« It's official | Main | A question about health care history »
Which vacation model is best?
Marko, a loyal MR reader, asks:
Compare and contrast US vs European vacation model.
How much vacation do we really need?
That is a good question for August. I think of the European "minimum three weeks in August" model as resulting from lots of collective bargaining, small families, fewer large dependent pets, higher tax rates, and many nearby desirable locales which do not exhaust themselves easily. Plus you already live near the kids' grandparents, so you either don't need the four-day trip there or you wouldn't consider a full three weeks with them. Head to Morocco and hire a guide.
Rather than comparing the vacations per se you also can ask whether the preconditions for the European-style vacation are desirable. Overall I see the European approach to leisure as having higher private returns but lower social returns. It reflects a very coordinated but less flexible approach to labor allocation and it reflects a weaker obsession with work and children, both of which in my view have larger social benefits. If there is nowhere fun to go, as for many Americans, or your pets and kids tie you down anyway, you'll maybe have a better time at home.
One ideal is to have an American-style income and tax rate and then some free time in May and September rather than August, combined with a willingness to take longer flights; I have most of this (though I teach in September) and we don't have pets. It is Yana who leads the charge to go places.
Addendum: Matt Yglesias makes some interesting points.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on August 3, 2009 at 07:18 AM in Travel | Permalink
Comments
What's the "minimum three weeks in August" model? (I ask, as a European.)
Posted by: J. at Aug 3, 2009 8:19:00 AM
In addition to these reasons, collectively bargained or statutory minimum vacation is designed to remove the ability to signal loyalty and ambition through reduced leisure. Depending on the situation it may not constrain individuals' ability to act according to their true preferences for leisure any more than does the wasteful signalling that results from its absence.
Posted by: per at Aug 3, 2009 8:26:41 AM
a weaker obsession with work and children, both of which in my view have larger social benefits.
Now *that* is an interesting thesis. If it was true, why arent we all speaking chinese right about now?
Posted by: JSK at Aug 3, 2009 8:42:51 AM
Tyler: On the other side, there are many social benefits in coordinated vacation time (ie Everybody takes vacation in August), and you won't find economic actors trying to communicate with their couter-parts in their vacation time, because everybody is.
Posted by: Alejandro Guerrero at Aug 3, 2009 8:42:55 AM
In fairness, Tyler, you get to travel a fair amount for work, so I'm not surprised that you wouldn't be the one pushing for more travel.
Posted by: Anonymous at Aug 3, 2009 8:49:07 AM
Tyler,
The co-ordinated August holiday is certainly a significant component of the (continental) European vacation model, but what do you think of the fudamental difference in levels of paid holiday between Europe and the US? Even in supposedly hard-working Britain, paid annual leave is 4-6 weeks.
Posted by: Patrick Gillett at Aug 3, 2009 9:03:41 AM
If there is nowhere fun to go, as for many Americans...
Hmmm -- where would you have to live in the U.S. for there to be 'nowhere fun to go'?
Posted by: Slocum at Aug 3, 2009 9:22:24 AM
For many US families, August is back to school time. State sales tax holidays will be this next weekend aound where we live. Many teacher friends have already had some meetings and must be fully prepared when the kids arrive for their first day on Monday August 17.
Not much time in August for an extended vacation.
Posted by: Jim at Aug 3, 2009 9:35:40 AM
@Jim: You can't take Tyler's "3 weeks in August" that literally. Typically these "3 weeks" are when the children have their 6 weeks of school holidays.
Also, there is (at least in Germany) no law that requires people to take vacation in any month. That can be negotiated with the employer, and I know many people who take 4 weeks of vacation whenever they see fit, plus of course the winter holidays around Christmas.
Posted by: IWantCookieNow at Aug 3, 2009 9:41:34 AM
Best use of vacation days: take off as many Wednesdays as possible. It breaks up the workweek very nicely.
Posted by: Peter at Aug 3, 2009 9:45:25 AM
Tyler,
your comment reflects the assumption that all people in the world tick the same way and have the same utility function. This assumption, what I have seen, is wrong. Asians, Europeans, Northamericans, Africans and Latinamericans all have different utility functions and thus have different work/leasure optima. So, it is not your objective but the subjective factors that count. Another example is the pleasure people derive from sitting at a table and eating, which differs vastly around the globe.
Posted by: Christian G.E. Schiller at Aug 3, 2009 9:49:29 AM
Obsession with children is a result of modern times in countries where parents don't have enough time to raise their children. Obsession is a deviant behaviour rather than important social factor.
Posted by: SkippyEU at Aug 3, 2009 10:05:17 AM
If ... your pets and kids tie you down anyway, you'll maybe have a better time at home work.
Fixed that for you...
Posted by: ogmb at Aug 3, 2009 10:09:41 AM
Tyler, it is not necessarily true that Europeans have fewer children than Americans. Generally, the French and Scandinavians have about as many children as Americans do.
http://demographymatters.blogspot.com/2009/07/what-is-real-european-fertility.html
Posted by: Aslak at Aug 3, 2009 10:32:00 AM
Yes, but clearly Europeans don't care about their children as much as Americans do. If they did, they would raise them in America.
Posted by: Reuben at Aug 3, 2009 10:35:07 AM
So, it is not your objective but the subjective factors that count. Another example is the pleasure people derive from sitting at a table and eating, which differs vastly around the globe.
That is so true.
I love what I do and feel like I'm on vacation most days. I actually tell people I have "retired" and am doing what I want to do the rest of my life.
But time away from thinking about work or whatever it is you do most days is still good to do - it helps me see problems in a new way.
And when I can find a good conference or trade show that has a lot of presentations by people from small and mid-size businesses not in my industruy, I always learn new and useful (and often profitable) things.
If there is nowhere fun to go, as for many Americans, or your pets and kids tie you down anyway, you'll maybe have a better time at home.
There are many fun places to go here in DC and all across this great land of ours, but I also enjoy being at home. And my kids loved good road trips.
Life is good.
Yes, but clearly Europeans don't care about their children as much as Americans do. If they did, they would raise them in America.
At first I thought this was posted by Andrew (because of the humor). Come on Andrew, weigh in!
Posted by: anon at Aug 3, 2009 11:14:13 AM
fewer large dependent pets, They abandon them in the roads. Along with old people. the corpses of people that died during the vacation time heat wave remained abandoned for weeks
, and many nearby desirable locales which do not exhaust easily . So you have been to a beach in summer
And everything is closed in the cities while people from around the world id there to see those cities
No fun place to go in america so the millions going to Disney and New York are there boring
Posted by: k at Aug 3, 2009 12:14:00 PM
How about: Europe is vastly more crowded than the US and has more restrictive planning laws. Plus, people have a preference for living in old houses which cannot be newly manufactured. So, expenditure on housing (most peoples biggest expense) is more largely positional, therefore, a world in which Europeans can co-ordinate on lower wages is better for most people (not landowners). Holidays are a way of co-ordinating a transfer from the capital/landowner class to the worker class.
Also, having lived in Europe and the UK. Whenever it came up, Canadians almost always wanted European style holidays but the British never wanted Canadian/US style holidays. Canadians also did not want US style holidays. Given this apparent strong favouritism towards more holidays, why do we not see longer holidays than we do?
Posted by: Sam at Aug 3, 2009 12:33:38 PM
Huh. I'm an American, and for three years (my early 30s) I was very nearly perfectly set up to take extended vacations: no attachments, self-employed as a programmer (with a laptop machine I could work on). I didn't have the money to fly overseas or anything, but I did have places I could have snuck off a month for basically the price of gas and food.
And you know, I don't think that ever even occurred to me as something I might like to do. I took a lot of shorter vacations -- a typical year would have seen maybe five four-day weekends away from home and three week-long vacations. A lot of overnight trips as well. But I don't recall even a single two-week vacation in that period. Three weeks just seems like I would have found it completely unthinkable.
Posted by: Sol at Aug 3, 2009 1:08:34 PM
Given this apparent strong favouritism towards more holidays, why do we not see longer holidays than we do?
1. Fringe benefits are a fixed cost, so employers have the same disincentive to offer greater vacation time as they do to offer full-time benefits for part-time work.
2. If you were an employer, would you want to hire a worker whose priority was longer vacations rather than higher pay? Wouldn't preference for leisure time be a signal of a less ambitious worker?
Posted by: Slocum at Aug 3, 2009 1:51:28 PM
> If you were an employer, would you want to hire a worker whose priority was longer vacations rather than higher pay?
Yes. All the people I know value leisure time immensely more than more money. What gains would the employer have in denying leisure time from workers (within reason, of course)?
> Wouldn't preference for leisure time be a signal of a less ambitious worker?
No. Why should it? An unhappy worker is not always productive. Besides, as an employer I wouldn't hire an ambitious worker, just a knowledgeable worker (there is no substitute for knowing your stuff). I have seen devastating effects of ambitions in work.
Posted by: just a comment at Aug 3, 2009 3:26:34 PM
Disney World in August with everyone suckage.
Posted by: Andrew at Aug 3, 2009 3:56:47 PM
Explaining the difference with the number of pets or kids (or worse, how much parents care about kids?) seems quite silly. People do take their kids with them for vacation. At least in Finland every family takes their kids with them for the four week vacations, generally to a summer cottage or sail boat.
In fact, in some sense having a kid is a reason you need long vacations: adults can compensate a short vacation by spending a lot of money on it (four days in Bermuda > two weeks in New Jersey), but with kids there is really no substitute for time.
Posted by: ilkka at Aug 3, 2009 4:58:47 PM
"Paid vacation": is this one of those posts where all the economists are chuckling to themselves?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089670/
I especially liked the Germany scene. She was my favorite European Vacation Model. From what I can tell, all the European highschool kids spend their Summers in the US. 100% of the ones I've met anyway. It's kind of remedial cultural training. "Oh, this is what it was like before women evolved underarm hair."
That said, wrt the minimum 3 weeks of August, I wish August only had two weeks. September is much cooler. Let's get it done. Combined with some changes to daylight savings we might offset some of the global warming. Why are the Europeans so pro-August and anti-July/September? They probably don't like the 4th of July holiday. I always thought they were un-American.
Posted by: Andrew at Aug 3, 2009 5:09:44 PM
The Mediterranean seacoast is horribly overbuilt with vacation housing and restaurants that are idle about 90% of the year due to everybody vacationing at once in August.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Aug 3, 2009 5:13:51 PM
