I Once Thought Europeans Lived as Well as Americans. Not Anymore.

The writer Sarah Haider recently took some flak when she wrote: It s really shocking visiting the UK. I don t know what I expected but what I found is what could be at best described as a developing country. Her follow-up correction was not entirely reassuring: Okay on second thought, this is probably fairly described as an inaccurate statement given my reference point for first world is the U.S.

The question of whether Americans or Europeans have higher living standards has preoccupied me much of my adult life. I went to live in Germany as a student in 1984, and I marveled at how many things were better there than in the United States. The streets were cleaner, crime was much lower, many of the foodstuffs tasted better, and there were so many interesting places to see. I was only half an hour from France (Colmar) and an hour from Basel, Switzerland. A comparable location in the United States is difficult to imagine.

I firmly felt that the West German living standard, at that time, was not worse than the American living standard, all things considered. In some important ways it seemed obviously better, ranging from the quality of public goods to the orderliness of everything around me. And it was the first time in my life I ever tasted what I now would call real bread.

Now, 40 years later, I ve massively revised my original judgments. I go to Europe at least twice a year, and have been to almost every country there. More and more I look to it for its history not for its living standards.

It is a small thing, but I now can get excellent bread in the United States, and that has been true since the 1990s. That local artisan bakery in Brooklyn will not itself tip the balance, but it reflects the more general truth that one of these societies has been better at innovation than the other. American life has improved a lot more than German life has. When I visit Germany these days, as I have done twice over the last year, it feels to me like a pleasant, well-ordered version of the 1990s a country preserved in a kind of amber, with good intentions but also loads of complacency.

via www.thefp.com

It’s not black magic. It’s just the result of socialism. Ok, it is black magic, but of a familiar kind.