I've thought for some time now that corporate inflexibility was part of the cause. More of us work for large, bureaucratic companies than in the past. These sorts of companies often won't employ someone on a flexible or part-time schedule because it would be too complicated to manage. It's actually easier and cheaper to let you site at your desk and waste time for 10-20 hours a week than it would be to figure out and manage an alternative. Do you think this rings true in the UK? It certainly does (in my experience and observation) in the US, though I think in the US healthcare is at least as important a factor.

Part time and "work when needed" contracts for the 20 - 30 year old bracket is growing in the UK and has been cited as one of the ways the unemployment figure has fallen. It is concerning some workers groups according to some of the papers and the BBC.

I think if you want part time work in the UK it is easy enough to come by (engineers at many companies I know can go part time until management level if they wish) but there is a growing trend of only part time positions becoming available in some sectors and you either have to like it or lump it sadly.

Yeah, see for example http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/economics-blog/2013/aug/0...

Thanks for finding that - I'd forgotten they were called zero hour contracts

The UK and every other developed country also has to somehow finance their healthcare system. Regardless of whether people pay privately or via taxes (or insurance or…), the cost still has to be covered somehow – of course, these costs can be distributed more evenly among the high earners and those earning less if they are re-routed through the tax system, but the value still has to be created somewhere.

Note that this holds even though (or in addition) the cost of healthcare per person in the US seems to be slightly higher than on average in the western world.

It’s about twice as high as in the rest of western Europe (that Americans spend more on healthcare than, say, Senegalese, is not really a surprise), which I, in my orders-of-magnitude mindset, would classify as ‘slightly’. Especially if you look at the % of GDP spent on healthcare, the picture becomes much more varied – curiously with some other pacific countries (nearly) besting the US.

I don't really understand what you mean about population size. If the need for a job scales at O(P) and you have O(P) workers, population cancels out. Not many jobs grow per-capita when population rises.

No, but large, divers populations give opportunities for work that didn't previously exist and create an extra overhead in many sectors that requires more staff (not 1 for 1 relationship but it will impact)