[vekker]

I'm happy to live in a country with such a strong social safety net as well, compared to the US (even though I don't profit from it at all being young, self-employed and unmarried...), but on the other hand I'm really concerned about our future. Someone has to pay for this and it's not like the government is encouraging people to roll up their sleeves and to learn some personal responsibility, with all the benefits they're giving for not working.

[samsonradu]

This is spot on. For all the praise of Belgian welfare I believe there is a 'dark' side to it. It is not doing well in motivating people to perform and there is a lot of systemic slack and abuse, like people claiming they're sick for a ridiculous amount of time every year.

*Note that firing an employee for not performing is quite difficult and the tax bracket at the top is outrageously high.

[tsimionescu]

The thing is, people everywhere want to work, with extraordinarily few exceptions. A government doesn't really need to incentivize work in general, only some specific kinds of work which are underperformed.

[BobbyJo]

Citation? I find it funny that no matter how many times history, and even contemporary events, have taught us otherwise, people still believe "People don't need strong incentives to work!"

[tsimionescu]

You can look at employment rates in countries with generous social welfare and unemployment benefits, and notice that the percentage of the population sitting idle who are not sick is minuscule, and not significantly different format the idle population in countries with weak unemployment benefits.

It is true that there are systematic exceptions - especially people born rich.

[BobbyJo]

Productivity in the US is considerably higher than most, if not all of those countries, when you account for productivity per hour and hours worked: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/v/s/www.forbes.c...

Unemployment just tells you people have a job, and nothing about how much that job is contributing to the collective resources.

[markvdb]

According to the OECD, productivity per hour worked [0] in Scandinavia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland is comparable to the US, and in some cases significantly higher. All of these countries have much more generous social safety nets.

P.S. The link you gave 404's here.

[0] https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PDB_LV

[BobbyJo]

The average hours worked are significantly less for those small upticks in PPH. If you factor in hours worked, the US comes out far ahead of most if not all.

[tsimionescu]

What does productivity have to do with people's choice of working or not? We were discussing whether people need encouraging to go to work or not. Productivity is a completely different metric, impacted by many other things.

[BobbyJo]

Productivity is a part of the metric which you base that decision on. Do people need encouragement == will we produce 'enough' with less encouragement || is the long term reduction in production, and it's effect on future generations worth the increase in leisure time now.

[csomar]

I think he meant people without income.