Separated at Birth?

To Return To The Bulk of our material in this book, what absolute differences separate the United States from Europe? The United States is a nation where proportionately more people are murdered each year, more are jailed, and more own guns than anywhere in Europe. The death penalty is still law. Religious belief is more fervent and widespread. A smaller percentage of citizens vote. Collective bargaining covers relatively fewer workers, and the state’s tax take is lower. Inequality is somewhat more pronounced. That is about it. In almost every other respect, differences are ones of degree, rather than kind. Oft en, they do not exist, or if they do, no more so than the same disparities hold true within Western Europe itself. At the very least, this suggests that farreaching claims to radical differences across the Atlantic have been overstated. Even on violence—a salient difference that leaps unprompted from the evidence, both statistical and anecdotal—the contrast depends on how it is framed. Without question, murder rates are dramatically different across the Atlantic. And, of course, murder is the most shocking form of sudden, unexpected death, unsettling communities, leaving survivors bereaved and mourning. But consider a wider definition of unanticipated, immediate, and profoundly disrupting death. Suicide is oft en thought of as the exit option for old, sick men anticipating the inevitable, and therefore not something that changes the world around them. But, in fact, the distribution of suicide over the lifespan is broadly uniform. In Iceland, Ireland, the UK, and the United States, more young men (below forty-five) than old do themselves in. In Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Norway, the figures are almost equal. Elsewhere, the older have a slight edge. But overall, the ratio between young and old suicides approximates 1:1. Broadly speaking, and sticking with the sex that most oft en kills itself, men do away with themselves as oft en when they are younger and possibly still husbands, fathers, and sons as they do when they are older and when their actions are perhaps fraught with less consequence for others. Suicide is as unsettling, and oft en even more so, for survivors as murder.

Nationalism

Americans Are Patriotic And Nationalist, but not more than some Europeans (figure 173). Unsurprisingly, Germans are least proud of their nation, and rather unexpectedly and cheerily, the Portuguese—not the Americans—are most proud, with the Irish tied for second place. A 2007 survey reveals that a larger proportion of Italians consider their culture superior than any other nationalities surveyed, including the Americans. Another survey finds that only the Irish feel more uniformly proud to be of their nation. Proportionately more Austrians, Irish, French, and Danes claim they feel very close to their nation than do Americans. Americans are more likely than any Europeans to think that their country is better than most others. But proportionately more Portuguese, Danes, and Spaniards feel that the world would be improved if other people were like them. And any U.S. tendency to boosterism is tempered by the finding that a larger fraction of Americans admits that certain aspects of their country shame them than do the Germans, Austrians, Spanish, French, Danes, or Finns. No country more robustly projects its own nationalist aspirations in the products it sells abroad than the supposedly postnational Swedes. Swedish manufacturers, or at least their advertising agencies, seem convinced that the sheer fact of being Swedish is a selling point. Ikea’s walls are adorned with musings on the preternaturally close relationship between Swedes and nature that allegedly sets them apart from the rest of humanity, as are packets of Wasa crispbread. Asko’s slogan, “Made In Sweden,” is festooned prominently on its products. Though it does not necessarily inspire confidence that the company’s dishwashers are better than the competition, it certainly makes clear Asko’s national origins. Absolut Vodka’s tag—in uncharacteristically unidiomatic English—“Country of Sweden,” does much the same. Saab hawks its cars as “Born from Jets,” an unsubtle allusion to the company’s standing as a pillar of the Swedish military-industrial complex.

Health Care

The U.S. Economy does Differ from Europe’s: a less regulated labor market, but also an economy that is more hemmed in than might be expected. By European standards, America has hardish-working people, a state that collects fewer tax dollars, and workers who are paid well even if their holidays are short. In social policy, the contrasts are more moderate. Europeans commonly believe that the United States simply has no social policy—no social security, no unemployment benefits, no state pensions, and no assistance for the poor. As Jean-François Revel, the political philosopher and académicien, summed up French criticism, the United States shows “not the slightest bit of social solidarity.” Will Hutton similarly assures us that “The structures that support ordinary peoples’ lives—free health care, quality education, guarantees of reasonable living standards in old age, sickness or unemployment, housing for the disadvantaged— that Europeans take for granted are conspicuous by their absence.” And, in fact, the United States is the only developed nation, unless one counts South Africa, without some form of national health insurance, which is to say a system of requiring all its citizens to be insured in one way or another. This lack of universal health insurance is the one fact that every would-be comparativist working across the Atlantic knows, and the first one to be hoisted as the battle is engaged. One of the first attempts to quantify and rank health care performance, by the World Health Organization in 2000, gave the American system its due. Overall, it came in below any of our comparison countries, three notches under Denmark. In various specific aspects of health policy, it did better. For disability adjusted life expectancy, it came in above Ireland, Denmark, and Portugal; on the responsiveness of the health system, it ranked first; on a composite measure of various indicators summed up as “overall health system attainment,” it ranked above seven Western European countries. Even on the measure of “fairness of financial contribution to health systems,” where we might have expected an abysmal rating, the United States squeaked in above Portugal. That is, of course, damning with faint praise, especially given that in this particular aspect of the ranking—a well-meaning but other-worldly attempt by international bureaucrats to rake the entire globe over the teeth of one comb—Colombia came in first, outpacing its close rivals, Luxembourg and Belgium, while Libya beat out Sweden.

Th e Economy

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.

How the West Was One

When Americans Compare Their Country to others, it is almost invariably to find fault with it. Of course, there are tub-thumpers on the right wing, for whom the United States is the greatest nation and comparisons are drawn merely to underline that preeminence. But they are a predictable lot, and intellectually of no consequence. Comparisons with abroad are of little use when preaching to the choir if the choir does not care. Most conservative Americans are too uninterested in Europe to sit still for comparative explanations of U.S. superiority. Mitt Romney got very little traction from attacking French health care and other things Gallic during his abortive run for the Republican nomination in 2007. The vast majority of Americans’ comparisons are undertaken by social scientists with liberal leanings who hope that the United States will some day approximate Europe when it comes to family allowances, universal health insurance, parental leave, and the like. For them, Europe means northern Europe. They either ignore the south or see it too as aspiring to north European status. Stockholm is the mecca toward which the social science faithful pray. Because of their political reform agenda—fervent but unfulfilled—the tone they strike is wistful. Take as a recent example the American Human Development Report, published by a preeminent institution, the Social Science Research Council, and prefaced by multiple well-wishes from the great and the good. It is modeled on the UN’s attempt to sum up economic and human well-being in a single number, to compare nations and progress over time. Its wealth of information lays bare the sometimes dramatic disparities within the United States and shows where it is lagging in relation to peer comparison countries. That is all well and good, and who could fault it? It is when sight is lost of the larger picture that worries begin. Thus, the report presents a chart (Figure 1.2) showing an apparently precipitous decline in America’s human development ranking. The United States stood in second place, after Switzerland, in 1980. This held steady until 1995, when it plummeted over the next 15 years to land at the 12th spot in 2005. America’s numerical score has increased steadily, we are reassured. But the scores of other countries have risen even faster. As a result, the United States has fallen behind its more efficient competitors.

Th e Environment

If We Turn To The Environment and its protection, the contrasts between the United States and Europe are less stark than the debates over Kyoto and global warming suggest. Popular attitudes across the Atlantic appear to be quite comparable. A smaller percentage of Americans than any Europeans are fearful that current population trends are unsustainable. The percentage that fears strongly that modern life harms the environment is at the lower end of a very broad European spectrum. But a higher percentage of Americans than anyone other than the gloomy Portuguese are very worried about the environment. Already long before Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth, proportionately more Americans considered global warming extremely dangerous than do the Dutch, Norwegians, Danes, and Finns. Relatively more Americans than anyone but the Swiss claim to be very willing to pay higher prices to protect the environment. Proportionately more Americans than any Europeans are prepared to pay higher taxes for the sake of nature. Americans also claim willingness more than anyone other than the Swiss and the Swedes to accept a cut in living standards to achieve such ends. A higher percentage of Americans think that government should pass laws to protect the environment than the British, Swiss, Dutch, Germans, and all Scandinavians other than the Danes. American executives are more convinced that complying with government environmental standards helps their businesses’ long-term competitiveness than their colleagues in Germany, Iceland, Austria, Luxembourg, Greece, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, Spain, or Portugal. In a recent comparative ranking of environmental policy conducted by Yale and Columbia universities, the score assigned the United States was not impressive. But that of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Greece was worse. The Achilles’ heel of America’s environmental policy is its energy inefficiency, which is partly related to the size of the country and the extremities of its weather. On most other measures, U.S. rankings are better

Education and the Higher Pursuits

It Is Generally Recognized that higher education in America is in comparatively good shape, with the main competition coming from the UK. With less than 5% of the world’s population the United States accounts for 40% of global research and development spending, produces 63% of all highly cited scientific publications, employs 70% of the world’s Nobel Prize winners, and is home to three-quarters of both the top 20 and top 40 universities in the world. Spending figures reveal the reasons why. As a proportion of total outlays on universities, government spending is lower in the United States than in any European nation (figure 91). But, as we have seen when looking at overall social spending, monies channeled through the state do not tell the whole story. Total spending on university education in America, measured as a percentage of GDP, is not merely high by European standards. It is some 60% above the nearest competitors, the Scandinavians, and more than twice the level of Germany, a country that once boasted universities as good as any (figure 92). It is worth remembering, too, that the U.S. GDP is itself bigger than Europe’s. Americans therefore not only spend proportionately more on universities. In absolute terms, the gap becomes greater. A higher percentage of Americans have graduated from university than in any European nation. America’s adults are, in this sense, better educated than Europe’s (figure 93). Despite this, the amount of continuing education that Americans undertake is above that of the Germans, Swiss, and Belgians, among the narrower range of countries surveyed in this case. Th e United States is in the middle of the European pack for state spending on primary and secondary schools, and for overall state educational spending (figure 94). But total educational spending, public and private, measured as a percentage of GDP, remains higher in the United States than anywhere in Europe (figure 95). Primary and secondary school teachers are reasonably well paid by European standards, in the upper middle of the spectrum (figure 96). And proportionately more Americans have graduated from secondary school than in any European country.

More Broadly

Europeans Often Regard America as a country of bigness: big people, big cars, big houses. People we have already touched on; cars will come. American housing standards do fall in the upper half—but still well within— the European scale. Two rooms per inhabitant is the U.S. average. Residents of Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the UK, and Belgium have more (figure 88) The Irish have a higher percentage of their households occupying at least five rooms, the English and Spanish are very close runners-up. For social or public housing, transatlantic discrepancies pale before even more impressive disparities within Europe itself. Approximately a fifth of all accommodation in England and France is public housing, but those are by far the highest figures in Europe. In Italy, it is only 7%. In Spain, the fraction of the public housing stock of all dwellings is even less than in the United States, namely 1%. According to figures from the OECD, social housing scarcely exists at all in Portugal, at least to judge from the sums the government spends on it. Sweden, a country with a somewhat smaller population, spends well over 500 times as much. In any case, the range of state spending on housing in those nations with figures high enough to register as a fraction of GDP varies from 0.1% in Austria and Luxembourg to 14 times that in the UK. It is hard to call a penchant for social housing a defining European characteristic. Moreover, despite the absence of much public housing in the United States, the poorest fifth of tenants in America pay less of their income for housing than their peers in Sweden or Switzerland, and only a bit more than in the UK. America is oft en considered a stingy helper of Third World nations in distress. It is true that American foreign aid, in the form of direct cash grants, is not impressive if measured per capita. Nor is that of Austria or the Mediterranean nations, except France, which are all lower (figure 89).

Th e Rest of the Welfare State

If We Turn to Other forms of Social Policy, how does the United States care for its old, its poor, its unemployed, and its disabled? Here, most outcomes place the United States in the lower half of the spectrum, but within European norms and standards. The primary weakness of American social policy is its reluctance to deal resolutely with poverty. If we measure outcomes before redistribution, the United States starts with an economy that produces less poverty than most European nations. According to one calculation, only Finland and the Netherlands have lower “natural” poverty rates. But after taxes, social benefits, and other mechanisms of redistribution have worked their magic, the American poverty rate (as measured relatively, i.e., as a fraction of median income) is higher than anywhere in Western Europe. We will come back in more detail to the question of poverty and inequality. In what one might call the middle-class entitlement aspects of the welfare state, however, America is less of an anomaly. As is widely known, the American state is more modest in size and scope than its European peers. Yet as an employer of civil servants, it ranks in the middle of the European scale (figure 50). France and Finland employ proportionately more civil servants, but at least five other countries, including Germany, hire fewer. Correspondingly, the percentage of America’s GDP spent on government employee salaries is higher than in six of the nations we are examining. The size of the American state, as measured by government expenditure as a percentage of GDP, also fits into the European span. Ireland and Switzerland spend less (figure 51). For most social policies and benefits— which together make up what is usually called the welfare state—the picture is analogous: the United States ranks low, but within the bottom half of the European spectrum. All figures given here and elsewhere (unless otherwise indicated) are phrased in internationally comparable terms. Sometimes this means benefits rates are measured as a percentage of median income, allowing a sense of what proportion of a standard of living is maintained. Sometimes they are calculated in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms, which means that differences between the cost of living in poorer and richer nations have been factored in.

Acorn and Oak

To Parse The Subtle Distinctions between Europe and America must strike observers from other parts of the globe as an exercise in the narcissism of minor differences. Like twins keen to differentiate themselves, some nations eagerly distinguish among countries that are, seen globally, much of a muchness. During the cold war, the unity of the North Atlantic nations against the Soviet empire was obvious. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, new antagonisms emerged. Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, Israel: these are the immediate bones of contention. The larger issue has been the role of the United States, the one remaining superpower, as its regnum is tested by Middle Eastern wars, Russian saber rattling, and Chinese aspirations to great power status. Perhaps, as some Europeans argue, the United States has become a rogue state, unilaterally exempting itself from the strictures of mutual dependence in an increasingly interwoven world. Perhaps, as some Americans reply, Europeans live in a cloud-cuckoo land where conflict is considered ultimately to be based on misunderstandings, not real differences, and talk can therefore replace guns. These are geopolitical debates we need not enter into here. We are concerned, however, with the geopoliticians’ frequent and facile elisions between internal and external politics. Because Americans own guns, they like to go to war. Because they drive big cars, they need to secure oil supplies in the Middle East. Because they are religious, they see themselves as crusaders. Because continental Europeans do not have functioning armies and refuse to pay for any, they turn foreign policy into a talking shop. Because they spend their money on social benefits, they cannot afford to defend themselves and must therefore appease the aggressors. Because of their own traumatic past, they refuse to acknowledge the continuing reality of evil in the world. In this book, I have shown that, in almost every quantifiable respect, the United States and Western Europe approximate each other. Earlier, I have accounted for some of the ways that social scientists have tried, and failed, to typologize differences between Europe and America.