Then I am surprised to say, there is the same thing in Italy ("aspettativa per avvio attività"), but oddly enough, only for public sector employees, up to 12 months.
I am not sure many people make use of it, I would guess very, very few.
so would I, but I think the demographics of people who go into (most) public sector jobs and those who want to become entrepreneurs do not have a major overlap.
Yeah, as everything with labor laws in Italy, it can be fiendishly complicated and vary dramatically from sector to sector, from year (of hiring) to year...
does the swedish system have sufficient protections in place so that unless your employer thinks the world of you, you won't be let go for 'valid reasons' shortly after just to set an example?
You're not 'enployed at will' in Sweden. Meaning you can't be fired for no reason. In fact there is a very short list of valid reasons. Amongst them for example 'work shortage'.
If you indeed are fired, you have first dibs if the company decides to hire someone new for a similar position, so firing someone for BS reasons isn't a productive way forward.
Often you start with a 6 month 'probationary period' when either side can quickly terminate the contract. The employer is supposed to use this time to decide if the employee is 'mediocre' or not.
Apart from that you could also be terminated if there is documented evidence that you are failing to perform your job.
The uniquely American idea that you can be fired at any time for any reason is for me utterly terrifying and the primary reason I would never want to work in the US.
There's plenty of contractors in Europe who can effectively be fired without giving a cause. They are often the most experienced and valuable people and the "firing at will" is not a big issue for them - they are paid for it (much more than full time employees).
Similarly, tech people in the US make much more than European FTEs - you don't get protections, but you get paid so much that it's trivial to save up money to just protect yourself against any periods of unexpected unemployment.
People in US generally enjoy higher standard of living than people in Western Europe (minus healthcare, but that's unrelated), which is a signal that the system as a whole is generally benefitial for workers. Employers hire much more eagerly knowing that, if the tides turn, the extra employees will not be a burden. To see this in practice, check out for example unemployment trends in US vs France.
Health care, dental care up to adulthood, parental leave protected by law and education through college is definitely not unrelated to standard of living. Neither is mandatory pension contributions from your employer, as well as a guaranteed contribution from the state (we unknowingly get contributions to our retirement for every month we go to college).
Sure, if you're single with no kids, in very good shape, employed as a data engineer and 30 years old , like me, you would gladly take the money instead of all the other stuff. But I like the fact that children who are born into working poor families in Sweden will have a much healthier upbringing than if they were born in the US.
Given that healthcare is often provided by employer's in the USA, I think healthcare is very related to the topics of the jobs markets and job regulations.
The "hire much more eagerly part" is actually great. Sure, your job can be reduced at any time, but the alternative is to not have the job at all - the business will likely not risk job creation on an uncertain project knowing they will not be able to fire if the project goes south.
In practice, just see unemployment numbers - around 3% in US and around 9% in France, with chronic low-intensity rebellion (yellow vests) happening in the country.
This is not backed up by statistics. Look at life satisfaction or mood-polls. GDP/capita or stuff like that does not tell you how people are actually doing. Even in rich cities like NYC or SF, I did not feel like people had a higher standard of living - unless they were part of the 1%
This is the country that saw the invention of the "food desert", that has an absolutely terrifyingly high incidence of opiate addiction and that routinely shuffles entire cities worth of homeless around the country so they're someone else's problem? That US?
It's also the country where not being able to live in a detached house is mostly seen as not worthy of middle class. That's far above the standard of Western Europe, where people in middle class lives in flats.
In Sweden, most middle class people live in detached houses. However, most young professionals desire to live in apartments because it's simply more convenient. I hate the garden and I hate driving.
This article is about Sweden, remember. My parents have two houses, one outside Gothenburg (big enough that they have converted the floor me and my younger brother lived in into two apartments, one if four bedrooms the other one is two) and a beach house further up north. They're from a completely different generation with different priorities.
'documented evidence that you are failing to perform your job'. It's the same where i live. But here (nl) it basically means that you can be fired at will anyways. employers will write down their version to set up a case. lawyers dont really try these cases because their rates are high enough employees cant afford a court case. They prefer settling these cases, so you get fired, but you typically get some money. after i found that out, i did not really bother with the whole permanent contract thing at all anymore.
In Sweden the unions are the ones who will go to court and negotiate for you because they know that if you go it will set a precedent that exposes everyone else too.
In Sweden you almost have to be part of a union, not in the least because it is right (because they dictate and negotiate your minimum wage, among other things). In the context of the Netherlands this doesn't really apply, except for specific sectors that are overwhelmingly not tech (or tech-adjacent).
This is very, very wrong. What happens is that they bring it in front of an employment judge and they will decide whether or not it is right. Both sides present their argument. If you are not employed at minimum wage you can afford insurance to pay for legal costs, including those incurred in disputes between you and your employer.
As for the practice of handing employees a sack of money to leave (and other, more insidious practices) - that definitely happens, but that isn't at-will employment (which would be turning the dial a few ticks up on the dystopia scale).
> The uniquely American idea that you can be fired at any time for any reason is for me utterly terrifying
As an American nearing the end of a decades-long pretty successful tech career maybe I can offer some useful perspective. Having spent quite a bit of time interacting with international colleagues one difference I've noticed is that American high tech workers are more aware of and connected to their employer's bottom line. This is partly because stock options, RSUs, profit sharing, performance bonuses, and commissions tend to be a more significant portion of our overall compensation here. But a more meta reason is that generally speaking, companies are both started and go out of business faster and more often here. The faster pace of the overall economy leads to less effective firms reaching the natural consequences of poor performance faster.
I haven't looked up the data but I suspect the average length of employment of highly-experienced skilled employees is shorter here. It's not just due to being laid-off from a failing or pivoting firm but also because employees choose to leave for other opportunities more often. I've had international friends assume "perhaps you Americans feel less loyalty to your employer or employees" but it's more that loyalty is earned (and lost) faster.
While different firms and industries vary, I think there's an overall trend from employees of "switch employers faster" which is matched by employers tending to hire and fire faster. In my experience, this also seems true for other job changes like promotions and employees voluntarily applying for open positions within the same organization (against their direct manager's desire to keep them). On those anonymous employee satisfaction surveys run by HR depts, there's often a question asking employees to rank "How likely is it you'll still work at this company in X years". I'm pretty sure in the U.S. those responses average much shorter than in Europe. So, while there's a higher level of medium-term job uncertainty, it's just the necessary 'other side of the coin' of having a higher level of medium-term upward mobility.
For me, none of this feels 'scary'. Frankly, I wouldn't want an employer to be required to keep me around for one minute longer than makes business sense for them. The reason is that for most of my career, my performance stock options and bonuses have consistently increased, often to more than half my total compensation - sometimes much more than half. To be clear, that extra money wasn't a "gift" or granted because the company is "nice" (though nearly all my employers have been very nice). They keep increasing my comp because my market value is increasing and they are justifiably worried I'll leave for a higher paying or more interesting job elsewhere (or to do my own startup). When it comes to highly skilled workers at silicon valley tech companies, managers often don't even have to fire employees who aren't performing well. Once the employee sees the performance part of their compensation falling to match their current value to the firm, the employee will quit to go somewhere that values them more.
My relationship with employers is similar to how I feel about my relationships with romantic partners (and now my spouse). There's a constructive tension that makes it work. I want to continue being in the relationship not because "it's comfortable" or, worse, "this person is about as good as I can expect to do" (ugh!) but rather because I so highly value the other person I'm worried she'll 'come to her senses' and dump me for someone better. I think an ideal relationship is where both parties feel that way equally. I want to be so valuable to my employer that they're worried I'll 'come to my senses' and quit. Conversely, I want the job I'm in to be so well-suited to my skills, challenging, enjoyable and highly-paid that I'm worried they'll 'come to their senses' and replace me with someone better or cheaper. If either party ever stops feeling that way, the relationship is ultimately going to degrade anyway and life's too short to remain in relationships where the value dynamic is unbalanced for any significant period of time.
It's only hard to get rid of employees that turn out to be mediocre or lose all motivation after a while. But you can still move them within the company to perform less complex work. No one says you have to promote them.
How would you write the law such that employees couldn’t take the leave then come back and abuse their employment knowing they were protected from being fired for ‘valid reasons’?
I am CEO of a swedish VC-backed startup, and i am currently off 2 days a week for parental leave for 6 months. Yes, i am a man. And when we hire somebody in their 30s (man or woman), we can expect that for 6-12 months they will be gone on parental leave at some stage. (We have 4 people now out of 16 who will be on parental leave during 2020 - 3 of them men).
We three were working for a firm in the UK in various capacities in 1999. The firm decided to FM their IT function to Synstar which became part of HP(E). We formed a company and resold ourselves back through Synstar (they took 17%, we were still cheap and still made a living)
Nowadays, 20 years later, we are still going. We will never set the world on fire and that is the way I like it. We turn over £1.5M at the moment and have 20 employees, we grow gradually as needed. I sleep very well at night.
I'll quite happily stick two fingers up at any fantastically wealthy fuckwit who managed to make themselves wealthy beyond compare who might describe my little company as an underachiever (and have done so.)
I'm not advocating that our approach is the best. It works for us. It wont put you on the cover of a magazine. Be absolutely certain that you are the dog's nadgers when you think you are the dog's nadgers. If you are not the dog's then be prepared for disappointment and worse.
This is Sweden so you don't have the same requirement on healthcare benefits like in the US. I imagine the biggest benefits are pension and equity. It's my impression that most pension benefits are as a percentage of the wage, so unpaid leave doesn't net you any pension. Equity I imagine depends on the language of the specific contract.
I've seen it happen, people take extended leave of absence on FAANG, to pursue some non profit stuff or simply to prevent burnout.
During those, you're still covered by healthcare plan, but everything else freezes: let's say you take 2 months off. Then your RSU that was supposed to vest next month is now vesting in 3 months. Your vacation days don't accrue during those 2 months, etc. Obviously, since you're not getting any salary, there's no contribution to 401k happening during those 2 months.
Well, unless a company has a specific policy, it's something you'd probably need to negotiate. What you describe seems pretty reasonable as a leave of absence for a valued employee who actually has an option to take a leave of absence but it certainly isn't something I'd assume was anything like a universal formula. (Certainly continuing healthcare is a big deal for many people unless they're covered by a spouse's policy whether or not they have to pay the company portion or not.)
Maybe this is a Silicon Valley bias but I have never heard of anyone scoffing at the founders of failed enterprises. New enterprises are hard even the best prepared ones will require some luck.
A successful start up ecosystem should ensure that people are not punished for trying.
Or maybe the existence of this policy acknowledges that failure is an expected outcome and people want to get back into the job market and maybe try again later.
Why? You can leave to chase an idea that will most likely turn out not to work anyway but could be a lot of fun to pursue. Or you just use the opportunity to learn new skills. Most start ups don't succeed, the performance of the founder is only one reason why it might not work out.
Is there some sort of personal failing in not being able to run a business (perhaps with a very good idea)? This really doesn't need to be influenced by some sort of pride idea.
Being Swedish, I attempted to use that back in 2002 when I was fed up with with my current, quite stagnant employer. Being young and naive I allowed my then direct manager and CEO to bully myself into giving up on that idea.
They weren't even aware of this possibility. I showed them the actual law. They implied they would lawyer up if I fighted them.
I ended up simply resigning instead. In retrospect that was a fantastic idea! In retrospect I saw people getting stuck there, while my career took off like a rocket (well, comparatively speaking)...
If I had been a similar age today, wanting to attempt this, I'd probably be able to find free help online. It's such a different world now, compared to 18 years ago.
I heard finding housing in stockholm is very hard. How do policies like this play in practice? Is it like how some US states pay you to move there except it's really nowhere near enough to be considered a livable income?
Swede here. We have a largely regulated rental market throughout the country, stupid as it is. In my view, this is an old remain from bygone times, but for some reason it is romanticised by many.
With this system you have to stand in line for at least 20 years to get a decent rental apartment in inner-city Stockholm. As you can probably guess, this system doesn't exactly encourage free movement. And it's created a huge black market, plus that it's pushing everyone into buying.
The issue is far more complicated than simply not having de-regulated rents. De-regulating rents would do something, no doubt, but there are so many more reasons why we have astronomically high real estate prices at this moment (and didn't have them just 20-25 years ago).
* We have massive tax cuts and subsidies for home owners. You get to make deductions off your interest rate payments, something that was introduced as an emergency measure in the 90s. We also have effectively no real estate tax, meaning there is no incentive to move out when your kids have moved out and the home is more than you need.
* For a long time, there was no need to even pay the principal of your mortgage. Now there is and it's one of the primary reasons the prices have gone sideways in Sweden for the past year.
* The local governments don't want renters and have gradually been given more and more power to get rid of them. They own a lot of the rentals and especially in Stockholm they have aggresively converted them into apartments that are owned (the common, Swedish system of buying a membership into a home owners organization is a bit hard to translate into an appropriate English term, but it's called "bostadsrätt"). The national government is basically powerless to increase the housing stock, if you go back to the 60s when my grandparents were facing a housing crisis the national government had the power to build one million homes mostly in the bigger cities like Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. They have nowhere close to that power anymore and the local governments have no incentive to solve the problems of low income people in a completely different city who would like to switch cities to get a decent living.
There are more than these too, these are just the first ones that popped into my head.
And all of this is unfortunately hard to change because most Swedes live in homes they own and it's a very common retirement plan. People who are in their 30s, like me, also think that falling interest rates well below inflation is the new normal because they've known anything else throughout their adult lives and thus take larger risks than they should.
I've never understood the purpose of price regulation without the government being involved in the market.
Let's use rent control as an example. The government is setting an upper bound to prices. The limit may not be high enough to justify building more units. Therefore there is a perverse incentive for the government to enact a bad policy because it is shielded from the outcomes but gains public support because visible indicators (like average rent price) look normal again.
There would be a simple way to make this system not horribly broken. When someone wants an apartment and wants to pay the regulated price the government should be responsible for building that regulated unit or subsidizing the difference between the regulated price and the market price. This aligns incentives because now the government is on the hook for actually solving the problem and if it fails to do so it will be financially punished because setting an artificially low market price will cause the government to lose money.
In Germany there are city owned housing associations that are responsible for providing low cost housing. This system works very well but I think cities like Berlin are not utilizing it correctly. They just want a quick political band aid and make the problem worse by avoiding responsibility.
Bah, stick to the truth: 20 years is for the decent but super cheap apartments, if you pay “market rates” you can get something from the private owners within months.
I don't think that's true. The private renters also have to abide to the regulated market prices, so you cannot buy your way to a rental apartment. Not unless the renter is breaking the law, that is.
I admit that I pulled the 20 years stats out of a hat. I quickly looked for some stats, and this page suggests around 10 years average for the private market, and 13 years for the communal: https://www.stockholmdirekt.se/nyheter/sa-lange-maste-du-koa...
The truth is that the existing system with regulated market prices ensures that ordinary people can save some of their wages and spend it on things like summer houses and holidays. As soon as you go fully private, rental prices double and all of that profit goes to a 1% who own housing. Of course, there is a narrative here that we have to abandon the regulated rental market - driven by that 1%. Then ordinary people, excluded from the regulated rental market because they have to wait 20 years to get the place they want, gang up with the 1% - which is insane! The truth is you can get a regulated rental appartment within 6 months if you take it in a crap neighborhood. But, everyone wants to live in the same places, and demand is high. So, the regulated market makes you queue - based on your waiting time, not ability to pay. There is, of course, a huge private ownership market, but prices are very high.
By "you” I think he means most swedes. I don’t know anything about the Stockholm rent market, are rents cost accessible to the average person or is a top-teir-income zone?
They are “too” affordable due to rent control, especially in the city centre. Leading to people viewing a contract as an asset that shouldn’t be given up for free but rather traded for another contract or sold (illegal).
All rents follow a standard model based on a number of parameters, but it's purposely constructed to enable lower-income household to aquire apartments in attractive locations. At the time of inception, the construction was considered an alternative to dedicated social housing.
I recently moved to Stockholm and have lived here for over a year. Finding housing that wasn't astronomically expensive (in relation to the salary level) was really, really tough.
France has something similar: congé création d’entreprise, up to 1 year (renewable once adding an additional year).
Also, if you’ve worked in the private sector for 6 cumulative years, you’re entitled to an unpaid sabbatical of up to 11 months, and you get to keep your job when you go back.
Here in the US we go the opposite way: even if you do find some way to take enough time off to accomplish something significant, there's a good chance your employer (legally) owns it.
No worries for Amazon SDEs! The amazon software developer "outside contributions" agreement basically states that you are not allowed to do anything without approval anyways. /s
Seriously tho. When I was employed by them their agreements were by far most draconian compared to any other company I've worked for. Ridiculous.
Most companies I've worked did have a route to enable you to contribute to projects outside of work and still retain the rights. Tho the easiest route is to establish something within a domain you want to work and then state that on a "inventions and copyrights" pre-employment agreement. This will outright eliminate you from certain jobs but... That's the US for ya.
And when you go without a job to try your hand at starting a business, it's usually accompanied with the gamble that you won't need any medical service that will wipe our your savings.
b) Define "something". If I take a year off to e.g. write a novel, do you really think that gap in my resume isn't going to affect me negatively if/when I start looking for jobs again?
I think we should also start with 6 hours work days or 4 days 8 hours. It will free up time to try new ideas and spend more time with family and loved ones. 6-7 weeks of vacation would also be something to try. Ie optimizing for life quality.
I remember reading a discussion about this in a german online newspaper a while ago. (In light of an initiative of the Finnish cabinet exploring 6 hour workdays, I believe).
When reading the comments, I expected people to dismiss the idea as unrealistic or naive but to agree with the spirit and to share the general goal of reducing worktime.
I was not expecting panic and outrage.
It was a minority (and certainly skewed by the groups of people who post online in the first place), but a notable number of commenters were violently opposed the idea, not out of economical concerns, but because they believed the end goal of having more free time itself was highly problematic - that it would encourage an unhealthy lifestyle, erode morals, would pose a danger to social order, etc etc.
It was a sobering read and a reminder that status-quo bias is still very much a thing.
If I'm not allowed to spend my time working, it is not free time!
In a free society, work hours is an agreement between consenting adults. If you want to work part time, that option is widely available. But why force your preferences on the rest of us?
Agreements made when the power balance is unequal are by nature not going to be fair. It is to the advantage of the one with more power to use it to get their way. For example, Silicon Valley had a famous issue of anti-poaching agreements to force wages of engineers down. Legally forcing these things is an attempt to deal with power imbalance to the benefit of the most people.
People in the experiment the gp post describes do not want to work 'part time', they want to work 'full time' for 30 hours a week. The fact that you describe that as 'part time' undermines your argument that work time is simply an agreement between adults (as opposed to a schelling point dictated by law, tradition, and convenience).
People don't freely choose to work in a vacuum - they are coerced into it (through property law). I work to avoid homelessness and starvation, and so do most people.
If I stop working, eventually somebody will turn up at my door and throw me out onto the street.
No, but good luck trying to burn some piece of forest to get your piece of earth for your farm. You cannot justify the existing order with basic human needs. In some places you even have to pay for access to water.
"biological need" is a strange way to describe being violently attacked in your place of shelter for working insufficient hours for the capitalist class
Nope. It is a right, not an obligation. Your employer can't stop you if your want to test your wings. Though this has actually been around in some form for quite a few years.
I started my first company in 2001 by getting 6 months off from Ericsson. I wanted to during that time, Ericsson would have to allow me to come back and continue as an employee. Quit permamently after three months. Now I'm happily running my fifth startup.
I left formally after three because the new business was taking off that I couldn't see any reason to go back. Better to have 100% focus on the new business.
I realize the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1937 is considered anathema among libertarians and many owners of enterprises who employ low-wage workers, but I don't think you'll find many takers among populace at large.
The "freedom" you are talking about is the freedom to take or leave work schedules we consider abusive today. If you want to go back to a world where employment means 12/7 or starve, you are free to campaign for the repeal all you like, though. Your senators' aides are standing by, call now. Meanwhile, I will be lobbying them to constrain your freedom a little more.
My god it’s so true. I’m a robotics engineer and I’m an advocate of what I call “reduce the human cost of living to zero” through automation and democratic arrangements. The idea being that we can make it cost very little for society to support non-working people, such that work is not compulsory for survival. It’s similar to a basic income but it’s universal basic services where we try to get the marginal cost to zero (we can IMO make it cheaper than a basic income).
I get so many people telling me “but people would be miserable, they need work to be happy and have purpose.” UGH YES I agree, but I never said I would ban employment! I just want people to be able to take a year off now and then, or work half time, or volunteer or do non-capitalist work and be fine. People seem to think that if we weren’t desperate for employment we’d just sit around bored all the time. That’s not what wealthy people do! Human beings are far too creative to just sit around and do nothing. Eliminating compulsory work is about increasing freedom. We’re smart enough to find something good to do with that freedom.
Well, but sadly it is true for people who have been in chains for years, that they don't know what to do anymore(except drinking and watching TV), when suddenly there is no one around anymore to tell them what to do. Lots of people quickly degrade after retirement.
You can also see that effect already in schools. Currently there is school vacation and you see lots of groups of bored teenagers hanging around.
There is something very wrong with a "free society", when most of its people don't know what to do with their free time except to kill it. (The very concept of timekilling is disturbing as well)
But yes. I am 100% behind the idea of robotic basic income!
People can learn again, that there is more to live than mindless huzzling and consuming.
Agreed. I’ve found that most people don’t spend time thinking about the ideal society. So when you talk about an ideal society and you describe one aspect of it, they imagine you’re talking about a society where everything is the same except that one aspect. They have a very hard time imagining what the world would be like if many things were different.
It might take a generation for people to adjust, like Clay Shirky describes at the start of his talk “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus” from 2008:
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing—there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders—a lot of things we like—didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.
It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.
But it also wasn't a civic surplus until people actually got the money and time to make use of it. The fight for the 8 hour working day took more than half a century and had a price steeped in blood. Getting wages above survival level likewise.
Somebody would have to build and fix those robots. I'm not worried. Plus I don't expect robots to create meaningful art and literature. Compulsory work can be boring, or stressful or dangerous. Like what those kids in Bangladesh are doing, dissasembling ships. I'd much rather the dissasembly was done by spider metal cutting robots.
> we can make it cost very little for society to support non-working people, such that work is not compulsory for survival.
If we are supporting people that legitimately can’t work, sure. But supporting people that can work, but don’t — that’s where I have a problem because my willingness to work, even in jobs I might not like gets punished through taxes. Why do I have a personal responsibility to support others that are unwilling to support themselves. We are talking about grown adults, if they have nothing to contribute to society, why would we subsidize that? Some layabout watching Judge Judy all day gets a free pass while the guy working on a hot roof all day is supposed to pay for that? Who is going to be a janitor if they don’t have to? Producing something of value to society is part of being a part of a society. People have a responsibility to take care of themselves. They might need some temporary help now and then, but making dependency a permanent state is a great way to ensure that government has ultimate control of your life.
But we already have existing data that says that people who are given free money don't just become unemployed, and the only people who do take the free money to be unemployed are parents and teenagers who are trying to parent and study respectively. I think personally that sounds amazing. If someone wants to watch Judge Judy all day, every day, for months chances are they have a mental illness and need to be treated the same way as someone whose back is thrown out needs to be treated.
People will take jobs for the similar reasons we take jobs now- we want money, and take higher paying jobs to afford nicer things. In a world where bases are covered, luxuries will definitely be a better carrot than the stick of homelessness.
I won’t force you to support them. I WANT to support others because I feel good doing so. At normal jobs I’m just helping some billionaire get richer (my last job I worked indirectly for a billionaire). I would way rather work day in and day out to support regular people like me.
And since you brought it up, I find your attitude disturbing. “Why should I have to help other people” is kind of a gross question. You don’t want to help other people? Doesn’t that make you selfish? Again I’m not saying I will force you to help, but why are you against the idea of helping others anyway?
I see that you mention government. I didn’t mention government. I said society could provide for everyone. We can do that without the government.
You did say "democratic arrangements" which you might be able to wriggle out of admitting means government. In either case, what is your plan for dealing with a dissenters to your view, especially if they wind up being in the minority? Remember to leave out force, threat of violence, and other coercions, lest you contradict yourself. Or strike "democratic arrangements" because it's a heavier hammer than you think it is.
People who don't want to interact with society or be helped by society can... not interact with society or be helped by society. They can go out in the woods somewhere or develop a religion that gives you excemptions.
You can also organize among your minority group and protest that your rights are being violated, or hire lawyers to sue.
Oh my god you act like I’ve never heard of libertarianism. A worker owned cooperative can be democratic without being a government. And I agree with authors like Murray Bookchin who advocate for a kind of anarchist communism where you have a “government” but not a state. I personally advocate for a state-free society and have no interest in rule by force. I wrote a story about a democratically arranged worker owned cooperative that feeds and houses all its members two and a half years ago:
http://tlalexander.com/corporation/
I’m not concerned with people who don’t want to participate. They don’t have to and we don’t need their support. Such a system can be supported entirely by those who want to support it.
I’m sorry if I come off confrontational but your question seemed to be a “gotcha” that is honestly very simplistic. As an anarchist or “libertarian socialist” I’m quite aware of problems of the state. I will say that in many cases I think local governments may find it beneficial to support these systems, but I like the idea of this being done on a local level so individual cities can decide for themselves. In the same way that some governments operate trains, it is not the case that trains depend on government to be useful.
Remember the premise is to drive down the cost of meeting peoples needs.
If the cost of supporting peoples need is driven towards zero, then the cost of supporting your own needs will likewise gets driven towards zero. At that point, the amount of work you will need to put in to meet your needs will go towards zero, and the number of people that can be supported by a minimal amount of additional works will rapidly increase.
The point being that at some point the incremental amount of work needed to support a large number of people choosing not to work will be so low that it's not worth worrying about it relative to the potential benefits of creating a surplus large enough that it effectively becomes a choice for everyone.
While I'm sure a lot of people will choose leisure, a lot of us won't. We might work less. More likely we'll work on different things. If I had full freedom to choose my projects, I'd still work on something because I work on software because I enjoy it.
Liberating a huge number of people to pursue projects that the financial payoff for is extremely uncertain has the potential to be massively transformative.
There are plenty of ways we could reward those choosing to continue to do the minimal necessary work in a future like that, to ensure sufficient people want to.
> They might need some temporary help now and then, but making dependency a permanent state is a great way to ensure that government has ultimate control of your life.
I happen to agree with this part. The Expanse illustrates this potential case well: People on "basic" have their needs met, but are also locked out of work, and getting into the upper echelons where you can get a job and do better is treated as a privilege allotted via random allocations - unless you have friends in high places... People on basic don't dare rise up, because their life depends on not getting in the crosshairs of government.
This is why a lot of the left are concerned about universal basic income, for example - because it is a potential "bread and circus" for capitalism struggling to deal with future fallout of automation.
But that is different from opposing the idea of a system where automation is advanced enough and democratized enough that basic needs are available to be met everywhere, and nobody has the power to stop you from using the time that gives you however you want, including creating your own position to do better.
My current job is doing 4 days 8 hours because the boss read an article saying it increases productivity.
So, his opinion is that we should be more productive in 4 days than we are in 5. I do enjoy the 3 day weekends, but I have to admit that I don't like the immense pressure of the shortened week.
Can you just work less hard in the four days and then work on the fifth off day? It seems like that schedule should give you more options about how to work, but not require you to work the compressed schedule.
Ive been working four 4-6 hour days a week for the past year. I’m in my opinion quite productive. I think we need to stop thinking in terms of 8 hour days. An 8 hour work day is a lot! Same with five day work weeks. With four day work weeks you get perpetual three day weekend and that makes a huge difference. Actually recently I started working Monday and taking Tuesday off so I can attend a Tuesday night hack night at the local hacker space that I would not be able to attend on a work day.
One of the most productive teams I’ve worked on had unlimited vacation that was actually used. People were taking a week or so off every month and we’re still getting a crazy amount of stuff done.
Part of the problem with unlimited vacation is that companies that use it tend to do it to save money, since if you have unlimited vacation days they don't need to compensate you for unused PTO when you leave. They'll also try and create a culture where employees don't want to or "can't" take time off. It can be more nefarious than anything.
Of course companies that do that are usually startups, and if your startup tries to fuck you, leave. They probably need you more than you need them.
The financial aspect is certainly true though, as someone who hasn't moved around a lot and who pretty much uses all their vacation, that aspect of traditional vacation banking has never been a big deal to me.
The culture aspect needs to come down from the top. A senior engineering manager at a well-known SV company with "unlimited" vacation claims it works pretty well because, from his perspective, an expectation that you'll take time off and disconnect comes from the top. On the other hand, I've heard others at the same company give a less rosy report, so YMMV depending on teams, etc.
Only France has a 35 hour work week. 35 or 40, not much of a difference but nevertheless important since you can have a decent lunch break and still spend meaningful time with your kids if we account for commuting etc.
One gets get paid overtime for anything more than the 35h work week and can work up a limit of h/yr overtime. They also reduced overtime payments. If the company needs 70h per week from an employee, they'd probably be better off employing two people anyway, at least in theory.
This sounds like a wonderful idea but I'd love to hear some stats on how this specific time-off fares for would-be startupers. The article mentions a few successful start-ups but it's unclear whether these came about as a result of the time-off or if they resulted from someone just pursuing them full time. Not knocking the idea either way, just would love to see data on how many new companies it's helped create.
From my experience people are more likely to use this for studying, trying a business idea (not the HN meaning of startup) or extended travel. Startup I imagine is an outlier in what its used for.
It lines up well with the very advantageous student loans (for living costs, university is free) for studying and lets people try their hand at going through higher education wothout throwing their job away.
I mean... most startups fail. Surely that's no less true in Sweden than elsewhere. If you want statistics, I guess you'd measure this in terms of successful exits or revenue or equity size or something as a fraction of population or GDP or workforce. But at least anecdotally (c.f. Spotify/Skype/Mojang) they seem to be doing pretty well.
I think Sweden is very romanticized in American media and amongst the elites. Having lived there for 6 years before moving to US, I think it's an ok country but nowhere near the paradise that is promised by the American media. They say the best thing in Sweden is its health care. In the entire time I was there I attempted to see a specialist for a condition that I had maybe two or three times, I ended up giving up every single time after I was told the wait time is between 3-4 months. I keep my American employer sponsored private insurance and employer determined time off policy, thank you very much.
Of course if you are in the top 5-10% of earners (which I suppose many/most on this forum are), a privately funded system will almost always be better simply because you can afford to pay for the best.
For myself I’d much, much rather live in a society where a cancer diagnosis doesn’t financially ruin you and your family for you life, and where everyone no matter their income receives quality care when it’s needed. Even if that means that I have to wait weeks/months to get something non-critical seen.
The American healthcare system isn’t hard to fix because it only works for 5-10% of people. It’s hard to fix because it works for 80% of people. Americans don’t irrationally cling to a system that’s bad for 90% of them. (Even among Democrats, a large fraction oppose getting rid of current health insurance: https://slate.com/business/2019/10/medicare-for-all-is-getti...)
Americans stick to the current system, because it works for most people. Most middle class people don’t go bankrupt when they get sick. And the middle class pays the lowest taxes in the developed world, because they don’t pay 20-30% payroll taxes like in European countries to support healthcare for the bottom quarter of earners. That’s the bargain people have voted for. That is obvious, because candidates who campaign for Swedish style healthcare don’t propose Swedish style taxes to go with it. Elizabeth Warren isn’t running on a top tax bracket that kicks in at $75,000 — she’s running on a wealth tax Sweden abandoned and corporate taxes higher than Sweden. Because Americans won’t vote for the bargain between healthcare coverage and middle class taxes that Swedes have adopted.
It’s not the system I’d prefer, I’d rather pay more taxes and make sure the bottom 25% have adequate healthcare. But the notion that everyone is actually irrational and the current system only benefits a small minority is self deception.
I'm not sure I agree with this -- how do you distinguish between "the system works for 80% of the people" and "79% of the people don't have medical emergencies (but the system would fail them if they did)"?
I'm not convinced on this point. Over 90% of Americans have health insurance[1]. Sure, insurance might not cover every dime of every bill, but I can't imagine falling ill is an instant and universal cause for financial ruin like people claim.
Disclaimer: I've been lucky enough to not have to use my health insurance for anything serious. But I have had to use other kinds of insurance (car, home) and by and large it's been fine. We hear horror stories a lot because they're sensational and they sell well, but people continue to buy insurance because it actually does provide value.
There's also this[1] study about cancer and debt in the US.
Insurance isn't equal to insurance. The car insurances in the US are the most comfortable in the world. Something happens, you're covered, the insurance pays. Not so in other parts of the world. You drive out of the parking lot scratch another car? It's considered normal in the US. Not so in Germany. You scratch someones car by accident? Anything is possible now.
Why compare apples and bananas? I had a surgery in Taiwan and worked in Healthcare in a couple of countries. I also had health insurance when I was working in the US and got hit by a car while on a bike.
And while the insurance and the other drivers car insurance paid for most, man you sure have to be careful that someone can tell the emergency not to take you to the wrong hospital.
Let's stop pretending there isn't something seriously wrong with the US healthcare system. If all stars align everything is fine, but just an MRI can take anything from 1000 to 2000 or more dollars depending on whether you have insurance or not. You don't have to pay the 2000 dollars if you know better, but it's basically like a bazaar where you have to bargain if your insurance hasn't done so already.
Germany was at that point in the 1920s(or sometime around that) actually. I'm not a fan of Germanies healthcare system, especially since it's such a huge chunk of an already low income, but all the issues you describe about other countries are mostly non issues in Germany.
> The financial burden of cancer varies with the types and coverage of health insurance. An analysis of the 2010–2014 MarketScan data showed that an average patient with employer-provided plan had incurred about $7000–$11,000 OOP expenses over 4 years following diagnosis for a series of care that worths $100,000–$280,000.
> More than one-third of cancer patients who carry insurance spend more out-of-pocket for their treatments than they anticipated having to pay. Among those who report being blindsided by the costs of their therapies, the median monthly out-of-pocket expenditure is $703.
Among the one third of people who report being surprised by out of pocket costs, the median payment is $703 per month, or about $8,500 annually. That’s a lot, and it can be surprising. But The median individual income for someone 45-55 is $80,000. That’s about 11% of income, or smaller than the difference in the tax wedge between the US and Sweden.
And to put that in context: out of the minority of people who get cancer, and the 1/3 of those people who report being surprised by out of pocket costs, the amount of out of pocket costs is about the same as what everyone with the median prime age US income would pay in extra taxes in Sweden every year even when healthy.
I'm sorry if I came off an deceptive or disengenious. I don't mean to compare apples and oranges, I'm just making the best comparison I can.
This is where my question stems from I suppose. How well insured is the average American? How often do people get stuck at out-of-network care and how much does that cost?
The study you linked is very interesting. My main takeaway is that the average loss after 2 years is 92k, which is significant.
It doesn't seem like they control for employment status? Cancer and cancer treatment can often mean people are unable to work. So, medical bills or not, I could see keeping up with your mortgage and expenses getting near that figure.
A minor piece of anacdata, I had an MRI. Paid for it out of pocket because I can. Private company provided it. $200. Done. Don’t have cancer and I do have a DVD of my brain that I will never watch because I’m squeamish. The private market can bring down prices if given a chance. Yes we need to fix things, but look at the US track record on the VA.
I assume this was a researched and planned procedure on your part?
I am a much bigger believer in "the market" than most people. But the problem with the medical industry is that many / most things happen under serious time pressure.
The seriousness and imediatness of medical procedures means that competition and choice often do not get to play a role in your decision making. For many people in many circumstances, the MRI machine nearest them has a complete monopoly.
How do we bring the miraculous efficiency of the market to an industry where people often cannot make consenting and informed decisions? Its a very hard problem to solve.
That is true. However urgent care is a small fraction of the US procedures. Cancer treatments, heart operations, etc are most often planned care. They also care touted as likely to bankrupt you. Can we try to optimize the majority of our system first before we rebuild it because of painful corner cases?
I fell ill and I happened to luck out with exceptional insurance. I'm the 99.9 percent tier of best insurance available. If I had anything like like a typical individual I would be in financial ruin ending in bankruptcy if I don't die first. I'm 37, sometimes devastating illness comes out of nowhere. I'm lucky I was covered. Most people in that situation would be fucked.
Living in Belgium, the healthcare works for every Belgian if it's realistically possible, not the "80%" like in America ( source?).
When I see the costs of an operation in America, they just do unnecessary operations, because they can earn extra money. When your argument is "most people won't go broke", that is a really fucked up statement.
Medicare ( that the current administration is trying to slash) is a partial fix for a very expensive and failed system.
In the US it isn't the poor that suffer but the lower-middle class, who are neither poor enough to get excellent health care for free nor wealthy enough to have high-quality private insurance.
The policy problem is that to adequately cover the lower-middle class you would need to substantially raise taxes on the upper-middle class, which pay anomalously low tax rates in the developed world. And the upper-middle class in the US quite enjoys their low tax rates. (While often focused on, the upper class often pays aggregate tax rates in places like California and New York that are more in line with Europe.)
School shootings average 4 deaths per year. They are very tragic and very sad, but you should fear them about as much as you fear cows. In fact, cows kill a lot more people than school shootings do.
Every death is a tragedy. Many are avoidable. If we want to actually reduce tragedy and suffering, your time and energy is best spent on big problems.
A school age child is nearly 200x more likely to die by suicide than from a school shooting. That's a tragedy. And that's _avoidable_. Which do you hear about more?
The attention and resources of society are limited. We would be better off allocating resources to bigger problems, but we don't. That's a tragedy.
Americans have guns because we believe that individual citizens may, god forbid, need to kill people. Many Europeans, by contrast, believe that they are past that, at a point in history where only the State needs the power to kill.
Who knows who is right. But it’s ridiculously arrogant to say that the American position is not defensible. It was literally just a couple of generations ago when the US was air dropping rifles into France to support the Resistance. Even if we have now entered an age where ordinary people don’t need guns—that new age is younger than computers, supersonic flight, or television. Its far too soon to conclude that’s this is how the world will always be from here forward.
I think you're missing that Europeans also recognise that giving every dumbass, desperate person or dormant psychopath a gun, is far more likely to get people killed NOW, than the chances that when the 'end-times' you imply come, all these same people are going to someone effectively unite and overthrow the regime.
It's a crackpot idea to think that 'arming citizens' helps the whole. And the fact you think it's 'arrogant' to spell out a basic truth that the rest of the world understands is dumbfounding.
Yes, that the drills are misguided. And he is fine with the obsession with guns, suggested using palm/grip recognition to tie guns to owners with free updates paid for by govt. Reasonable.
> However, the magnitude of the bankruptcy effect is much smaller than previously thought: we estimate that hospitalizations cause only 4% of personal bankruptcies among nonelderly U.S. adults, which is an order of magnitude smaller than the previous estimates described above.
Take a look at bankruptcy due to health issues in Canada. It’s lower than the US, but still a problem. They have a single payer system, but what people tend to forget is if you’re really sick, you often can’t work, so even if health costs are minimal, you can still go bankrupt.
What I think would be helpful in the US is universal catastrophic insurance. Worst case scenario, you’re covered. If you want everyday health insurance, let people buy it or get covered if low income.
If you're already in a lot of debt, getting a medical bill is just going to add to that debt. As a result, anyone who sees a doctor and declares bankruptcy can say that healthcare is at least partially to blame.
I can't tell whether there are "too many" medical bankruptcies, but I know that pundits are exaggerating the degree of severity. This link has some statistics, so you can take what you want from it.
Money for employer provided health insurance doesn't come from nowhere either. Bumping payroll taxes up to 20-30% would actually be cheaper than the $30,000 per year my employer pays for my health insurance.
I think a better metric would be to find out what percentage of people who NEED their healthcare for major medical issues rate their healthcare insurance as good or excellent.
>> Most middle class people don’t go bankrupt when they get sick.
The median American household currently holds just $11,700 in savings. most people in usa would be ruined financially by a serious sickness where each day at the hospital alone could be up to $5000.
No one ever actually pays that. With insurance a deductible is around $4,000. Or they have medicaid. Or they negotiate with the hospital. Or they just don't pay.
Those news stories about people being ruined, are in the news exactly BECAUSE they are unusual.
I'm personally I the camp of, why the hell can I not know how much stuff costs up front, why can I not tell them no I dont an unnecessary x-ray, and why am I not told cost owed by me until after the procedure only to find out it's just an absurd amount of money
Private insurance blows cause we're all basically required to have it but it's worse than a tax because we barely ever know how much we owe.
There's plenty cash-only doctors and clinics out there. There's also companies that handle healthcare for their employees via personal accounts (they put more cash in your account each year, and you spend or don't as you see fit). People on such plans do a lot more shopping around.
And as the other poster said, you always have the right to refuse treatment, up to your death if you like (unless it is some kind of involuntary commitment where you are put there because you are supposedly dangerous). Many terminally ill people choose to go this way.
Pre-authorization sounds good, but unfortunately a lot of the time it isn't possible. For example, when I was in the ER they gave me a few choices on how they could do stiches on a big cut... But there is definitely no way I could compare the costs! I just ended up paying a $500 bill a few months later.
Lack of pricing information is ridiculous in the US.
You can’t base a system on the “free market” then prevent consumers from having pricing information.
It certainly wouldn’t fix everything in the US, but it would be a huge help.
To be honest, I’m not sure why hospitals in the US haven’t taken the lead on this. If I had a choice between two hospital of similar quality, but one provided price transparency and maybe even a price guarantee (your procedure will cost $X, guaranteed), I would certainly go to that hospital.
Price transparency is a tremendously difficult problem because healthcare is a multi-layered bureaucracy.
Even then though, making prices transparent wouldn’t address the primary scenario that results in personal bankruptcy, which is emergency care. You can’t exactly shop around for the cheapest ER facility if you’re bleeding from a gunshot wound.
Information asymmetries are a huge problem in "market solutions" and there's a huge one here: doctors have 8+ years of medical training and most patients....don't. It's going to be very hard for many people to second-guess a doctor's recommendation or estimate the expected value of decisions.
In a non-emergency situation, you can certainly try to read up on your own, but the medical literature is not always easy to interpret. A friend of mine asked for advice after he was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. Despite having a PhD in neuroscience and working as a researcher in a PD Center of Excellence, I had a really hard time making a recommendation. (Neuro conditions are particularly hard, but this is also possibly the best-case match with my experience).
I had a good friend who worked in a leadership role at a major health system in CA.
He readily admitted that the hospital has a very poor grasp on their own costs. At a high-level, they just charge as much as they can - sometimes they lose money, sometimes they make a 90% profit. They pool it all together (usually by line of business) and hope it all works out as a profit.
That’s why specialized, stand alone clinics (e.g. MRI clinic) have some of the best prices. They know exactly what things cost and can make sure prices reflect it.
It's so ridiculous. I had Kaiser for a period, because I was under the impression the bundle of insurer and healthcare provider would avoid these issues. It worked that way for a bit, but then I got some X-Rays. Paid up front, and then a few months later got an additional bill.
> I was under the impression the bundle of insurer and healthcare provider would avoid these issues.
It gets worse, bundling those two is the epitome of conflict of interests when you find yourself the victim of the hospital's negligence and expect your insurer to act in your best interest.
Problem is that sometimes you have to wait even for actually critical things - friend's mom waited almost 2 months for her cancer operation. In US if you've got money you're more or less covered, while in Europe the difference is that in some (admittedly rare) situations even if you earn well you're screwed just like everyone else.
At least in the UK, private hospitals tend to focus on basic care or routine surgeries. Once you have a more complicated or urgent case you'll end up in a publicly funded (NHS) hospital anyway. Which means that in the end, anyone independent of income has access to the best doctors, criticality of their illness decides who gets to see them, not money.
In Europe, urgent surgery can be performed same day. The reason many people have to wait is because it's not time critical so others will get surgery first. Having a system where anyone (with the right amount of money) could get complicated surgery without wait times sounds incredibly inefficient as you need much more capacity than necessary.
Europe is a whole damn continent, so no, it's not true. It's not true even for the entire EU. I happen to live in Croatia which is in EU, and I know first hand that in Romania and Bulgaria health system situation is even worse, as I spent some time there. You get urgent operations like if you're in car accident and you're brought into the ER, of course they'll not let you bleed out. But if you need, say, heart aortic valves replaced (happened to my mom), or anything else a bit more advanced, you end up on the waiting list, and unless you pull connections and give bribe that means months of waiting.
I just spent two hours today to wait at an “urgent care” facility in southbay (my regular doctor of 20 years! wouldn’t give me an apt after several days of trying). I think I owe north of $400+ for this one time visit because I am in the early phase of a high-deductible plan. But I haven’t got my bill yet. After the two hour wait, I didn’t even get to see a doctor, but a Physician Assistant. So much for my private plan..
I think this is the biggest issue with private healthcare. You pay a lot of money for it, yet you can still end up with subpar care and extra charges for out of network professionals
This was one interesting thing about my visit to China. Pay $25, see a doctor right away. In fact you can pick how good of a doctor you want to see (prices on the wall at the hospital I was at). This wasn't a small place - it's probably comparable to Kaiser in Redwood City.
In contrast when I was in a much much smaller "community" hospital in China I just walked in, talked to the lady at the desk, and she gave me a prescription. No temperature taking or anything...
> where a cancer diagnosis doesn’t financially ruin you and your family for you life,
If a cancer related, life-saving surgery takes 4-5 months to happen before you can have it, I'm not sure it really matters if it ends up being free or not.
> Over 18,000 suspected cancer patients a month in England are now not getting to see a specialist or starting their treatment within prescribed timescales, NHS England’s latest performance data has revealed.
And others get treatment same day. It all depends on criticality. One of the reasons for long wait times is that there are always urgent cases being pushed to the top of the list. I agree that it sucks having to wait for an important surgery. But they don't make you wait if it's life threatening.
> But they don't make you wait if it's life threatening.
That's literally what is written in the article. People who wait several months to get a necessary CT or imagery before they can decide to do anything about it. Some cancers can progress very fast in the space of a couple of months, it's basically the difference between life and death in some cases.
Yeah this does not happen. Of course you go to the front of the line if you have anything near life-threatening.
The problem (which I think is what OP were talking about) is anything that’s not critical but still need to be looked at by a specialist. In that case long waiting times are not uncommon. Yes it’s a big problem but it’s not a problem that will kill you.
I don't think the wait for cancer patients is 4 months. Even in Portugal you'll get treated and we're much poorer with a much more deficient health system.
I am not sure if 5-year survival rates are the best metric for this. Survival rate may be because of better outcomes or earlier detection. Is there any statistics that normalize for this?
Yes.[0] But I'm unsure whether this is due to private vs public healthcare. My guess is that it has more to do with how developed the medical industry is in the country. Size of the country probably matters as well.
5 year survival rates may be heavily influenced by detection rates. If country A detects my lung cancer at 55 and country B at 59 and either way I die at 60 - I’m no better off in A. Maybe worse.
Life threatening stuff is obviously not going to be a 4 month wait. The OP obviously didn’t have this sort of issue.
If people were dying left and right from waiting for cancer treatment. There would be a ton of news about that. No less in American media showing how bad European health care is.
The chances of getting cancer are so low you’d think some smart insurance company would want to sell you a catastrophic cancer policy with a low monthly premium. Then it wouldn’t have to mean financial ruin, the same way I have homeowners insurance (without which a fire would spell financial ruin for most).
Why isn’t this a thing? Can someone in the industry chime in?
Huh? I thought cancer was one of the big killers after heart disease.
While you are relatively young maybe the probability is low. That’s also when you are working so private health insurance and income protection insurance would have you covered I imagine.
Ok went to cancer.gov and Approximately 39.3 percent of men and women will be diagnosed with cancer of any site at some point during their lifetime, based on 2014-2016 data.
So, I can’t see why any insurance company could offer reasonable rates given those odds.
Same in Austria. The healthcare system is free and very good if you have something life threatening but if not, you're looking at 2 month waiting time to see a specialist and there's no way I can be living and working with a health discomfort for that long so I pay up and see a private doctor.
The current situation benefits the lower class with voting rights who have access to good healthcare without paying much taxes and the upper class can afford private anyway but if you're hard working middle class you're kinda screwed since you have to go private and pay if you want quality treatment and diagnosis in a timely manner but you're also forced to pay and subsidize the public system, which you don't use anyway, with your very high taxes.
I feel Europe is slowly migrating to a two tier healthcare system, a private and quality but expensive one for the ones who can afford it and a public underfunded one for everyone else.
> The healthcare system is free and very good if you have something life threatening but if not, you're looking at 2 month waiting time to see a specialist and there's no way I can be living and working with a health discomfort for that long so I pay up and see a private doctor.
The private doctor is still cheaper than copays/deductibles in the US. So that seems like a weird argument to make.
Emphasis on skilled. Most Americans make less, adjusted for inflation, than they did 40 years ago, they work longer hours, report more stress and are more productive (not necessarily by choice). The average American worker got shafted. Oh, and the American healthcare system costs people twice as much than average developed countries but with worse outcomes. Single-payer would save people money because of the collective negotiating leverage to push back against $100 insulin, $350 Epipens and $20 acetaminophen.
Furthermore, the US labor force participation rate never gets measured honestly or discussed because it's crazy.. there are untold millions and millions of men and women who have given up looking work. (Idle, disenfranchised people who don't have a future or families is a recipe for revolution, drug abuse and mass shootings.) Also, with automation, outsourcing and increased net population, there aren't as many good jobs as there were 40 years ago and there too many people for regular, less-skilled jobs.
I imagine if you took a look at total compensation (vacation, PTO, insurance, maternity leave), stronger labor laws and other societal benefits such as cheaper college, those workers earning €11/hr would probably be able to save a lot more of it compared to their counterpart in the US.
And bonus if they get sick, they don't have to worry as much about losing their job and spiraling down into crippling debt.
> I feel Europe is slowly migrating to a two tier healthcare system, a private and quality but expensive one for the ones who can afford it and a public underfunded one for everyone else.
Not sure if I'd agree. There are certainly fancy hospitals that look like 5* hotels but they're for routine surgery only. Top specialists are still at big hospitals because that's where the most complicated cases are treated and where the infrastructure is. You might be able to skip waiting time with private insurance but you won't see a better doctor or get better quality medical treatment. In the end, having a nicer meal and single room in your hospital don't matter that much medically.
In the UK, a 15m follow-up telephone appointment with a private consultant is ~£100-£150. An in person 30m appointment varies between £100-£300 depending on specialism and location. If they decide to prescribe something there is no extra charge. They will write to your GP with the outcome, for which there is also no extra charge.
As regards blood tests and the like, the cost depends on the type of test, but could be anywhere from £25-£300.
I do agree with the GP about a 2-tier system evolving in the EU, at least from my perspective in the UK and what I hear from colleagues around the EU; if you have something easily diagnosed and treated, the state health service is literally a life saver, even if you have to wait several months to be seen. But don't expect your doctors to be experts - your endocrinologist will likely no nothing other than diabetes etc.
I'm on good private insurance in the USA right now and on a 3 month waiting list after calling 35 specialists and taking the only one who was even accepting patients with an under 6 month wait. I'm on Aetna, a huge health insurance company here and when I call a specialist my first question is "Do you accept Aetna?" because I only have a 30% chance that they do.
The only way to speed up the process would have been to pay cash to a specialist who doesn't accept any insurance, which would be a $350 consultation then $250-350/hr each visit after the fact.
Swede here: Yeah, Sweden tends to be romanticized by the american "progressives". As a swedish "rightist", you end up being in an annoying position. There's a lot of stupid stuff that happens here, for sure.
That said, it seems like the really expensive/complicated healthcare needs gets taken care of in a competent way, "for free" (paid for via the taxes).
My then 73 yo mom had a tumor that was growing behind her left eye-ball being removed, two years ago. Zero complaints about that hole produdure, and the 10+ post-prodedure checks.
I spent a few hours googling the doctor that was going to perform this particular surgery on my mom - I was left with the impression that he was on the international fore-front on this particular procudure. He was doing a bunch of international speaking on the the topic. I saw videos of him lecturing hundreds of surgeons on particulars of this kind of procudure. Quite re-insuring.
(And yeah, my mom ended up being okay after the surgery.)
And that's assuming you can keep working. Getting fired or laid off because you can't work means you're no longer getting paid AND you now have to pay for the healthcare you can no longer afford. It's stupid.
It took my spouse 3 months to get an appointment with a specialist in the US. She definitely didn't shop around but it was a miserable wait time considering we lived close to some of the best healthcare facilities in the world and had one of the best health insurance one could buy.
I’m really glad that I live in Asia. Here in Singapore I can ring up a specialist and go in the same day...
I don’t understand why in Asia I have cheaper and better health care than if I lived in Europe or America.
Some of the things I’ve heard just about Hospitals scares me to not get sick when I’m in europe...
When my wife was in hospital for the birth of our daughter I slept over night in the room with my wife. While in France my wife’s friend wasn’t allowed to have her husband stay. The whole experience we had vs them was polar opposite.
Have you noticed that in Singapore all the nurses are Filipino though? I don't think they earn much and I reckon that has to help with getting costs down...
I also disagree that healthcare is uniformly cheap here. GP visits are not particularly cheap. You get to spend very little time with the GP and typically are sold a bunch of drugs you don't need (in Europe there's separation of clinics and pharmacies, which introduces some checks & balances).
To give another example, in Europe I used to go for a glaucoma test every year (due to family history) and pay about 20-30 euros. However, in Singapore, doctors look at you funny when you request to be tested for this as preventative health care is not really thing here. I did get tested twice for Glaucoma in Singapore (at the National Eye Center) and ended up with a bill of 250 SGD (~ 175 EUR) each time. The second time around, the doctor afterwards admitted that the bulk of the tests I had been given hadn't really been warranted. (Oh, and I couldn't exactly go in the same day by the way. There was a waiting list, though I don't recall how many days/weeks I had to book in advance.)
Finally, getting cancer has been known to bankrupt people in Singapore.
> Have you noticed that in Singapore all the nurses are Filipino though?
Nope? I’ve been in hospital 4 times in the past 8 years. And a 5th time if I include when my daughter was born.
The Nurses in the wards were not filipino. But one of the Nurses in A&E were.
> I also disagree that healthcare is uniformly cheap here. GP visits are not particularly cheap. You get to spend very little time with the GP and typically are sold a bunch of drugs you don't need
I can’t compare to Europe. But I can say that seeing a GP and getting drugs is FAR cheaper in Singapore than Australia... by ALOT. The entire cost of a consultation + drugs is cheaper than the consultation fee in Australia.
Not only that having to then go to a pharmacy to pick up drugs is the worst.
Doctors here also don’t just give drugs you don’t need. They do give drugs more often and that’s due to the mentality of Asia where If they see a doctor they often want drugs to fix a non existent problem. But I’ve had Doctors in Singapore ask more questions than in Australia and give me only what I need or want to give me nothing.
> To give another example, in Europe I used to go for a glaucoma test every year (due to family history) and pay about 20-30 euros.
Specialists aren’t cheap compared to Europe or somewhere like Taiwan, but compared to America it’s peanuts.
> getting cancer has been known to bankrupt people in Singapore.
I don’t believe this for a second, because for Citizens, healthcare is subsidised. And company with more than 50 employees has to have health care insurance. Basically it would only bankrupt you if you were a foreigner at a small company and didn’t buy insurance for yourself. Which again is still cheaper than NZ/Aus.
Why not? So she wanted to go to a specific doctor, and that doctor had a waiting list. How does any other system solve for that? A single doctor can only see so many patients.
> In the entire time I was there I attempted to see a specialist for a condition that I had maybe two or three times, I ended up giving up every single time after I was told the wait time is between 3-4 months.
It's the same thing they say about France (having a great healthcare system). But doctors [1] are going on strikes because of lack of amenities. Makes you wonder...
A private system where you chose your provider will always be better, imo, because the providers will have to compete. I think the US could do much better if they improve the pricing visibility and get the free market to make the prices go down. (I'm not very well versed in this topic, I'm just reading the news)
I can't see any way health care can become a truly free market, the patient doesn't have enough information or knowledge. They could rely on their doctor but you can see from the painkiller overprescription that doctors are open to manipulation. Also if I'm writhing around on the floor in agony because my Appendix is about to burst I'm not going to be phoning around for the cheapest quote.
> the patient doesn't have enough information or knowledge
You don't need one, all you need is brand and reputation. Customer doesn't know much about products in most markets: electronics, cars, software. It's never a problem when you have lasting brands/companies servicing many people with various level of knowledge.
It's not working that well in software, one company has 90% of the desktop market. Phone operating systems are divided between two companies. The car industry is being dragged screaming and kicking into EV's. And these are industries where it's reasonably easy to pick and choose compared to trying to switch hospitals or doctors part way through your treatment.
> It's not working that well in software, one company has 90% of the desktop market.
Because the company uses quite a lot of administrative pressure (patent trolling, vendor's bullying etc etc), hence the market is not competitive.
You are talking about competitive markets here, not information asymmetry. I see no evidence that monopolies are the outcome of asymmetry of knowledge, but rather that they are the outcomes of significant administrative measures like license-bullying or patent-trolling.
The only markets that have the problem of information asymmetry are lemon markets.
> And these are industries where it's reasonably easy to pick and choose compared to trying to switch hospitals or doctors part way through your treatment.
It's way easier to change a doctor than to change a car. There are only few conditions which restrain one from bargaining: heart attacks and other severe conditions, and these should be treated differently.
But in case of the vast majority of diseases from common cold to Epstein-Barr changing the doctor and bargaining is even simpler than in most other markets.
But again, bargaining power has nothing to do with information asymmetry as well.
We should absolutely have full transparency into services, providers, and cost, regardless of what other public policy is adopted.
One can make the argument that some big share of the affordability issue has been generated by the government in its policies of preventing cost transparency for medical services and drugs.
I'm not saying cost transparency will solve every problem, but this is a government caused problem. I have heard no good reasons for the monopoly pricing granted the medical industry.
Also bear in mind the whole system of government subsidized employer group health insurance was invented by the government to satisfy the labor unions, way back when private sector labor unions had influence.
Now only government employee labor unions have influence, and boy what influence they have. Just remember, public employees are in entirely different social benefit and retirement systems than us mortals.
This is my major problem with the US system. Also lots of doctors or dentists will require you to have unnecessary procedures which pile on to the costs. And they will refuse to provide you service unless you get them oftentimes too.
It's almost just as bad as the collegiate system here as well. Except the college system you can somewhat anticipate costs. Insurance is a total gamble.
But I completely agree with you on the free market. My personal issue with going to the doctor is I have no idea what my bill will be at the end of the day.
Perhaps he's being downvoted (not by me!) because the claim is self-contradictory. Either a market based system "always will be better", or it could be "better if they improve the pricing visibility", which is it? Unless he's saying the US system is already superior to all others, but could be made better still. That seems like an ambitious claim.
That's a "no true Scotsman" problem, though. If the US doesn't (or didn't pre-ACA) have a market-based healthcare system, then who does? And if no one does, how do we know it's better?
> In the entire time I was there I attempted to see a specialist for a condition that I had maybe two or three times, I ended up giving up every single time after I was told the wait time is between 3-4 months. I keep my American employer sponsored private insurance and employer determined time off policy, thank you very much.
I've waited 6 months to see a specialist here in the US. The fact is that countries with universal healthcare have shorter wait times than the US does[1], and they manage to cover all of their citizens.
Usually long wait times in the US are provider specific. I’ve also experienced long wait times, but it’s because I wanted to go to the top academic system in my city.
If I was willing to go to any specialist, I could have seen one pretty quickly.
In this case, this was across the board for the types of specialists I wanted to see. I had called dozens of practices, and spent hours with insurances representatives trying to find a provider who wasn't booked for the next 5 months. For mental health specialists, I had to wait on two different waiting lists for both someone who could prescribe medication and for someone who provides therapy. Specialists who could do both had even longer waiting lists.
It isn't just the mental health field. I have a colleague with a daughter who needed an addiction specialist, and that was another 6 month waiting list. People die waiting on those lists.
There are private health insurances here too. If the public system would be so bad as you describe it everyone would use the private ones but very few do.
Wait what? I live here too, and many employers do pay for private insurance because it saves heaps of time for the employees. Why do you think the private options sprung up in the first place?
The public system has serious flaws. I was told by the public system to take antibiotics for 6 months straight while waiting for a tonsil removal operation. Got my operation a few days later through my private insurance.
From my experience in the UK, people typically don't get private insurance because they _believe_ in the public system, not because they have a generally positive experience with the public system. They don't really realize that the service could or should be much different, so they just put up with it because they believe in the system being the way it is. They believe in chipping in, paying their fair share, and everyone being in the pot. It's a mind set, not an optimal set of circumstances. I admire the mindset in many ways, but it doesn't make for quick or efficient service. It all kind of depends on what you optimize for, and what you are willing to put up with based on your worldview of what is most important.
It's not super-common, but some employers do offer private health insurance. The numbers I saw suggested about 10% were covered by such insurance which isn't a huge number but isn't nothing either.
I would guess less than half of those people ever use the coverage, and those that do still use the public option for more than half their medical needs. It's often bundled with employment packages with the idea that it provides some kind of insurance when a key member of staff need treatment and can be prioritised to jump some queues, but in everyday situations like when their kid falls off a bike and spits out some teeth, they're going to use the same service as everyone else, because it's simply quicker and more effective to do so.
Private insurance is very much a supplement, not a totally parallel system in the UK:
It might change depending on exactly how you define efficiency but the UK system scores highest in some global comparisons in terms of bang for buck.
From the way you phrase it I assume you actually mean inefficient service, like you'd get at a high end restaurant or hotel, where they have lots of people hanging around doing nothing a lot of the time so no one ever feels they're being treated less than a VIP in busy periods.
Private Health insurance without group plans does not really work well so the fact people don't choose it doesn't mean much to me.
Essentially, since sick people are more likely to choose such plans the costs are going to be very high. Either that or the restrictions on the plans need to be high to prevent it. Both make such plans unattractive independent of how bad or good the public plans are.
> If the public system would be so bad as you describe it everyone would use the private ones but very few do.
Ah, that's simply wrong, because you pay for public healthcare anyways (through taxes), hence private one is to be paid twice.
I doubt the system is `that bad`, but even in Russia, where private healthcare is super cheap (and very good) and public healthcare is a total disaster, a few people use the private one (until they are wealthy) due to exact same reason: they've already paid for the public one and feel like paying twice is not an option.
Regarding healthcare, my employer gives me private insurance but I tend to use both systems.
Generally I get same-day care. I call up DKV, report my symptoms, they find a specialist in my area, and I pay nothing. (I mention the symptoms bit to contrast with the system where you have to see a general practitioner who then refers you to a specialist - that does not happen here AFAIK). I've used this for allergies, asthma, ear problems. I also had a knee injury where I got an x-ray (same day I think?) followed by weekly sessions of physio.
My partner recently gave birth in the public system. I think the delivery was free, but the 4-night stay cost us around 4000 SEK (400 USD) total.
I also had a remote doctor's appointment using the KRY app. I don't actually know how that was billed - public I'd guess.
Paying 4000kr for staying four nights sounds really weird since Swedish law say that the fee for staying at the hospital can’t be above 100kr/day. I also recently stayed about four nights after my partner gave birth and we payed a couple 100SEK.
> Each new 24 hour period cost 100 SEK from the time you arrive at the clinic. Your partner/labour support person is charged 600 SEK/24 hours from the time the baby is born. Food, towels, sheets, sanitary products and diapers are all included free of charge during your stay.
Makes more sense. I guess you are free to charge the partner whatever you like. I live in a more left leaning part of sweden so here the partner is also charged 100 sek.
Hej! I’ve been in Sweden now nine years. It’s true that it takes time to get to certain specialists, but only if you are in a non-threatening situation. The system works with a triage concept, and the moment your condition is deemed serious you are in the front of any cue, meaning you get care immediately. I know some people with skin cancer that got amazing care , fast, at no cost. I have a coworker that had an extremely premature born : 24 weeks. the level of care he described, the team around his son and 10 different surgeries had cost him nothing. Luckily they are home now , with oxygen equipment provided to theM and nurses visiting every other day to monitor him.
This in the US would probably have meant a bankruptcy for someone in his income bracket.
The system is not perfect but after living in the US for 13 years I can tell you you never worry about health care here.
Edit: Nobody mentions you can also pay extra and visit a specialist right away! The wait is if you want the visit for the government price: 12 dollars for initial visit, 30 dollars for a specialist.
Wait times for specialists are a thing in the US too, even with good employer-sponsored insurance. Specialists are a limited resource - usually artificially - in virtually every country.
> I attempted to see a specialist for a condition that I had maybe two or three times, I ended up giving up every single time after I was told the wait time is between 3-4 months. I keep my American employer sponsored private insurance and employer determined time off policy.
I am in the US and go to good dentists and doctors, who are out of my insurance network incidentally, and they and the specialists they refer me to can easily have three month waiting times.
Also Sweden has been following the US lead of cuts and privatization since the 1990s, often led by the Social Democrats. It's a great strategy for the idle class - push through public health spending cuts due to costs, then bemoan the inevitable wait times as reason to privatize.
Aussie in Sweden here. I had to wait 4 weeks to see a GP and then 4 more weeks for them to refer me each time they said "wait 4 weeks and come back if it's still an issue"
Public healthcare works way better in Australia, I went home and saw a doctor there, got to see a doctor straight away, got scans & referral etc within a week.
Other expats have told me I should go to Germany or the UK if I urgently need health care
If you want to see a doctor here in Sweden, you do what the Swedes do: call at 8am to the Vårdcentral. Then say whatever you have is urgent (akut). You get a time the same day, 90% of the time. Otherwise, most vårdcentral have "akuttider" (emergency times) when you can just drop in.
I went to the vårdcentral drop in that morning, saw a nurse who said "come back in 4 weeks if you still have an issue" they decided me suddenly having ringing in my ears that has not stopped was not an urgent issue or a problem
There's around two weeks total of holidays (spread over the entire year). There's also a vacation benefit, which typically starts at two weeks and increases the longer you stay. Big companies give more and a senior person at a large company may get 4 or 5 weeks a year. There may also be separate sick days.
It varies by employer. I get 24 days that I pick plus 9 or 10 that the company picks each year. Plus an additional 4-week block (that I pick, but has to be contiguous) every five years.
Counterpoint, in an affluent area of the US, I was told 6 weeks for a gastro appointment when I reported vomiting of blood - top-notch private "insurance".
I’ve had to wait to see endocrinologists about 6 months at multiple practices while having very good insurance in the US. It’s mostly a location and a supply and demand issue with most specialist medical professions, not an insurance issue (which it’s often conflated as in the media).
Your argument for why Sweden is no paradise makes sense, but your argument for American system being better just because of your personal experience alone is not sound.
You realize that American healthcare has wait times as well, right? My family has had to wait months to see specialists as well. I'm honestly just tired of people acting like American healthcare somehow doesn't have wait times.
And not to mention if you're saddled with a particularly bad employer, they won't give you the time off to see the doctor in the first place.
Is this an HMO? I signed up for one once and the delays were pretty stupid (even to get a referral to a specialist you needed to come back to see a different doctor first). I've never signed up for the HMO plan again since. With a PPO you can always pick another specialist that is available.
Meanwhile there are companies in Canada that help Canadians get their MRI's in the US because it's so slow there. And clinics near the border advertise in Canada.
Usually people are saying the US has too many specialists, except for certain lower-paying specialties like obgyn.
I've never had a problem with delays in large metro areas in california. I do recall hearing Boston was the worst big city to find a new doctor, supposedly due to Massachusetts' push have universal coverage.
My mom lives in the DFW area and makes $50k. Within the past 5 weeks she's gone for a routine mammogram screening, seen a specialist about a grown that thankfully was benign, and been seen by a surgeon who removed the growth to be on the safe side because my mom is considered high risk.
Organized crime in Sweden likes grenades and some similar explosives, largely because they - by accident - was legal to import a couple years back.
Grenades became much easier to get ahold of than handguns, which have had some weird effects, as they seem to have come to be used as intimidation between rivals.
The use has been dropping the last few years, and should hopefully be back to the pre "legalization" levels soon.
It's all certainly quite unfortunate, but the number of casualties are perplexingly low. It really seems that whomever it is that does these bomb/grenade attacks go out of their way to avoid people getting killed. Not that I understand why exactly, except that it seems to be about intimidation in the majority of cases.
As a Swedish entrepreneur with 2 exits under my belt and a startup in progress, nothing boils my blood more than bullshit like this. You want to encourage entrepreneurs? stop making up bullshit laws and initiatives that does nothing but fuck us over every single day.
Initiatives like this have the exact opposite effect of how they´re advertised as I´ve personally experienced first hand. Yet somehow all you read about is the outgoing PR of how great this place is, when in fact it is a god awful place to conduct business in. Heck just living here is becoming a nightmare as of late.
It´s time to move on from this shit hole to somewhere more welcoming. Too bad the US immigration system is a clusterfuck regardless of how much money you´re willing to throw at it.
</rant>
As requested here is an example:
Lets take the "Right to Leave to Conduct a Business Operation Act" or "maternity leave". In both of cases if you work at an early stage startup and exercise your right to take a leave (paid or otherwise), I as an employer have to hold on to that position for the duration of the entire leave of absence. In the case of maternity leave (~1.5 year of paid leave) for instance, I have to hold that position open for you as an employee. The last startup I was involved in had a female employee that was there for about 6 months and then left work for ages before returning, and then "somehow" in an "unplanned manner" managed to quit a few weeks after. Zero work experience, have to hold the spot open for her, have to hire expensive replacement consultants for the duration of the leave which could be extended at any point and I am also obligated to provide benefits to the workers that come in as temporary replacement at a higher cost???? All of that without having the right to fire or suspend said person.
Imagine being 1 out of 6 employees and you just vanish, leaving behind everything for the company to pick up by having to hire a secondary person as a consultant for far more money, giving them those same benefits while keeping your position open. Startups cannot afford these costs period. Not every startup enjoys the millions of SV dollars. Our bootstrapped startup almost went under because of employee benefit payments for people who were not even showing up to work and we cannot fire by law.
This is beyond sinister and it isnt done to protect employees, it is merely done to extract the maximum amount of value from companies at all stages so that the state can afford to deliver on its never-ending promises of "FREE EVERYTHING".
One of my best friends have had a full salary for the last 5 years and have not worked a single day. Who pays for that do you reckon? and in what world is that fair to the rest of us?
It is really rich that those on HN who are paid 6 to 7 figures would seat on their high horse and disparage OP for complaining about labour law arbitrage from the perspective of an Nordic entrepreneur and yet would be the first to throw a fit if their jobs get shipped or outsourced to Mexico or some other emerging economy.
Funny enough, I just outsourced a bunch to Vietnam and am in the process of moving the rest to eastern Europe. The only part that will remain here is the sales division because that needs to be here.
So yea, looks like the laws are working as intended... amirite?
In my city the IT sector unemployment is around zero point something figures, meaning it's quite difficult to find new qualified workers. I've even heard about cases of French and Belgian citizens moving to Eastern Europe to work in IT. It sounds crazy.
And what the do when they can't exploit said countries as much if they institute stronger labor laws?
Frankly I welcome companies to try and outsource their work. It almost never works out well because they pay garbage rates and get garbage code back. I have zero concerns about software jobs being outsourced.
This is an /r/politics tier comment. Don't boil down someone's thoughtful and informative reply, based in their personal experience to some list that you crafted just to morally shame them. It's really embarrassing behavior that you wouldn't engage in face-to-face. Do better.
I love this reply because it showcases how people hear so selectively and ignore facts. I guess relying on fiction is much easier.
Anyhow, I agree. Seems like the laws are actually working as intended as I have started to outsource to Asia. Your laws did wonders to protect the workers which they were "intended to help". Man this is way to fucking hilarious and sad at the same time.
Your <rant> is basically about you not having (or not willing to budget) enough money to cover the extra risk that the Sweden's work laws impose on your startup. When you think about it like this, the laws and your response to them work exactly as intended.
From Sweden's point of view, the positions you have outsourced will be covered by a company which is willing to pay the price of access to the labor market in Sweden. Which is not unlike a tax.
Did you budget for Sweden's taxes in your startup? Not doing that and then posting a <rant> that you suddenly have to pay taxes and that the existence of the tax code forces you to outsource to Asia would be quite similar to your post here.
People who start new companies don't automatically have infinite amount of money. Or you think that if one is not insanely rich one has no right to start any business?
This is so cynical to support regulation of small starting up companies and huge international corporations by the same laws, ignoring the scale. Only 1 company of 100 actually survive to become profitable. No wonder corporatism "wins" around the world. Though usually it's ignorance, in case of Sweden what they do to small business seems to be done intentionally.
No system is perfect, and sometimes we need to acknowledge that unsavory unintended consequences do exist.
I recently went to a european country with similar laws and was talking to an american ex-pat woman running the tour I signed up for. She said when she first decided to stay a while in this country and started looking for jobs, people were asking her strangely personal questions like how serious she was with her boyfriend. Only after she took her maternity leave a few years later did she realize they were actually gauging how big a maternity leave risk she was going to be while not quite asking her that outright because that would be technically illegal.
The kicker is now she was running her own small tourist business, and she flat out said that she would think long and hard about hiring a woman in her 20's for the exact same reason. In this country she would have to pay a person taking maternity leave out of pocket for up to a year and the government would reimburse her a year or two after the person comes back. The issue was that for a small 3-4 person operation, losing a person for a year while paying whatever % of salary is a significant risk to the business -- she wasn't sure she could stay afloat while waiting for the government to reimburse her (plus this was a mediteranean government not known for german levels of solvency...)
None of this is to say any of this is right or just, but it's just a first-hand tourist story I got that shows it's difficult to create a system that works (at least if "works" is defined solely as "maximizing business growth"). Even if something is formally illegal doesn't mean it doesn't appear as some of the informal mental calculus, and an honest discussion about this would say "yes, these policies can impact business growth and have unintended consequences." The followup conversation no one in the US is willing to have, though, is should we really be fetishizing business growth above all else?
Is Sweden's tech industry an utter joke, though? Stockholm and Sweden rank very high, both when it comes to old-style tech companies (Ericsson, etc) and startups.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/sweden-...
"Stockholm produces the second-highest number of billion-dollar tech companies per capita, after Silicon Valley"
Also, tech salaries are quite high -- as a consultant, you make more than in London at least.
I had no idea the IT consultant salaries were higher in Stockholm compared to London. What kind of rates would an IT consultant be expected to pull in Sweden?
Assignments that are accessible by "anyone" at the consultant brokers are often listed around 750-950 SEK/hour, which means ~470 to ~600 GBP/day if you work 8 hours per day -- clients usually don't mind you working more though. Tax isn't that different last time I checked, but CoL is of course much higher in London.
you are forgetting however that the 750-950 SEK/h includes self-employment taxes (arbetsgivaravgifter) of ~30% + 30% income tax. That´s before all other taxes and fees.
This was essentially the whole point of my original post about consultants. But people dont get this. After all taxes are paid, you get something like 375-475sek/h if even that as this is the above average level of salary.
Compared to when I lived and worked in London, this is a joke. That´s before factoring in cost of living relative to income. You live a much better life in London than you do in Sthlm for instance so I am not sure where you got that last part from. Especially if you consider how massively fucked the Krona is right now
I'm quite aware of the taxes involved -- as I said, I've been working as a consultant for some time now. What you might be forgetting is that, with a company, you can plan your taxes better. Take out a minimal salary and put everything in an ISK and you don't have to pay any capital gains tax, for example.
You're also going to pay taxes being self-employed in the UK, and whether you prefer London over Stockholm is subjective; what you need to consider is the cost of real estate mainly vs statistical incomes, rather than anecdotes.
Yes. It's a short term money grab that will have profound effect on financial services industry, pharma, construction, etc. After killing contracting in the public sector the time has come to abolish the one-man consultancy in the private sector. It's still there, but no client (esp. big companies) wants to put the risk of audit on themselves so they largely have a blanket policy of 'no contractors' in place come April.
According to my friends there, a programmer in Sweden makes SEK 30k - 40k a month, or $37-49k. Europe is a low-cost outsourcing centre which occasionally spits out bright people who run startups, just like China or India or Vietnam.
I have toyed with the idea of working in the US, and I'd have to make about two times the salary in the US to have the same quality of living as in Sweden. Three to four times the salary to have access to the same kind of medical care. Maybe.
Perfectly doable of course, for someone into tech. But just to put things into perspective.
Most employers (tech) pay 90%+ of healthcare costs. Worst case scenario you might be responsible for $6k per person per year if you heavily used the healthcare system.
Because to get to the same level of care and to emulate zero copay, I’d need better insurance or more savings allocated for health bills. Also cost of living is MUCH higher near many tech jobs in the US.
A first year student of some community college in the US is twice as good as the average developer here.
You think I am talking shit? well... I studied in the US and worked as a program director for a technical University based in Stockholm whose sole job was to output developers into the market in line with what all the hundreds of CTOs that I interviewed required.
Trust me when I say this, that article you linked to is pure PR bullshit. You can find the same article written about Paris, London, Berlin, etc. It´s all PR bullshit that people spin in order to attract foreign capital.
> Also, tech salaries are quite high -- as a consultant, you make more than in London at least.
at some point you ought to realize that what you´re saying is bullshit, and this sentence should have tipped you off to the fact that you´re talking out of your ass.
I don't understand your anger, but it's interesting that you've got such a completely different experience of the situation. FWIW, I've also studied in the US, and I've hired developers in Stockholm. There are of course both good and bad developers, but if you pay more, you tend to get better ones.
The article might or might not be bullshit, but there's a lot of highly valued tech companies per capita in Sweden, and I know for sure the consultant prices aren't bullshit as I've worked for quite a long time as just that. I'm usually not the kind of person that "talks out of my ass".
> At some point you ought to realize that what you're saying is bullshit too.
My previous startup was a tech one. The current one that is in Vietnam is for production and manufacturing of physical goods. The parts I moved to Vietnam are the manufacturing parts and the parts that moved to Eastern Europe are the tech parts where you can a lot more value for much less.
So no I am not talking shit, you just dont know enough about my specific case to judge it, yet somehow you have managed to do just that.
Dude, I am also a swedish entrepreneur and I don't have the same expectation that I can shit on my colleagues (yes, i don't see them as resources to maximize my exit). I wrote elsewhere in this post, that currently 25% of my company will be on parental leave this year (including me and 3/4 of us are male). You know what, we plan around it. Get over it - that's the system here. And why would you bring in a consultant - if you're a startup you're growing, continually hiring FT people. That's what we're doing. We hired somebody who was going to be on parental leave in 6 months, because they were good. The govt pays when they are off. Then they come back, and they're still good.
>Too bad the US immigration system is a clusterfuck regardless of how much money you´re willing to throw at it.
There are countries in the world other than the United States and Sweden. Also why should any country have an obligation to open their doors just because you're willing to throw money at them?
That aside, one of my Canadian friends spent a year in Chile creating a startup because the Chilean government paid a good chunk of his living expenses in an effort to bootstrap their tech entrepreneur scene. There are many interesting options around the world of you seek them out.
> There are countries in the world other than the United States and Sweden. Also why should any country have an obligation to open their doors just because you're willing to throw money at them?
Yea not none is really pro business the same way as the US is unfortunately. Also the US offers multiple states with multiple jurisdictions so you can decide for yourself what level of regulation you are willing to tolerate and move accordingly. That´s like 50 countries in 1 :D
Also, no one has to open up their doors. I am just personally disappointed because I want to work hard and prosper in a place that is pro-business that speaks English. I have considered moving to Asia for a long time but I dont think that I´d enjoy living there.
> That aside, one of my Canadian friends spent a year in Chile creating a startup because the Chilean government paid a good chunk of his living expenses in an effort to bootstrap their tech entrepreneur scene. There are many interesting options around the world of you seek them out.
I tried South America for a while. It didnt work for me as I dont speak the language and English isnt very dominant at times. So I´d need a year or two to learn the language before I can even get started in a place like that.
Do try Eastern Europe then. English is spoken in most places where it makes sense to run a startup and you won't have to deal with corruption as you're not doing real estate or working for the local government. Plus you have different EU tax jurisdictions, at least until Bruxelles screws things up.
> One of my best friends have had a full salary for the last 5 years and have not worked a single day. Who pays for that do you reckon? and in what world is that fair to the rest of us?
I somehow doubt this is the full story. Would you mind going into a bit more detail?
She had several kids in a row by timing their birth perfectly so that she never has to work. And obviously, for each kid the parents get parental leave. Not that hard and far too common of a thing to do here.
And paid by the state, not the company in question. Some companies have agreements to cover the difference to your regular salary and similar but that's only goodwill.
But what´s your point? it could be one cent on the dollar, that does not change a thing for me as a business owner though. It isnt the money that is the primary problem even though it is a problem.
I know first hand small employers that had employees go on parental leave, hired replacements, and then without too much hassle could keep the replacements and fire the one on leave, because there are many exceptions you can do as a small employer. So I find your entire rant confusing and not matching my experience.
I’ve been on parental leave myself and my small employer hired a replacement, and by the time I got back we were both needed because they ran a successful and expanding business.
Again, you leave out important details. It's also capped at a low level - like 80% of 3000 Euros/month or something. So high earners like you (and me) feel a bit more pain. But you know what, it's worth it. I cherish the time I have spent with my kids on parental leave, it's worth all the money in the world.
> Our bootstrapped startup almost went under because of employee benefit payments for people who were not even showing up to work and we cannot fire by law
That’s unfortunate but that’s what you need to handle if you are an employer. You know the rules when you start a company and when you hire someone. There are some exceptions in place for smaller employees too.
Competition means that successful companies that survive are those that manage to cope with such terrifying things as employees going on parental leave.
I’m not sure how you ended up managing a company with several employees while seeming surprised by the labor laws in the countries where it operates?
I don't think they wrote they were "surprised" or that they didn't handle these laws or the situations caused by them. The author just wrote that those laws are very difficult for business and are not as "entrepreneur-friendly" as advertised by these "Sweden does _____" articles.
> That’s unfortunate but that’s what you need to handle if you are an employer.
100%, and we managed because I had taken into account all of that stuff. But people cant claim that this place is great for business while exposing startups to these massive risks.
> I’m not sure how you ended up managing a company with several employees while seeming surprised by the labor laws in the countries where it operates?
Plenty of these laws came to me personally as a shock because it isn´t really easy to know all of your obligations ahead of time especially when there are thousands of things to take into account.
It saddens me to say this but every time I hire someone I have to put aside 125% of their salary aside for both employer taxes as well as a "rainy day fund". Imagine claiming that such a place is business friendly. That´s my beef, nothing else.
> every time I hire someone I have to put aside 125% of their salary aside
You can't answer if that is unreasonable unless you compare to other countries. As an example, in the US you would have to also pay for health insurance. And if the employee were to get sick they might still not see a doctor immediately because of the premiums, leading to further time off.
I would be surprised if the majority of the people who downvoted the comment have actually lived in Sweden. It's more likely it was because the comment wasn't (initially) specific, or because it didn't match the universally positive image they have of Sweden.
I live in Sweden and I don't have a “universally positive image” of it — but I've also heard complaints about the burden on employers from [insert any country here]'s policies before, so it's not a very interesting comment to me.
Why do you think it’s against guidelines? The OP comment started a very interesting thread IMHO. Not everything has to be a “reasoned critique”, sharing personal feelings about a situation can be a great way to get to a constructive discussion.
Oh boy, bad time to being saying this. All of the Americans on here have been hearing that Sweden is just better...it is so easy, "free" healthcare, "free" everything...build a wall, make Goldman Sachs pay for it.
The reality is somewhere in the middle. Generally in Northern Europe, excluding UK, you have a history of huge (monopolistic) companies that dominate the economy. So you end up with labour policies that reflect that...which is kind of terrible for the way the world is going. If you could take the job market flexibility and social policy without the freeloading, that would be something...I am not sure anyone has done this. And btw, this model would bring the US to its knees. It will be interesting to watch if it occurs...but I also hope it doens't.
It’s very much true that Sweden’s labor laws are deeply influenced by a heritage of large industries like Ericsson, Volvo, SKF and the like. They work well when employers are large, employments are long.
It’s equally true that these laws may not create a great climate for small tech startups.
I don’t think there is an easy answer to how to liberalize the labor market without it damaging large groups of blue collar workers (which would make it politically impossible). Denmark has an interesting model where employment security is weaker but in return the safety net is better. I think this is where Sweden could be headed as well.
>You're coming off as a disgruntled employer. Sweden is trying to make it better for employees.
Bullshit. It´s a way to purchase votes and generate tax $$ plain and simple. Workers lives are not bettered by crippling startups. That´s the EXACT opposite of what is true. You want more business rather than less so the worker have more choices to pick from and there is more competition for the labor of said worker which would enable him to get an even better life and living standard.
> I'm sorry but I'm just a bit shocked because I didn't think Swedes had lost their socialist spirit so much.
The fact that you´re shocked tells me all I need to know about how well this PR game has been played. Sweden isn´t "socialist". How many times do we need to repeat that? Just because a company has a state run safety net that does not mean that it is a socialist country. By that definition, every country is a socialist country. Your definition of socialism is pretty fucked. Read about the 90s and the restructuring of the Swedish economy post the Housing crisis for Christ sake. It´s like facts seem to magically get altered just because Bernie said so.
> Clearly you're a product of the Bildt era.
I wonder how many calories you burn a day by jumping into conclusions... and no I am not. Not even close. I am merely an observer of two contradicting messages that are being put on display: 1) Sweden is one of the best places for startups, and 2) startups are burdened unlike any other country I have been to or read about. I cant personally square that circle and pointing that out does not make me a "product of Bildt" era, as if that actually means anything...
> That freedom of choice he advocated in health care for example has already backfired multiple times where the end user/consumer has suffered.
1. Dafuq does that have to do with anything?
2. ah I see, you categorized me as a "Bildt follower" just so you can assassinate me by association. Noice! Well played but... naah try again. That shit doesn´t fly here.
3. if "freedom of choice" backfires for some reason, then freedom ought to be suspended in favor of centrally planned alternatives? give me a break, not even real socialist doctors (not your kind of quasi-socialist) would accept that premise.
4. You want to talk about consumer suffering? Open up the USD/SEK or EUR/SEK chart and see what the currently lovely policies have done to the consumer.
>Your vision of Sweden would only benefit yourself and your own kind, business owners and employers, in the long run.
Sadly enough, That´s the exact opposite of what I am trying to achieve because if we keep on going the way we currently are, Sweden will be a graveyard a few decades from now. A businessman ALWAYS wants a strong and rich consumer so that he in turn can make money off of said consumer. My goal is to enrich the consumers of society not reduce their wealth. But then again, I can´t expect logic to come easy to a sophist.
Please follow the site guidelines even when someone else has broken them. If you react by breaking them yourself, it discredits your points and means your comment will probably get (correctly) moderated. It's much better to stick to making your substantive points thoughtfully. Let the audience see for themselves how you didn't take the bait; your case will be stronger for it, and you won't contribute to damaging the commons here.
Because shit like that is generally against the law in countries that care about workers rights. It's utterly transparent and anyone can see through it. It's the same reasons Uber aren't allowed in many European countries - at least not in the way they are in the US. You can't just claim that the people that are effectively your employees are simply contractors.
How does this violate the law? Could you point me to any European country with laws prohibiting this?
> You can't just claim that the people that are effectively your employees are simply contractors.
No, they are the employees of my subsidiary. They are entitled to all of the protections of labour law, including all the maternity leave and all that. If the subsidiary goes out of business, too bad. That's what they're for.
If this actually was a functioning way of handling the situation, every single company would be structured this way. Worker protection laws are a huge pain for employers in Sweden, so they wouldn't hesitate a second if they could work around them through such a loophole.
Calling for us to point to a certain paragraph of a certain law is not really fair, because we're generally not lawyers here. Can you instead explain why all companies are not structured the way you suggest. Because all managers are idiots, or because they've realized that it's not legally sound?
Because it's bad PR, and because few people bother to be bold enough to innovate. Sweden, like most of Europe, is a country of conformism. There is very little innovation being conducted there, just like with the Chinese.
In America, people have a long and proud tradition of coming up with Byzantine workarounds for laws. In Europe, not so much.
I can't prove a negative, but you can prove a positive.
Either this isn’t happening because people wouldn’t accept that form of employment, or it isn’t happening because it’s too cumbersome or the cost of it cancels the gain. Or it isn’t happening because the laws are successful in preventing it. Who knows - either way it’s not happening.
The only gain is that you can employ a new full time employee instead of hiring a temp while waiting for the person on leave to come back. It's a minor gain compared to the hassle/risk of trying to circumvent a law anyway.
No. Unless you don't compete with your employer, poach customers, or do something illegal - what you do on your unpaid time off is none of their business.
> "...Stockholm, has become Europe’s start-up capital, second only to California’s Silicon Valley for the number of unicorns (billion-dollar tech companies) that it produces per capita."
I can't find any evidence for this. According to wiki[1]: "Unicorns are concentrated in a few countries/regions: China (125), United States (121), India (27), South Korea (11), UK (10), Israel (7), Sweden (5), Indonesia (5), France, Hong Kong (3), Portugal (3), Switzerland (3), Australia (2),Estonia (2), Belgium (2), Canada (2), Germany (2), Singapore (4), Ukraine (2), and thirteen other countries (1 each)."
Smells like propaganda to help the stagnating innovation in europe.
Wiki says "Skype was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennström, from Sweden, and Janus Friis, from Denmark.[26] The Skype software was created by Estonians Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn. The first public beta version was released on 29 August 2003."
Yes, good one. Yubico is another HN folks should recognize. And then there are tons of game studios doing AAA games. Numerous network equipment vendors. And of course Erlang.
So this interested me - and am quite astonished by the outcome
If I use unicorns (parent post) per millions of population (figures from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio... - rounded up to nearest million .5 up - thus Estonia (1.3M has 1M in this calc, giving it 2 unicorns per Million people!))
Estonia 2.00
Israel 0.78
Singapore 0.67
Sweden 0.50
HK 0.43
USA 0.37
Portugal 0.30
SKorea 0.22
Belgium 0.17
UK 0.15
China 0.08
Australia 0.08
Canada 0.05
France 0.05
Ukraine 0.05
Germany 0.02
India 0.02
Indonesia 0.02
Sweden is forth in the list, with Estonia and Portugal as real surprises. Guess the effect of just one Unicorn / outlier is high but even so ... SV is clearly not the only way.
And if it wasn´t per capita, they´d find some other way to slice the data. This is simply a PR campaign to attract foreign investment into a country that it latching onto a piece of stat in an ocean of bad indicators.
China has 1.5 billion people. Sweden has 10 millions. If China would have numerically less start up companies than Sweden than something would be serious wrong in both countries.
Funny that you say that because it's precisely what I've noticed and been saying, having moved to Europe because of all the great stuff mentioned on the internet and realizing it's not as great as people would have you believe.
What's weird is every time I've brought it up, either my comment gets buried or a bunch of excuse makers jump in and say "it's not like that, it's just you..." Not until very recently have I noticed other people talking about the lovely EU propaganda and not getting buried.
The WEF is a kind of a 'personally politicized' entity I don't mean that in a bad way. It's not some official government thing working on economically secular issues. It was founded by a dude interested in economic advancement and wellbeing of 'the world'. But it's made of people with personalities, agendas - and I don't mean cynically or negative, it's just part of the NGO landscape. It's a very European centric and is naturally going to be supportive of developing and promoting 'innovation' in the broadest sense for its constituents and relations.
Someone in the group may have had a meeting with someone from the city of Stockholm either public or private, which gave them the impetus or idea to talk about how they've been successful.
The author of the post, 'Sean Fleming' is a journalist from the UK with a background in PR, more than likely he's hired to 'write stuff' that is favourable to the WEF, and so this seems like a neat thing to talk about.
Basically, it's PR. There's nothing wrong with it, but that's what it is.
I'm doubtful that anyone in such a position is paid remotely enough to go really in-depth and to discover the underlying correlational factors such as the effect of very high taxes, or the real productive measures of '6 months off'.
It's just a little note from the WEF on how Sweden might possibly have some interesting differentiating thing.
For sure the article feels like PR. I was asking especially about the part of the comment regarding “the WEF pushing for stagnation in Europe” (paraphrasing), that’s the part that sounds counter intuitive to me.
Germany's economy is characterised by decentralisation and small and middle-sized family business, the so called Mittelstand. Germany is home to a significant portion of the world's 'hidden champions'[1], which as the name suggests, largely fly under the radar of the consumer focussed start up sector.
Startups mostly profit from access to homogenous large consumer markets and extreme clusters. Neither has ever been the goal of German economic development, largely because it's incompatible with the sort of cultural values German's consider important.
>I thought being Europe's strongest economy would help.
I don't think that reducing a country or an econonomy to a single metric (here: gdp, I guess?) is the right approach; we are looking at very complicated systems here. One thing that makes Germany unique is its Mittelstand-phenomena [0].
Historically, innovation isn't driven by wealth, but by pressure, see: times of war, or the US' "make it big or die"-mentality.
Germans are very well off: cabs in every village are high-end mercedes models (suggesting that the entire society is rich), and social security is simply unmatched globally (afaik, no other country pays you 400eur+rent until you find a job, no matter how many years it takes).
Growing up in this environment, I never felt incentivized to come up with ways to become super-rich (which is the idea behind being an entrepeneur, isn't it?). Theres just no point to that hustle if you can live a really decent life working a normal job.
Sure, there is some class struggle (and there always was), but generally speaking, people just don't need to "make it" on their own - opposed to the US, where status is everything)
> Historically, innovation isn't driven by wealth, but by pressure, see: times of war, or the US' "make it big or die"-mentality.
It's driven by both. New hypotheses get generated in times relative wealth, when people can afford not to default to the availability bias of ideas that exist already.
Pressure for success results in the selection of the more optimal hypotheses available to put into action. Much of the science and tinkering that led to wartime technology used in the world wars, for example, was done during non-war time.
If you place too much on the side of survival pressure, you will be over optimized for the short term, and likely generate fewer innovations.
In practice, if you left a job in the US for an entrepreneurial venture that fails, your former employer or a competitor would gladly welcome you back as an employee.
I enjoy and support the systems mentioned in the article, but the right to unpaid leave was used by Daniel Ek, Markus Persson or Niklas Zennström as far as I know.
You are asking on HN, so you are bound to be the kind of person who can go to Sweden, find work or continue to work remotely for your present employer or whatever, and settle into things and be welcomed.
The office language is often English, everyone speaks excellent English and everyone is happy to speak it. I know many immigrants in the IT sector who have picked up only the most basic Swedish despite years of living there; you can get by by just talking to absolutely everyone in English.
At least half of the programmers at offices I’ve seen are immigrants. They have a variety of reasons for going to Sweden, which usually seem to start with uni eg from the classic “met my wife-to-be when she was an exchange student” to “studied here, never went home” etc.
Now there’s an entirely different experience for the unskilled and refugees, but although there is an veiled racist vocal right wing, the real people, even those who live near flyktingboende, seem compassionate.
There's a difference between tolerance and acceptance. People are very nice and tolerant of foreigners, but they will always be the "other" in society.
This is btw the case for immigrants in most places in the world, especially Asia. But because Sweden especially gets such a high reputation for being welcoming, I feel the need to contextualize.
Right so second hand. Also please note your friends have motivation to smooth over the rough patches of their new lives the same way you have when discussing Swedish immigration in general.
I used to live in Umeå, so I can tell you from first-hand experience (as an American). It wasn't easy. Everything people say about America's immigration policy being "racist" are also true about Sweden - with exemptions only for those seeking asylum. The Nordic countries in general actually aren't that easy to immigrate to. In my case, I basically had to prove a level of wealth that for 99% of the population of the world wouldn't be possible. (It was actually recommended to me to BUY a house before I was allowed to permanently move!)
By comparison, moving to Germany was a breeze and I still have a valid German green card to this day. In retrospect, this is almost obviously true when you compare the demographics of both countries. Sweden is more homogenous than Germany by far despite offering social benefits that are substantially more valuable.
This applies to anyone, whether you're syrian or american; learn the language and find a job. Those are key to getting citizenship.
A friend moved here from the states for a job, so he had the job ready before he came. He learned enough swedish to speak it daily within 2 years. No problem getting citizenship.
Post-2015 Sweden is quite difficult to immigrate to if you aren't doing it via a skilled employment visa. The requirements, along with the amount of time it takes to get simple things working properly (like a social security number and a bank account) once you do get here are cumbersome. Plus housing is an issue, you will find that it is quite a struggle to get a permanent rental contract in the major cities like Stockholm and Malmö. The language is also quite difficult for us English speakers to learn because everyone loves to practice their English with you so even when you attempt to speak Swedish they recognise you are an English speaker and change languages.
Very welcoming if you are an analphabet from the 3rd world or IS fighter.
If you are coming on a work visa expect some difficulties. And if you do anything minor like not taking out all your vacation days you will lose your visa.
How does this work when it comes to any intellectual property you create, while still bound by an employment contract which can often stipulate a company's ownership of ALL of your creations while working for them.
I've had to insist on that clause being removed at a couple of places I've worked. As long as anything I build in my spare time (which I like to do a lot) isn't competitive.
So basically how it is with the US/UK but with formalities? I've never heard of an employer refusing to take an entrepreneur-failed attempt back, if anything its a demotion to have the same rank/job after
this is mostly bullshit... if you are unemployed you can use 6 months of your unemployment money as a lump sum to start a business. most of the time noone gets unemployment money. as many have said sweden is romanticized.
I dunno, but this just feels very strange. Sure the unicorns, but to call it the #1 startup capital in Europe? Something HAS to be better at this, Berlin perhaps?...
“Employers can only turn the request down if the employee is vital to the business’s operations. Also, your new idea can’t compete with your existing employer, nor cause them any significant inconvenience.“
Swedish resident here. Absolutely correct. 99% of "Sweden does" stories are absolute and total nonsense. Publishers publish what their audience want to read.
No-one* uses this 6 month sabbatical for startup purposes.
Headlines are misinterpreted and the rumors travel far on the internet. I've also seen that "finland has UBI" being re-told as a story, and that's just from the trials that have been done in Finland. I'd say the onus is mostly on us, to read the articles and not the headlines to understand what they say. And be critical of what the articles say, too.
Why can't people they just quit their job for the duration needed, do the startup in their spare time using their own money rather than taking advantage of someone else who is already successful?
They want to be called entrepreneurs - why would they not grow balls, take risk like proper entrepreneurs do and not hide behind socialist populist state?
Looks like a lot of people on HN have left-leaning views despite the name "HACKERnews"
> Why can't people they just quit their job for the duration needed, do the startup in their spare time using their own money rather than taking advantage of someone else who is already successful?
The idea is basically that the idea of being forced to look for work, something that can be very draining, is keeping people from taking the chance. This law allows swedes to give their idea a shot without having the lack of job loom over their head.
> Looks like a lot of people on HN have left-leaning views despite the name "HACKERnews"
I'm not really sure what you mean with this. Can you not be a hacker/entrepreneur/developer and have left-leaning views and ideas? If that's the case I have a few friends that need to change their views or sell their companies.
And these friends are left-leaning Danes. So in essence, if you're American, you can generally compare their views to a slightly more "extreme" version of Bernie Sanders.
1. i wonder, what makes people and politicians think that an employee who is not certain to find a new job within 6 months and who doesn't have 6 months of savings is capable of creating a sustainable business or a startup? And why creating business is less "draining" than looking for a job in already familiar area for that person?
Looks infantile to me.
2. I would imagine entrepreneurs and even more business owners statistically should be right-leaning. Especially, when they start feeling how socialist government "loves" them ;)
3. yes, i was wrong. didn't think it through. hackers can be left leaning. probable today's hackers are naturally left-leaning from what i can see from the comments :)
"The problem with socialism is that it runs out of other peoples' money"
> Anyone who’s been in full-time employment for at least six months is entitled to apply for the unpaid sabbatical, or tjänstledighet, as it’s called in Sweden.
I just don’t see the magic in this or the extended parental leave
Why can’t any healthy functioning adult do the
exact same thing on their own ?
is 6 months living expenses really holding back your entrepreneurial dreams?
> Why can’t any healthy functioning adult do the exact same thing on their own ?
Because they know it would be very hard to be re-hired if things don't work out.
> is 6 months living expenses really holding back your entrepreneurial dreams?
No, for most people it's the thought of renouncing a guaranteed job. With this sort of thing, you know that there is a safety net if the business doesn't take off in 6 months.
At least in America it is extremely difficult, if not practically impossible, for "any healthy functioning adult" to just take six months off to do something like start a business. Very few households have even one month of expenses saved up (most can't afford something like a $400 emergency, e.g., car repair).
> At least in America it is extremely difficult, if not practically impossible, for "any healthy functioning adult" to just take six months off to do something like start a business.
What is so hard about it?
Also, that are not getting paid during those 6 months in Sweden either. Don’t see the big deal here.
Amazingly productive days. I must add that you don't get paid for the time off. It's just that you don't lose your employment status.