[yummyfajitas]

... but young parents are usually given quite a few months of vacation time and salary from the state, a sort of children allowance until a child is 18 years old (100EUR or so)...

In the US we earn 30% more money than Finland (adjusted for cost of living, which is quite high in Finland), so we can just pay for these things with savings if we want to. Most of us choose not to, suggesting these benefits are worth less to us than money.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

[rlpb]

> Most of us choose not to, suggesting these benefits are worth less to us than money.

Or you could be suffering from a Tragedy of the Commons. Your American viewpoint may be preventing you all from pooling your money together and saving overall. Instead you all have to act as individuals, and in this case it is in your individual best interests to not spend the money, since you only get the saving if you all act together.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

[yummyfajitas]

I don't understand. The tragedy of the commons is about resource depletion in the absence of price signals. If I choose to work rather than take paternity leave, what resource am I depleting? Or more generally, what harmful externality am I creating?

[rlpb]

> The tragedy of the commons is about resource depletion in the absence of price signals.

This is a narrow view. Think about it more generally, and you'll see that the same concept applies here.

[anigbrowl]

Ask your kids.

[beagle3]

More likely, you prefer not to pay because it costs way more than it should. I am not familiar with analysis of e.g. Day care costs, but Americans pay significantly more for healthcare than Europeans, and get significantly worse results; also, they pay significantly more for education and get significantly less.

The party line is that it is a preference - but anecdotally, I've only heard that preference from people who never really looked at the numbers, and from the obscenely rich.

[yummyfajitas]

More likely, you prefer not to pay because it costs way more than it should.

Americans earn 30% more than Finlanders adjusting for PPP. I.e., taking into account higher cost of health care, lower cost of most other things, we still have 30% more on average.

Americans do pay more for education than Europeans, but our results are quite good compared to most of Europe. The only reason it appears our educational system is poor is because certain subgroups of the student body drag our averages down.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

[Timberline]

>> The only reason it appears our education system is poor is because certain subgroups of the student body drags [sic] our averages down.

Yeah, lots of people forget how great we really are once you compare our best to everybody else's average! It's pure bias. Individually (booyah!) almost every one of us is well above average. It's just that there are too many of the others who don't deserve to count.

[_mulder_]

Perhaps American's would be even more educated if they used a system like Finland's, often held up as the worlds best education system. Paying less and getting better results sounds good to me. Maybe Finland's high educational achievement level starts with the picture book in the box?

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Index

[yummyfajitas]

If it's so easy to copy, how come no one else in the world has actually managed to do it?

[eru]

Some parts of Germany now rank as well as the Finnish average in the PISA tests. (And Singapore ranks pretty well, too, but that was not a result of an effort spurred on by the testing.)

[yummyfajitas]

So do some parts of the US. Ethnic subgroups of the US with similar ethnicity to Singapore also rank quite well.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-well-do-above-...

[nawitus]

One reason is that education politics are extremely conservative.

[beagle3]

> Americans earn 30% more than Finlanders adjusting for PPP.

You're taking PPP to mean much more than it actually does. Just consider the fact that there's no accepted "PPP" measurement methodology.

But even assuming one existed (pick your favorite), it only effectively encodes one specific consumption profile - one that e.g. takes into account the health care costs of a 30-year-olds with healthy 4-year-old kids, but not that of your average 50-year-old which are considerably different.

> taking into account higher cost of health care, lower cost of most other things, we still have 30% more on average.

Averages are totally the wrong tool to measure anything like that - especially when disparity in the US is so much higher.

Compare the proverbial USElbonia to Eulbonia:

In USElbonia, 1% make $16100/month, 99% make $100/month' avg=$260/month

In EUlbonia, 1% makes $400/month, 99% make $200/month, avg=$202/month

USElbonians, make, on the overage 30% more - but every single EUlbonian is at least 100% better off than 99% of the USElbonians.

Real stats are not quite as bad, of course - but disparity in the US is ridiculously high. But there are many respects in which all EU people are better off than US people which do not make it into any PPP comparison -- e.g., http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/06/05/bankruptcy.medical.bill... "Unless you are Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, you are one medical emergency away from bankruptcy" - I can't find a real European comparable, but http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2009/11/17/no_one_goes_ban/ suggests that there's more the quality than 30% parity-adjusted purchasing power can buy.

> The only reason it appears our educational system is poor is because certain subgroups of the student body drag our averages down.

Cherry picking statistics will get you anywhere you want, regardless of any "truth" however that may be defined.

Consistently in STEM, about 50% of PhD and postdoctoral students in the US are not USA citizens, and this has been going on for at least 20 years. I would take that as empirical evidence that the US STEM education is, indeed, poor.

[Nursie]

That's right kids, Americans choose never to have any vacation time and spend all their lives in work...

Also LOL @ Savings. From what I've read only around 55% of Americans have more savings than credit-card debt.

[_mulder_]

Or another way to look at it, Infant Mortality rates in Finland are so much lower than in the US, suggesting they value a babies life higher than Americans value money.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_m...

[nollidge]

> so we can just pay for these things with savings if we want to.

Uh, who's "we"? You mean the 60% of Americans with more than $500 in savings? Are those the people who can "just" pay for it out of savings?

[yummyfajitas]

Not to mention all the Americans who choose to consume at American levels (considerably higher than European levels), rather than saving.

As for people at the bottom, they typically do choose free time over money. About 90% of those classified by the government as poor choose not to work full time, for example.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2010.pdf

[jon-wood]

They choose not to, or there's no full time work for them to take so they work part time instead?

It may be that they make the choice (I admit to not having read the paper), but lets not jump to that assumption just because they're not in full time work.

[yummyfajitas]

They choose not to, or there's no full time work for them to take so they work part time instead?

The answer is in the report I linked to, which measures involuntary part time employment in addition to labor force participation.

[eru]

Sorry, yummyfajitas was being sarcastic.