I think I have to disagree. Not knowing the specifics of French unemployment benefits, here in Germany, the situation is probably closer to that in France than that in the US. If you are unemployed, you still have health insurance, you get some money, and becoming homeless because of unemployment is basically unheard of.
So far, I have yet to meet a person that is happily unemployed here. There is a huge social stigma attached to it and people get depressed because the self-image suffers from being unemployed for longer times. Going a little bit over the top, the whole incentive argument to me sounds like this: Since being miserable does not provide the right incentives for an unemployed person to search for work, the situation must be improved by making them miserable and hungry/homeless.
France is like most countries with high unemployment in that the primary cause of unemployment is that there aren't enough jobs. Germany has the mittelstand which keeps over 70% of the population employed. The US has its own version of the mittelstand with over 26,000 Subway sandwich franchises, so its unemployement rate is only slightly worse than Germany.
Rubbish. There is a massive lack of jobs, just like everywhere else in Europe.
There may be a lack of high-paying, low-stress jobs, the kind that spoiled, study-a-random-field-till-30 university graduates generally feel entitled to, but that's not the same thing.
>There may be a lack of high-paying, low-stress jobs, the kind that spoiled, study-a-random-field-till-30 university graduates generally feel entitled to, but that's not the same thing.
What are you referencing by that? Off the top of my mind I can't think of any low-stress job. Sure, some jobs are less stressful, but I don't think anyone has the expectation to find a job that doesn't conform to general properties of almost all jobs.
It's a combination of incentives. Being unemployed is less awful in France, so there is negative pressure on being employed. Additionally, the cost to fund such a program creates negative pressure on increased employment through various means.
By no means am I a hardcore conservative and against these programs (they have their place), but innovation and employment thrives in a less regulated environment. We can argue about the quality of the labor in such systems, but that's entirely different.
An interesting hypothesis. Evidence against it is that Germany has a similar net and yet unemployment amongst the youth is less than half that of America.
Keep in mind that unemployment in France, Belgium and Holland (I'm not very well informed on Germany, only saying here what I've seen directly), unemployment is determined by social status.
In the lower social classes (the equivalent of trailor park in the US I guess), unemployment is somewhere between accepted and encouraged (because it means these people can help eachother out). Amongst the educated, unemployment is a stigma, with possible exceptions for people who are content to beg a life together as "artists" or hermits (these guys are what holds up the science department in universities though). Getting a job and raising a family is what everybody else in the middle and higher classes do.
The problems are threefold.
First, the lower classes don't shrink. Well they shrink by birthrate, but not fast enough.
Second, people are getting forced into the lower classes (the biggest effects are car manufacturer closings, which destroy tens of thousands of jobs in one go). Far more go into them than ever come out. You can bet though, that the government will find a way to not count these people in the joblessness figures. In Belgium, over 10000 ex-Opel employees got to go on pension, some as young as 38. Real unemployment in France and Belgium is just shy of double the official figures, coming up to almost 25%.
Third is immigration. This is not a problem anywhere except the huge cities, but there the problem is endemic. The vast majority of immigrants in Western Europe join the low end of the lower class, where it's almost a crime to hold a job (it'll get you mugged regularly, for one thing).
I don't know what is happening in Germany, but this is what's happening in most of Western Europe, and it won't end well, that's for sure.
Unemployed people I know do not like being unemployed. There are people who don't want to work, and are fine mooching, but it is such a small percentage that it's a cost I'm willing to pay to protect people. Complaining about those "mooching off" of the safety net is like complaining about voter fraud in the US.
