> Are you all really that sick?

Well, no. These are averages. Obviously, some people take more sick days than others; e.g. women with severe period pains might take days off each month.

> Shouldn't the availability of lots of sick time and your "superior" healthcare system decrease your illness levels?

Sick days are not just for "illness", so they aren't an indicator for overall health.

> Doesn't seem to make any sense to me.

I could make a snarky response about US education or something, but instead, I just want to point out that I find it strange how people in bad situations often defend their circumstances, rather than trying to change them.

Sick days as other wrote is prescribe by a doctor. It doesn't have a limit (e.g. .y college broke his leg and was on sick leave for 1.5 year). And his vacation time accumulated, he didn't use his 26 days first year so the next he had 52 days to use.

Sick leave in my country is not full paid, it is 80%, so people are not that keen on getting it if not needed. On the other hand they are not hit that dramatically if they are sick.

I wouldn’t use the number of sick days as some form of “national health metric” since there’s probably a bunch of factors that influence it as much (if not more) than actual sickness, like for example: how many sick days are you actually allowed to take, how much do you get paid on sick days, what’s the culture around taking sick days?

If you want to measure general health, you could go for example for life expectancy. Or if you care about the healthcare system itself you could go for infant/maternal mortality. Or if you want to measure efficiency you could go for spending per capita.

The sick leave has to go through the healthcare system. That said, there are doctors that would just blindly approve, but it's not exactly a norm.

A lot of those sick days are also childcare.

[dead]

What countries? Above peoplemwrote about Germany.and didn't mention such strange limit of first few days. Also in Poland there is no such thing. You can have a sick leave for 1 day and you get paid the same amount as if you get 3 weeks - 80% of your salary.

> In most places in Europe the first sick days are not comped

I don't think that's true.

The point is that it is a limited amount of paid sick days, which is a completely foreign concept in most places (pun intended).

Fair enough!

I read "could be better for sure" together with the whole "but" that came after it - meaning even though it could be better, it's not so bad because it averages 11.

> healthcare were far cheaper

In the 60s people would often die from ailments that are now solved with routine outpatient procedures.

Cars were cheaper too but it turns out all that emissions and safety equipment costs money.

> wealth was more evenly distributed,

Maybe…of course, those were also decades where companies would comp executives with cars, apartments, vacation homes, &c. Plus other perks like expensing ‘business meetings’ at strip clubs.

100% disagree.

SmartPhones, Cloud, AI.

Just three things that happened in the past 20 years and were brought to the world by US companies.

Also post war Europe had to rebuild, the US didn't - and lots of scientists headed west.

> US inventiveness peaked in the 50s and 60s

How does one even measure that? And who would even try and claim that?

> when corporate taxes were much higher

The corporate tax rates in the 70s and 80s were just as high as they were in the 50s and 60s [0]. And the capital gains taxes were actually lower during the 50s and 60s than they were in the 70s and 80s. Why did inventiveness stop if the higher tax rates were helpful?

   1952-1963 Over $25,000 52%
   1975-1978 Over $50,000 48% ($50k in 1978 is ~$21k in 1952)

But surely Reagan did some bad things, right?

   The maximum tax rate on capital gains was capped at 34 percent for 1987
   From April 1, 1954, through Calendar Year 1969, the maximum tax rate on capital gains was 25 percent.

Grift in the 50s and 60s was pervasive and everywhere. Eisenhower was warning about the Military Industrial Complex in 1961.

[0] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/historical-corpor...