Matt Zeitlin

If you’ve been following the wonky blogosphere recently, you’ll know that there’s a debate that started as a dispute between Jon Chait and Jim Manzi over some statistics Manzi used in his National Affairs essay to show that European social democracy underperformed the American economic model. Chait pointed out that his statistics didn’t actually show that, that they instead showed that per-capita GDP growth was similar and that much of the US’s gain in share of global income was due to population growth. Best I can tell, Chait is right.

Tyler Cowen, however, chimed in to say many things about comparing the US and Europe and I want to focus on this last point he makes:

Countries have to start from where they’re at.  If you’re constructing policy advice, you can either build on what a country is really good at or you can try to revise the internal culture of the country.  If you’re going to do the latter, come out and say so.  Most of my policy recommendations are based on the former approach, namely strengthening what (the better-functioning) countries already are good at.  I’m not suggesting that countries never change, but getting such changes right by deliberate policy interventions is very hard to do.  I wish to stress this point applies to the pro-U.S. as much as the pro-Europe side.

I’d like everyone to have a sign, which they would hold up when appropriate: “My policies seek to revise the internal culture of my country.”  That’s OK, but you’re raising the bar for your own ideas and don’t fool yourself into thinking otherwise.

This point is a good one, and people should be cautious about country-to-country comparisons when there is little chance that a given country can full-hog adopt the other country’s policies or economic system. But I’m a little suspicious of “culture” being a catch-all reason for why America can not adopt a more egalitarian social and economic structure. Or, I wish we’d talk about more institutions.

It doesn’t seem like too big of a stretch to say that if America had a more majoritarian legislative system, we’d already have universal health care of some sort, and may have had it since the Truman administration. And when we talk about social democracy in Europe, health care is a big part of it. So would we be a social democracy? But what about our resilient individualistic culture?

Now, one can say that our change-adverse institutions are an outcome of our unique political culture; but the existence of a senate comes from the late 18th century when the idea of public welfare or anything like social spending was quite foreign to our political culture. And it’s not like European social democracies flowed naturally from their “culture.” Atul Gawande made the excellent point that many European universal health care systems were adopted in a piece-meal way due to historical circumstance. Once again, that the British government ending up taking responsibility for much of the country’s well-being because of the Blitz and then, by the end of the war, had the fundamentals of the N.H.S. already in place has very little to do with culture and more with Britain’s location vis-a-vis the rest of Europe.

It’s probably naive to think that the U.S. will ever spend more than 4.5% of GDP on job retraining, wage subsidies, unemployment benefits and early retirement like Denmark does, but it hardly seems like seeking to “to revise the internal culture of my country” by arguing for a health care bill that has passed the senate and marginal moves towards higher taxes on rich people and more redistribution and social insurance spending knowing that I’d like to see those moves go farther than might be politically plausible at a given time. One could even say I want a marginal revolution.