French Family Values
Jul 29th, 2005 at 5:11 am by Susie
I’ve been looking at a new study of international differences in working hours by Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, at Harvard, and Bruce Sacerdote, at Dartmouth. The study’s main point is that differences in government regulations, rather than culture (or taxes), explain why Europeans work less than Americans.
But the study also suggests that in this case, government regulations actually allow people to make a desirable tradeoff - to modestly lower income in return for more time with friends and family - the kind of deal an individual would find hard to negotiate. The authors write: “It is hard to obtain more vacation for yourself from your employer and even harder, if you do, to coordinate with all your friends to get the same deal and go on vacation together.”
And they even offer some statistical evidence that working fewer hours makes Europeans happier, despite the loss of potential income.
It’s not a definitive result, and as they note, the whole subject is “politically charged.” But let me make an observation: some of that political charge seems to have the wrong sign.
American conservatives despise European welfare states like France. Yet many of them stress the importance of “family values.” And whatever else you may say about French economic policies, they seem extremely supportive of the family as an institution. Senator Rick Santorum, are you reading this?
What is also widely ignored is that Europeans, working less, are MORE PRODUCTIVE than americans. translation : 1000 hours/years of wasted working time, useless, just to please your boss or because you fear to lose your job does not add ANY value to US wealth. And this has nothing to do with ‘welfare state’. Free-market, indeed.
the people that the neo-cons hail as holding family values tend to be the middle and lower class, ie those living paycheck to paycheck. they are the base, after all.
You are all giving Krugman far too much credit for his column which was, in a word, flawed.
Here is what Krugman should have written:
1. The French economy is stagnant and does not generate enough jobs for its citizens. The French unemployment rate is 66% higher than that of the U.S.
2. Being an unemployed Frenchman is not a choice or side affect of French worker’s spending more time with their families.
3. Most importantly, French people are not more happy or satisfied as their American counterparts as Krugman suggests. In fact, its quite the opposite.
We’ve detailed all of these arguments using many of Krugman’s same sources.
Krugman’s French Connection or Les Miserables?
The only people in the world who believe the French are having happy family fun seem to live in the ivory towers of downtown New York.