Yes, but apparently the biggest players now abuse their comparative advantage positions. So, we are back to mercantilism to the detriment of all humanity.
Effective tax rate is what you should be looking at. The most efficient tax rate is one that describes a exponential saturation, where it starts growing faster once it reaches the point where you have too much wealth.
With how many statements of fact you make, you are pretty wrong. There's not one of them being right. We have enough productivity that a minuscule part of the population can produce and distribute the basic needs for every human on earth. There's literally humans that can't find jobs to do because we don't educate them well enough to go and offer services that other humans need. Not only that, we try to say that they don't deserve enough pay to supply their basic needs.
And yes, I'm talking about teachers and medics. We don't have enough of either, because we don't pay them enough compared to their workload. Those things we will always need, in great quantities to support our population. Greater quantities than engineers, architects, researchers, etc. but guess where everyone flocks because it pays more?
A welfare state that was genuinely targeted to serving basic needs of the population would look vastly different from present-day France and other comparable countries. Take a look at Singapore; last I checked, it was not known as a place where people might be at risk of starving. The underlying problem is that people expect the welfare state to solve issues of social marginalization, which are actually the result of fraying social capital as opposed to a mere lack of resources. Welfare states make these issues actively worse, not better.
For instance, when every employer (including those that may be only marginally successful to begin with) is expected as a matter of law to extend onerous labor protections against firing and laying off to each and every worker,[0] this results in marginal workers (who may have been socially marginalized originally for reasons of ethnic heritage and the like) being completely excluded from the market, which makes their plight even worse. (Except for forms of "gig work" or informal employment, of course - which in practice function to sidestep the most onerous regulations to some extent.) A very relevant issue in present-day France.
[0] And to fund those costly welfare programs through payroll contributions that are levied on employees and employers alike - which is its own issue and often amounts to exploitive, confiscatory taxation for the most marginal workers.
Pure unregulated market, that doesn't guarantee free market assumptions does that. Capitalism doesn't need it. Without mechanisms that allow for the free entry/exit of competitors, fair and simultaneous access to information, preventing cartels/price fixing, .... a bunch of assumptions for perfect free market to happen, the market will tend towards monopolies due cumulative advantage (in econ. known as Matthew effect), since small advantages compound into dominance.
Doctors of all countries have been under a lot of pressure by patients and health administrators to "fix the issue and quick". The last thing that your doctor wants is giving you pills so you go away, but that's what the context very strongly incentivize. You want doctors to stop abusing pills, stop asking them for immediate fix. Give them less patients, more time and more resources to deal with the health of the population. Also, prevention.
> The last thing that your doctor wants is giving you pills so you go away
Except for all the doctors who do want just that.
> Doctors of all countries have been under a lot of pressure by patients and health administrators to "fix the issue and quick"
While such patients exist, I don't believe they're a global majority, and the group of patients who want the exact opposite, more time rather than "quick", is the bigger out of the two.
Literally a few comments down from this one:
> N=1, but last yearly physical my primary care doctor asked me if I ever had anxiety. I said yes, but that I wasn't really interested in treating it outside of lifestyle change. They asked if I wanted a prescription for prozac, without explaining anything about how to does it or titrate up or down or a time frame. I said I wasn't interested again, and that I particularly didn't want to take any medications that you can't just stop taking one day on a whim (a statement she didn't respond to).
She then proceeded to say "well I'll just write you the prescription anyway and you can do your research later and decide to fill it or not".
> I was actually shocked by this interaction, and think about it often. She's a regular family doctor with the local hospital system, and this was just a regular checkup. I answered one question with a "yes, but it's manageable and I think I can handle it with lifestyle change" and then said no twice to medication and ended up with a prescription, which I ignored but don't appreciate having on my record, since it's a false indicator for future prescribing physicians.
Prevention is one of those things that when we actually attempt to fix it would have to completely change the world you live in.
Humans are social creatures and a huge part of our mental health is dependant on the society around us. If the actual problem is "wow capitalism is really broken and showing us ads 24/7 that say were not good enough is killing us", then taking a pill is a valid solution because changing the system will take generations or very violent wars.
This is the yearly stats published by staff of Stack Overflow. It seems that there has been some interest about the health of the site and its determinants. This table focuses on moderation actions, like closing questions, deleting, reviewing, editing, etc.
The highlights considering what the conversation usually is about when referring to "moderators" actions:
* There's a process that deletes posts that are old and haven't seen a single positive interaction [1]. This is the biggest responsible for deletion of post for the site. Then users, then elected moderators. In that order.
* Authors are the ones that most close questions. This is due a mechanic [2] that allows authors to accept a suggestion that their question is a duplicate. Non-authors and moderators represent a relatively small part (~15%) of all closures of questions on the site.
* There are certain actions that only elected moderators can do and no amount of coordination by users are capable of, because of their sensible nature [3], those are the special attributes of moderators. Anything else most users can accomplish them.
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