Were You Born On The Wrong Continent?, a new book (available in stores later next month) by Chicago labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan, makes those comparisons, and they are truly eye-opening.
The fact that the book is by a labor lawyer tells you that he has biases. Blumner shows her own biases in her second paragraph when she described President Obama's agenda as "mildly progressive". Keeping these biases in mind, let's see how her version of utopia stands up to close scrutiny.
Most of the book, and Blumner's column, focus on Germany which is presented as a worker's paradise.
Since 2003, Germany and its 82 million people have either beaten China in export sales or about tied China for first place. The country is arguably the world's leading industrial power, even as its workers enjoy high wages, six-week vacations and other benefits that an American worker only dreams about.
Keep that six week vacation figure in mind. I will get back to it.
Blumner points out that Germany's unemployment rate is lower than the US's. This is correct. Germany's unemployment rate is currently 7% while the US's rate is 9.5%. She insists that Germany's industrial policies make up the difference but it this is much more complicated than she makes out. Many economists believe that stimulus spending hurts employment and Germany spent less on stimulus than the US. Further, the unemployment rate in the US has been much lower than in Germany for most of the last decade.
Most arguments against European-style socialism point out that the population as a whole is poorer and that the GDP is lower. Blumner's book has an answer for that:
Critics of Germany can still point to the fact that German per capita GDP is lower than that in the United States, which is true. But a fascinating part of the book suggests that what drives our economy and inflates our GDP actually makes our lives less comfortable.
Part of America's higher per capita GDP is due to our lack of land-use planning. Americans spend huge sums on sprawl and the inefficiency it spawns. Without sprawl, traffic and all the wasteful spending they engender, our GDP can't keep ahead of France, Geoghegan writes.
Blumner does not elaborate and the book is not out so I will have to guess what she is talking about here. From the context, I am guessing that the point here is that we spend money on large private houses in the suburbs and that, if you subtract that spending, our economy would be smaller. This is an indirect way of saying that we should all be bottled up in high-density housing in the cities. With smaller houses and without cars and yards then we wouldn't need as large an economy.
What about the high tax rate?
Our lower taxes boost per capita GDP but also mean that we are on our own for collective-type goods like college education, retirement, health care, transportation and child care — things that are efficiently bought with taxes for everyone in European social democracies.
She is really splitting hairs here. This is not a yes/no equation. The US already spends significant amounts of tax money on everything on her list and entire books could (and have been) written on the supposed efficiencies of tax funding. Let's just say that she is making a lot of questionable statements here.
The next part is really interesting.
Americans work hundreds more hours per year than their European counterparts, and so burdened, have to outsource duties of life. We eat out more, because who has time to make dinner. We hire outside help to clean, provide lawn care and care for children. To make ourselves more essential so as not to be laid off, we buy computers to work at home.
A number of studies have shown that Americans, in general, are wealthier than their European counterparts and are able to use this wealth to pay for services that Europeans have to do themselves. By the time you factor in the extra time the Germans spend on tasks that most people would classify as household drudgery, they lose that time that they do not put in at work.
This is a vice-to-virtue argument. Blumner is arguing that Germans are better-off because they spend more time cooking and washing. She does not get into it and I doubt that her source material mentions it either, but many devices that we consider standard are unavailable in Europe. Dishwashers and clothes-driers are at the top of this list.
So, Blumner's eye-opening book says that we would all be happier if we lived in crowded apartments and spent more time doing household chores and less time at work. I am sure that many people do prefer this but the choice is not as sweepingly obvious as she makes out. Worse, by painting an incomplete pictures, she is presenting a false choice.
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