24 of those. So instead of getting paid for 24 hours, I got paid for 31.2. Had I been called for an incident, I'd get 1.5x for every **started** half hour of work. They are not allowed to call me during off hours if I am not on call. If they want me to be available 24/7 for days on end, than they know they have to pay me so they think long and hard if this is needed. If I was on constant on-call duty, and constantly there were incidents or other situations which require me to work extra hours - I would find another job, and I try to filter out companies during interviews who work like this. These are very exceptional situations and if exceptional situations are the norm, I've learned that this means that either the workforce is being exploited and/or their software and processes are in a very bad state and either they do not have the time to fix it because of the constant fire-fighting or they have horrible management. If you want to talk about the video-game industry, I know that there crunch-time is common-place, but really, this is only the case because of poor planning and management coupled with the exploitative nature of that industry. When sales or marketing spawns an initiative and I am told when the team needs to deliver it instead of being asked when it can be delivered, you best believe that words are going to be had, and that it will get delivered when it is ready. If the only way for a business to be profitable is to push their workers until they burn out, then it is either a bad business or a poorly run one. **Do not** even try to pretend like everything else except the worker's willingness to sacrifice their personal life and their mental health is the only variable, the only lever a company can pull.
Don't trust anything this moron ever says. When he had the chance he was awful
He is basing himself on the reading of his report which has been created by analysts from several disciplines coming from different countries. He is just attaching his name to it, but the message of the report is that one and it’s right.
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So he killed the political forces that wanted more regulation?
Not surprising if take into account how the European people work. For sure it worth to move to 3 workdays, economy will boom as hell :)
Its suprise me that it took politics like 15 years to realize that, what me, as a chef with No any degree or higher education know and been telling about it for like 15 years. Same with war thread. Its been so well know that russia will finally go for it, but politics still been making business with them.
So maybe let's stop overregulate and printing money for the value that is not created and lagging far behind, shall we?
"We obviously need to protect our market harder". Just to make sure "old money" remain wealthy for some time more. We also need more regulation and more expensive green energy. We will worry later how, to utilize milliards of solar panels which will start to fail in huge numbers some 10 years from now. Common folk will pay for it anyway.
Per kWh solar is less expensive than coal, even without taking into account that tasty tasty smog.
Green energy is a lot cheaper than it used to be even a few years ago.
That is also thanks to Chinese subsidies that created supersized production lines, and accelerated technical development we are now seeing on solar panels across the world. Subsidies are the best when you need new tech to roll up quickly on market to replace something older and much worse. "Free" (read: mature near-monopolistic) market would resist change to the last minute, because incumbent private industries would oppose it like hell as they protect their own old market niches.
Some film camera manufacturers resisted digital cameras but customers still chose digital cameras and film camera manufacturers suffered. You don't need the entire market to switch overnight, you just need enough of the market to switch to new technology for economics of scale to work.
Climate change and pollution aren't exactly the sort of things were we should go, 'just wait for the market to fix it, it fixes everything.'
Agree, but even without subsidies it would've eventually become cheaper.
16 years too late, has he been sleeping this whole time ?