Let Us Begin Where Everything Starts, with the economy and the labor market. This is perhaps where contrasts are thought to be sharpest. America—so the proponents of radical differences across the Atlantic argue—worships at the altar of what West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt once called Raubtierkapitalismus, predatory capitalism, where the market sweeps everything before it and the state exerts no restraint. The result is what another German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, called amerikanische Verhältnisse, “American conditions,” plucked straight out of a play by Bertolt Brecht: America’s labor market is untrammeled and cruel, jobs are insecure and badly paid. Americans live to work, while Europeans work to live. That is the story. But is it true? America’s core ideological belief is oft en thought to be the predominance of the market and the absence of state regulation. “Everything should and must be pro-market, pro-business, and pro-shareholder,” as Will Hutton, a British columnist, puts it, “a policy platform lubricated by colossal infusions of corporate cash into America’s money-dominated political system. . . . ” Hutton stands in a long line of European critics who have seen nothing but the dominance of the market in America. There is some truth to the American penchant for free markets. But the notion that the Atlantic divides capitalism scarlet in tooth and claw from a more domesticated version in Europe has been overstated. When asked for their preferences, Americans tend to assign the state less of a role than many—though not all—Europeans. Proportionately fewer Americans think that the government should redistribute income to ameliorate inequalities, or that the government should seek to provide jobs for all, or reduce working hours. On the other hand, proportionately more Americans (by a whisker) than Germans and almost exactly as many as the Swedes think that government should control wages, and more want the government to control prices than Germans. Proportionately more Americans believe that the government should act to create new jobs than the Swedes, and about as many as the Germans, Finns, and Swiss. The percentage of Americans that thinks the state should intervene to provide decent housing is low.
UNDERSTANDING ASSAM’S SUSTAINABILITY ISSUES