Something Terrible Is Happening in France | Economics Explained

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I gotta be honest, I find it a bit disingenuous for economists to wring their hands about workers getting higher pay for the same productivity when companies have kept wages flat despite soaring increases in productivity over the last few decades.

I'm an Australian living in France with a job, wife, kids, etc. The job protections and work life balance are comforting (and sometimes even confounding) even if wages are lower. Couldn't the work/life balance and job protections be used to draw in skilled workers from less balanced economies? It is a huge reason why we continue to live here.

I'm french and I study economics. I have never been convinced by economics explained but now they made a video on a subject I know quite well, my doubts are confirmed. It's just a stack of clichés about France that have been seen hundreds of times and as many times disproved. Where are the sources of the video in addition ?

Something weird/terrible is happening in all the big economies it seems

EE said "The Industrial Revolution" so many times, I thought he was going to quote the Unibomber.

I don’t think you know how “C’est la vie” is used.

I have a lot of respect for the French. I know this is an economics channel, but if you just examine France through the eyes of an economist, you miss a lot of what makes the country great. You touched on this tbf. They'll be fine; they have a variety of geography and climate, almost as much coast as the uk, and a huge amount of farmland. Tourism for days. And historically they've made some sensible choices on things like energy and defense.

I have spent a lot of time in France and my brother in law lives there. All I heard is “Yes I can earn more but I get more time off here”. They aren’t loosing young people. They are proud of the way they live.

I think is a bit disingenuous to say dirigisme causes inflation in the 70-80s when every western country have the same inflation graph due to the oil crisis.

Economics Explained has a terrible reputation among academic economists. Essentially, unless you're Australia (where he's from), your country is currently or about to fall into an economic death spiral. Ever since watching that absurd video on the UK's economy, which was full of inaccurate claims, I've been highly sceptical of every video released

The whole concept of perpetual growth is entirely unsustainable. If increased personal wellbeing isn't the ultimate goal of a society, then what is? GDP growth at the expense of the worker inevitably leads to inequality and instability.

I think your arrangement of the flight of the Huguenots and the French Revolution(s) implies a conflation between the two. The bulk of Huguenots left France in 1685, more than 100 years before the French Revolution 1789, and long before France's industrial revolution in the 1830s. While the loss of the Huguenots represented a serious loss of human capital of France, none of them would have been the engineers, scientists, or specialists critical to the French industrial revolution by virtue of predating it by so much. Otherwise a very informative and intriguing video. Thank you very much!

Thesis of the video: economic well-being and sustainability is a function of productivity & competition Quote from the closing statement: "but now it's just getting outcompeted by places that are willing to work harder in ways that are more economically competitive" This odd touch of catty-ness is super unnecessary to the point where it's self-undermining. I don't use the word "objectively" often, but this is a situation where the script would have objectively worked better had someone crossed out that bit in the editing room: "but now it's just getting outcompeted by places that are that are more economically competitive" I encourage others to consider the counterfactuals; Japan's "hard" work culture which has yielded little, if any, substantial economic productivity gains. Perhaps I've gone and unfairly twisted the original intended meaning of the script... but if anything I think that underscores the problem: "working hard" is a values judgement with no concrete basis in economic science.

According to the video, the major problem is state funded company. But the funded state companies represents only 3,1% of the employment in France. All along, there is almost no numbers given to put the content into perspective...

People try to predict the economy not realizing it is not a capitalistic market, its a command economy, central planning! my concern is, instead of having much dollar in bank that could lose value to inflation, do I save in gold to reserve and grow wealth for now, or just hang on?

An excellent example of the french national industries is covered in youtuber Perun's episode on French military procurement. Despite not being a super power, France manages to field equipment that is only reserved to actual super powers such as aircraft carriers, nuclear subs, nuclear weapons, it's own fighter aircraft, tanks, artillery, vehicles and more.

As a french I do think this video was pretty poorly researched and made out of stereotype unfortunatly.... state owned companies are not that much a thing anymore.... we have many challenges but reducing state companies is really not one of them, no one will agree with you here

I think it would be interesting to compare Scandinavian countries, which also have very strong welfare systems and France and see what they are potenially doing better/worse than each other and where they could learn from each other. Naturally you often hear economists to demand to cut down on the social security and welfare systems to solve economic problems but i'm not sure if this is always the best solution. Also i think it would be nice to include a few more statistics to emphasize where exactly the problems of certain economies lie and in which way economic measures are hoping to change those.

I'm french and the public service is going downhill, especially health, education and energy