While this Joel Kotin piece is interesting for its core thesis, France's rigid economic system sustains privilege and inspires resentment, thereby creating the conditions that caused rampant rioting, there are actually a lot of other good points in the article:

Since the '70s, America has created 57 million new jobs, compared with just four million in Europe (with most of those jobs in government).
...
Luckily, better-educated young Frenchmen and other Continental Europeans can opt out of the system by emigrating to more open economies in Ireland, the U.K. and, particularly, the U.S. This is clearly true in technological fields, where Europe's best brains leave in droves. Some 400,000 European Union science graduates currently reside in the U.S. Barely one in seven, according to a recent poll, intends to return.
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The Big Apple offers a lesson for France. An analysis of recent census numbers indicates that immigrants to New York are the biggest contributors to the net growth of educated young people in the city....

Keep all this in mind next time you worry about outsourcing, immigration, or how wonderful the US would be if we'd only just wise up and start imitating Europe's "enlightened" policies.