| I'm sorry but I believe most of that is FUD, which some prominents economists have been calling out, e.g. this short Krugman piece: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/about-that-frenc...
The sad thing is that this FUD itself has a impact, and is therefore self-fulfilling to some extent. "Superior results" are, to be fair, quite debatable: - UK got an edge via fiscal dumping, hurting its neighbours. This is also what Ireland is doing now, which really gives "good results", but is hurting all other EU countries (Luxembourg some the same, some other countries as well). - Germany has a lower unemployment rate, but with way more precarious working conditions for many workers. - I really don't know about Sweden so I won't speak about it, but I'm going to read the piece you linked, it looks interesting. I could also say that France has superior results, if you look at other metrics: - productivity per hour: the USA is #1 with a very very small edge over Germany and France, both #2. The UK, Japan are far behind - Gini coefficient! This one is very dear to me. We're doing pretty well, and our evolution over 10 years has been better than most of our neighbours[1] I believe that the biggest problem we're facing nowadays (and have been facing for a couple decades) is that increased globalisation allows companies to go "shopping" for their fiscal system, and put countries in competition. This creates a drive to get lower tax rates than your neighbours, which is a bad spiral and in the end deeply hurts countries (however, if you happen to disagree with that, then I'm afraid we have fundamentally different world view, and I don't really have the energy or will to debate if further, sorry). Ireland is a prime example of this. > why would the "French fraternal" system be worthy of being copied given its weak results? My goal is not for it to be copied a bit everywhere but, really, for it to be considered with fairness, and not just shunned and mocked because of propaganda and preconceptions. I actually have a in mind couple great pieces I'd like to share on those topics; unfortunately they're in French. I'll look a bit around for potential translations. 1: some data: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/table.do?tab=table&language... |