French Happiness

A recent story in the New York Times (free registration required) points to data showing that France's suicide rate is the highest in Europe, and about 50% higher than America's. Even more surprising, most of these suicides appear to be related to workplace stress.

Two months ago I came at this from a different direction:

And does [France's 35-hour work week] lead to more personal satisfaction? There may be "some indication" that it does, but there is also plenty indication that it does not. The world map of happiness shows the U.S. ranked 23rd out of 178 nations surveyed (and the highest-ranked really large nation). France comes in 62nd. "Industry is the enemy of melancholy," said William F. Buckley. Why should we assume that more leisure equals more happiness?

These suicide numbers are just more evidence that mandatory short work weeks does not happiness make.

Krugman and Stross: Making America More Like France

After their conversation, the floor is opened to questions from the audience. The first goes something like this:

One of the things that science fiction used to promise us was that robots would do all the work and one of the social problems we'd have to deal with would be what to do with all the leisure time. Do you think the fact that we're still working 40 hours a week is a technical issue, a social issue, an economic issue, or what?

One thing notable about Krugman is that I think he really does know better. He's a very accomplished economist. He knows that free markets, free trade, etc. really do bring enormous value to great masses of people. But he's also become a totem for the left, so he can't be entirely honest. I think this is why his answers are such careful nonsense. He starts out:

The stuff that can be automated is at this point still quite limited. We used to need to have 90% of the population tilling the soil just to feed us. At this point in the United States there are fewer farmers than there are playing World of Warcraft.

From his very first example, it sounds like automation isn't limited at all! Less than 1% of the population of the United States is involved in agriculture. That's a two-orders-of-magnitude improvement in productivity. So what are those 89% of people who used to farm doing? At first, manufacturing:

And in manufacturing, we have very few people working assembly lines now, and yet manufacturing output is a lot bigger than you might think, even in America, despite all the de-industrialization. But we have not found ways to have robots doing most of the things that involve interacting with complex physical environments.... Go out for an early morning walk and you'll see lots of short men from Central America taking care of the garden, right? Things that involve actual physical labor, most medical procedures, technology has done very little so far to be labor saving.

I can scarcely believe this is an economist speaking. Those "short men from Central America" are not going around with garden shears and push mowers - they're using gas-powered edgers and riding mowers, and they're using them because - guess what? - they save labor! The same number of men can do more in less time with that technology. The same is true in medicine in a different way. Remember my grandfather who was laid up in bed for six weeks? That's six weeks of lost labor from him, plus his care while in the hospital. With me, I lost one day of work and didn't spend a single night in the hospital. That's a huge labor savings.

Krugman makes up for it a bit with a good followup point:

Human wants tend to be infinitely extensible: it's not as if there's a fixed amount of stuff we want. If people had been willing to stop at a 1955 standard of living, we could all be working 20 hour weeks, but in fact, one way or another, people wanted more.

Correct. We are much more productive, but we also want more stuff. Furthermore, the premise (that we haven't gained in leisure time) is wrong. Krugman again:

In the United States, up until about 1970, we did take part of our gain in productivity in the form of increased leisure time: shorter work hours, growing vacations. And that did actually continue in Europe, but in the United States it just stalled, and we still are taking on average about two weeks of vacation.

Right again, sort of. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was not uncommon to work 60-80 hours a week, with no vacation. Americans have made a different trade-off between leisure and stuff than Europeans, but that's all we can really say. But Krugman is only "sort of" right because Americans working full time actually get an average of 3.9 weeks of paid vacation and holidays per year. The French get an average of 7 weeks. It's worth remembering these numbers when both he and Stross start exaggerating them later on.

Stross perhaps goes a bit too far here: "If you want Utopia, just move to France. Thirty-five hour working week, 8-10 weeks vacation a year, and their overall productivity is equal to anyone in America." Aside from the fact that Stross's numbers are wrong, the problem is the mandatory nature of vacation. In America, you have at least some choice about your leisure/work balance. In France, the work week and vacation time is mandatory. That's Utopia? Maybe in America we prefer to work more and take more expensive, shorter vacations than the French. Is this obviously a bad idea?

But do we have a choice in America? A later questioner brings this up and Krugman has more to say:

Effectively it's not possible for an individual to say, "All right, I think 20 hours of work a week is enough to provide everything I want." The world is not geared to 20 hour work weeks, there are all kinds of signaling aspects. There's an element where people want you to prove that you're committed, and so you can't actually work humane hours, because if you do then you must not really care. So what you do in a place like France is that there are 35-hour legal work weeks, there are mandated vacations, all of these things which enable them to collectively move to a position of working shorter hours and some indication that that does lead to more personal satisfaction.

So the 40-hour work week we have in America is inhumane, but the 35-hour weeks in France are humane? I admit I don't get it. The average Frenchman works 25-30% fewer hours per year than the average American. This is far less than the difference between the average American today and the average American a century ago. Krugman is just riffing to a receptive audience here.

And does it lead to more personal satisfaction? There may be "some indication" that it does, but there is also plenty indication that it does not. The world map of happiness shows the U.S. ranked 23rd out of 178 nations surveyed (and the highest-ranked really large nation). France comes in 62nd. "Industry is the enemy of melancholy," said William F. Buckley. Why should we assume that more leisure equals more happiness?

If an individual American wants to work less and earn less, then I certainly hope he can find a way to do so, even if that means emigrating to France. But I equally hope that we don't try Krugman's proposal of "collective action" to force us all to do so. Americans are choosing to forego even the vacation time they do get, so it isn't like we're chafing for more and being thwarted by our corporate paymasters.

No More Sears Tower

The Sears Tower was renamed yesterday for its new owner, insurance company Willis Group. The renaming has caused understandable heartache among Chicagoans, who feel that the Sears Tower is a landmark and therefore should be exempt from changes like this.

It reminds me of a similar controversy in Washington, D.C., over the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, an exemplar of brutalist architecture in the nation's capital. In both cases, a relatively young building (the Third Church was built in 1971; the Sears Tower in 1973) is being defended as a historical landmark - and therefore a common good - against private owners who wish to modify their property. Granted, the "change" to the Third Church is a bit more permanent: its owners want to tear it down and build a new church.

At what point does a private building become common property? I would argue: never, unless a government purchases the building. It is easy for free riders, who pay none of the costs of maintenance and endure none of the design problems, to prefer to keep a historic building unchanged. But its owners, who do have to weight those costs, may have different priorities. If the free riders want to become paying owners, they should find the money and buy it, obtaining all the rights inherent to ownership.

This seems like a no-brainer in the case of buildings that are only as old as I am. After all, if you want another 40-year-old brutalist church in Washington, D.C., it only takes 40 years - just build one and wait. But I did say "never", so what about harder cases: Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, for example.

Obviously, Notre Dame is a irreplaceable historic building. If it were torn down, it would measurably diminish our cultural heritage. Notre Dame is state property under the 1905 French law on the separation of Church and State, with exclusive use granted to the Roman Catholic Church. But suppose France wanted to tear it down and sell the land to McDonald's? Should they be allowed to?

I'm forced to say yes, as much as it hurts. If we wanted to save Notre Dame, we would have to pool our money and buy it. There is no ultimate authority on Earth that can decide what should be preserved and what should not be. Preservation has a cost as well as a benefit; it should not be up to those who do not share the costs to make the decisions (or else everything of value would always be preserved).

Taking this stance will result in some things being lost that I as a free rider would have rather seen preserved, but that is inevitable anyway. Every day things that I like are destroyed: a web site changes its format, a restaurant changes its menu, a television station stops broadcasting reruns of Scrubs. Worse yet, things that I think I would like but have not yet experienced are destroyed: say, a restaurant highlighted in a Thailand travel guide closes its doors. These things can never be recovered, even in our memories.

But that is life. We will never be able to experience all that we might have. The world is too full of possibilities to realize them all. Our best compromise is to have the maximum individual liberty to experience what we can - but that demands allowing everyone else liberty to do the same. If I demand that the French government must preserve Notre Dame for my benefit, then I am imposing a cost on French taxpayers. If they do not wish to pay it, that is their right.

This is the point where my late father would say: This is why we need a world government, so that it can own these items of massive cultural significance and - theoretically at least - the entire world would have a stake in their preservation. I disagree, but I will leave the response to that for another day.