Not how they do it in PHILADELPHIA

[DanS]

The problem with the Greeks is not enough of them are working. Those who work apparently are burdened by the people who don't.

[Tupac Shakur]

I thought the problem with the greeks was that they refused to pay taxes?

There are many problems with the Greeks.

[Dinner]

There are areas in the US where productivity is relatively high as well.

Yes, generally places like NY, IL, CA, MA, and WA. The rest of it is low productivity worthlessness.

[Dinner]

No, you have your governments demand that companies give you time off, forcing businesses overseas and contributing to unemployment.

Dumb ass. Why does Germany and most EU countries (other than worthless southerners [which is true on both continents]) have lower unemployment rates?

[Jon Miller]

The problem with the Greeks is not enough of them are working. Those who work apparently are burdened by the people who don't.

I hadn't heard that welfare was a large portion of greek expenditures. I would guess that pensions are relatively high, but they are relatively high everywhere.

And I haven't heard that people are being burdened by taxes/etc.

What I have read is that people basically refuse to pay taxes.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2011/07/11/110711ta_talk_surowiecki

"The “shadow economy”—business that’s legal but off the books—is larger in Greece than in almost any other European country, accounting for an estimated 27.5 per cent of its G.D.P. (In the United States, by contrast, that number is closer to nine per cent.)

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financ...i#ixzz1hJl2EjA
"

http://digitaljournal.com/article/316094

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/8585593/Greece-loses-15bn-a-year-to-tax-evasion.html

I could go on.

JM

[Tupac Shakur]

Yes, generally places like NY, IL, CA, MA, and WA. The rest of it is low productivity worthlessness.

Capitalist paradise Delaware had the highest estimate labor productivity growth from 2000-2004, according to a study by the Cleveland Fed. Michigan, North Carolina, Iowa, and South Carolina round out the top five, with West Virginia not far behind. All the states you listed are much farther down the list, with New York and California being notably poor performers.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

dinner is always wrong.

[giblets]

Dinner said labor productivity though, not "labor productivity growth from 2000-2004".

[Al B. Sure!]

Why the **** is he 'dinner'?!

[Tupac Shakur]

Why the **** are you "Al B. Sure!"?

[Al B. Sure!]

Why the **** are you "Tupac Shakur" when you already were the rapper Drake?

[Traianvs]

I thoroughly enjoy hearing the fictions you Euros invent to help you feel superior to a country that surpassed you on every meaningful measure decades ago.

It's even funnier when those fictions are backed up by fact, like more drug abuse:


obesity:


homicide:


teenage births


child wellbeing:


and we could go on like this for a ****load of other indicators.
Of course if you say the US is so much better, you're free to believe that.

Germans are as fat as Americans. Ya'll work nearly as hard as we do, however, so you've earned some extra Knackwurst.

They're not as fat as Americans. They are as overweight, but not as obese. US is still king o' the fatsos, don't worry.
There's a cool graph on http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html showing the trend in obesity over the last few decades. Impressive if not disturbing to say the least.

[Tupac Shakur]

I love that you had to resort to using moronic scatter plots of questionable validity.

[Traianvs]

It's funny you refer to rebuttals from the WSJ, and one that's not even remotely convincing. I think they've read only the first few chapters of the book, otherwise they wouldn't make such moronic claims as:

But, by the Wilkinson-Pickett reckoning, inequality is the cause of these problems and not vice versa. This leads us to the improbable conclusion that societal malaise can be alleviated by reducing income in the surrounding neighborhoods.

Which is definately not what they're saying.
On the topic of the data mining, in their statistics they have only used the UNDP data of 2004 once. They haven't used the 2006 in any of the other indicators... See here. There's a reply to the criticism here by the way.

It's disingenuous to post a response from a group of politically motivated people and then claim the work I cited is dubious. Every work has its critics from special interest groups. Just google Captus etc.

All of that however, is besides the point. Whatever the cause of the correlation, the data is there. The US is doing worse on a wide range of social indicators.

[Krill]

So...it's better to work for McDonalds in the US than the EU?