[dan-robertson]

I don’t know about the merits of this argument, but it feels like a bit of an old-man ‘back in my day’ argument. A few things I note:

- France has significantly higher productivity per hour than the U.K., but possibly this is due to workers working fewer hours. France has also had (slightly) better productivity growth since the financial crisis

- Is it actually relevant for young people to be able to replace taps or whatever? Cars are more reliable these days so there are fewer forced learning opportunities. If you are young and live in some city apartment, maybe you don’t even drive and maybe you shouldn’t be doing DIY plumbing on a property you don’t own. But these also feel to me like quite arbitrary standards – most young people likely have jobs that don’t require them to know how to change a tap and when you were young, your jobs likely didn’t require you to know how to use the Internet (or whatever – I don’t know how long ago you were starting work).

- If you look at the standardised international measures for things like literacy and numeracy, you’ll likely find that (1) the highest level feels like a pretty low level of ability to you and (2) a percentage of any developed country you pick won’t perform at this level, and you’ll likely find that percentage surprisingly high

- So, maybe there’s also an effect where the older people you interact with have picked up random skills over the years and become more ‘stratified’ such that you are less likely to interact with someone whom you think doesn’t know much but the young people you meet haven’t had so many of these random chances and are a more representative sample of the general population?

I don’t know anything about the situation in France though. Maybe you’re just plain right.

[skippyboxedhero]

France has a very different economic model.

France runs with very high unemployment (the UK's peak unemployment rate in 2008 was roughly the same as French unemployment rate at their economic peak in 2019), which naturally means higher productivity of those working.

France is also far more geared towards exports and large companies, which does produce relatively high levels of output per capita. But often doesn't mean high levels of consumer welfare.

Comparisons are difficult but Europe has this problem in spades, and many countries lack the educational institutions as well (although not in the case of France)...so the situation is even worse because no-one has any skills. I don't think anyone is really doing better, everyone just needs to catch up with the world.

[Felger]

I understand your point. I mixed background, long term tendancies with on-the-field daily feelings.

I should have more emphasized on the long-term tendancy : almost all lights are now red in France (and not so better in the UK) :

- Educational system is in shambles. Not enough manpower, not enough funds, too many kids per classroom. Level is steadily dropping. France's PISA ranking is getting worse and worse.

- Health system is on his knees, and the decision to fire (without pay) the unvaccinated health staff put a additional strain upon it. Thousands of them left for Quebec.

- National debt is higher than ever.

- A great portion of the French GDP is in fact born from the pensions spendings (legal age for retirement was 62 till now, and 26% of the total population is 60 yo and more) and public workforce (12,4% of total GDP, very similar to northern europe).

- We lost most of our nuclear workforce and engineering because the plan was to phase out nuke power plants for renewables... until two years ago. I Have a part of my relatives directly involved in nuclear power production field, now retired and they lament the loss of the once respected french "expertise" (well, mainly bought from Westinghouse but cough).

- Big compagnies still perform well (especially luxury companies - thanks China), but the other industrial ones are outsourcing/offshoring production at an alarming rate (the plan was to relocate and reindustrialize, but this was also before the energy crisis). Not much hope here.

Consequently, spendings being high, labour costs are also high (too much, if you ask me). Even if 26% are 60 yo or more, we still "benefit" from a quite high immigration, but we aren't quite able anymore to make the better of it because of the failing public education system.

Forecast are not particulary good, hence the pressure from the EU commission to reform the French pension system and target 65 or 64 yo as legal retirement age.

In fact, very similar to the UK, with more socialism ?

For the "young ones" (I'm 40), I fear that they won't be able to acquire the skills they need if they don't have the basic knowledge (numeracy and literacy foremost) and softskills layer they are currently losing.