Fiji just introduced 5 days/yr of "Family Care Leave" on the 1st of Jan, 2019. The Act doesn't require there to be sickness involved, so while you can take leave to care for your sick family member, theoretically you can also do so to support them at a school rugby match: https://i.imgur.com/Ct0wv5D.png
Fiji is just barely above "third world" status. What's your excuse, USA?
Well, what's Fiji's excuse for being "barely above 'third world' status" ?
What makes you think it's normal for Fiji to have low standards of development, but it's an aberration for the USA?
It turns out there are many different dimensions of development, and just like many countries, the US ranks poorly on some of those dimensions, due to extremely complicated and maybe intractable political and cultural issues.
> Well, what's Fiji's excuse for being "barely above 'third world' status" ?
Well there's a very long list of reasons starting from geographic isolation to brain drain (incl. to the USA) all the way up to military coups, but I doubt that was a serious question so there's no point me answering your question in any great detail.
> What makes you think it's normal for Fiji to have low standards of development, but it's an aberration for the USA?
See above for why Fiji has low standards of development. In comparison, USA is the most prosperous and powerful nation on earth and has been for over a century. You've enjoyed democracy for almost 250 years. You've been to the moon.
> the US ranks poorly on some of those dimensions, due to extremely complicated and maybe intractable political and cultural issues.
And at last after the defensive stuff is out of the way, we see an attempt at an answer, abstract and hand-wavy though it is.
> See above for why Fiji has low standards of development. In comparison, USA is the most prosperous and powerful nation on earth and has been for over a century. You've enjoyed democracy for almost 250 years. You've been to the moon.
Democracy and space programs are two dimensions of development, but certainly not the whole story. India is a democracy, and Russia has an advanced space program. Both countries have loads of problems. So I'm not sure what your point is with democracy and the space program.
As for "powerful", I also don't see how that's relevant. China is extremely powerful, and Switzerland is not powerful at all. However I would bet my life that a greater fraction of Swiss than Chinese people have access to sick leave.
Yes, the US is prosperous in some ways, and not in others.
> And at last after the defensive stuff is out of the way, we see an attempt at an answer, abstract and hand-wavy though it is.
Actually that was the point of my entire post. Everything else in the post was an illustration of that point.
Let me make another point. The US isn't a person; it doesn't have willpower, feelings, or emotions. So it doesn't make sense to reason as though "the US" made some sort of irrational bad decision to be a shitty country where people can't take the day off of work. It doesn't make decisions at all in the way a human being does. It's an emergent system with no mind of its own and must be understood as such.
"Let me make another point. The US isn't a person; it doesn't have willpower, feelings, or emotions"
You made a similar point in your reply to me, but you've made it better here, so I'll reply here.
The US is a human construct, just like any other nation. And part of 'The US' is its people, its citizens. You can't divorce the country from the people that make it.
It does have willpower, it does have feelings, it does have emotions. As an example take a look at the countries reaction to 9/11. There was a reaction, which seems to disprove your theory, I would go further and say it was quite a human reaction.
You missed the larger point. A token offering of “5 days for rugby” is irrelevant if the rest of the economy is shit. You might claim that more government mandated PTO has no impact on the economy, but that’s not been established in any facts you presented.
> You missed the larger point. A token offering of “5 days for rugby” is irrelevant if the rest of the economy is shit.
No you did. A worker who needs to stay home a few days to care for a sick child or parent will consider this a blessing, regardless of how shit the rest of the economy is, how low wages are.
Unless you're suggesting causation between barely above 3rd world status, and having family days off I'm not sure what your point is?
Richer countries tend to (or should?) have nicer things, its reasonable to ask why one of the richest doesn't have something that much poorer countries do.
Having high quality of life like easy access to childcare, sick leave and vacation time from work, etc., is part of being a rich country, or more precisely, a developed country. So your argument amounts to "rich countries should be rich", which is circular.
If by "rich" you mean GDP per capita as opposed to development, I don't think it's a great metric -- there are plenty of countries with horrible, oppressive regimes that have a high GDP per capita. There are many low- or middle-income countries that I would rather live in than the "rich" UAE or Saudi Arabia, for example.
Also, how are you defining "should" ? Doesn't that imply some capacity for moral reasoning, or at least willpower? The US has neither -- it is not a person and it has no mind of its own. Saying the US "should" do something is like saying a hurricane "should" avoid my house. It'd be nice if it did, but it sounds a bit odd to put it that way.
I'm defining rich in this context as the US, as that was the developed nation we were talking about.
You will note that despite the US being richer than most developed nations, it has poorer benefits like you highlighted [1], compared to those other developed nations. So I fail to see how that is circular, if the richer country has less of those things.
"Richer countries tend to (or should?)"
There is a correlation (tend to), but there are exceptions as you have identified, so to avoid getting bogged down in arguments like this, I added the parenthetical. I then added a question mark because I am aware its attempting to impose ethics on something amoral.
I will attempt to hedge my statements even more in the future.
Well I guess I don't understand what point you're trying to make.
Is it just the following? "High GDP per capita is positively correlated with other metrics of development, so it is an interesting exercise to attempt to understand why this applies more strongly in some societies than in others". If so, I agree with you that it's an interesting historical and sociological question.
I guess what I have a negative reaction to is people living in modern parliamentary democracies like the UK or France, people who are used to a system where elected officials tend to accurately represent their constituent's wills and are able to make those wills reality, scratching their heads failing to understand why the US doesn't "just" pass some reforms to make life better. From my perspective this is like asking why Syrians don't just decide to stop having a war. (I am sure if you polled Syrians, 99.9% of them would say they wish the war weren't happening!)
The US political and institutional system is so extremely deadlocked and broken that there is no person alive -- not even Trump or any Senator or any other powerful person you care to name, who would be able to institute mandatory sick leave for workers, free childcare, or any other plausible solution to the problem stated in this headline, no matter how much they wanted to. So it gets a bit tiring to constantly hear moralizing about these issues from people who don't realize that no path to fixing them exists.
"Is it just the following? "High GDP per capita is positively correlated with other metrics of development, so it is an interesting exercise to attempt to understand why this applies more strongly in some societies than in others". If so, I agree with you that it's an interesting historical and sociological question"
Yes, and I think the parents question of "What's your excuse, USA?" was getting at the same thing, which is why I was confused about why you were questioning it.
Who is paying for those five extra days? Is it the health insurance? Your cost of health care will go up or service will get worse.
Is it taxes? Your taxes will go up or money will be missing in the budget (or you will need to get more debt).
Is it the employer? Wage suppression.
You haven't gained or won anything really. There's no free lunch.
I will make an exception though: If you make people stay home when they are sick, you may reduce sickness overall. However, if people spend their entire "Family Care Leave" on rugby matches and then illness strikes, it's not going to work.
The cost is shared between taxpayers and the employer – employers get a 150% tax deduction for wages paid for family care leave.
Taxes will go up, and perhaps some prices. This is good.
> You haven't gained or won anything really. There's no free lunch.
Workers maybe haven't gained anything, but a worker has, and that's wonderful.
You can argue all you want about economic models and the absence of free lunches but at the end of the day, a parent who needs to take care of a sick child gets to do that, and having the cost paid elsewhere in taxes or higher prices is a boon.
The cost isn't paid elsewhere. It's essentially going straight out of their own paycheck. Not immediately and in equal measure, but over time and on the average. It's effectively vacation days.
Remember, everyone gets those five days. Big earners, small earners. It evens out to nothing. Everyone can't live at the expense of everyone else.
An American parent has a sick child but can't care for them. A Fijian parent has a sick child and can care for them. This comes out of their own paycheck (not immediately and in equal measure, but over time and on the average. It's effectively vacation days)
If you really don't see how the latter position is so vastly better for the individual parent than I don't know what to say. Perhaps you've never been a wage slave.
Believe it or not, an American parent can take a vacation day as well. The difference is, you're not forced to have vacation days and suffer lower pay for it.
In any event, why have only five days? If five days is good, why aren't two weeks even better? How could five days be enough to care for your family? Why not a whole month, that's even better than two weeks! I'll tell you why: Because it's not a free lunch. These laws are made so that politicians can sell them to clueless voters, not because they make sense.
It’s 5 days because there are no other paid leave laws. If the US had mandatory six to eight weeks paid leave for everyone like a civilized country, then there wouldn’t be a need to specify sick leave, other than allowing for leave without prior notice due to sudden illness or injury.
If the US had mandatory six to eight weeks paid leave, that would come out of the employee's paycheck.
I don't see what's good or civilized about being forced to take a vacation. A lot of people are underemployed as-is, because of all the regulations that make it less attractive to hire people fulltime.
"Why have only one painkiller? If one painkiller is good, why not take the whole bottle? How one pill be good enough to ease your pain? Why not the whole bottle, that's even better than one pill!"
Fiji is just barely above "third world" status. What's your excuse, USA?