Details of his education at school and university and early career are reported here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee

On Nobel prize winners: as with the inventer of the WWW, I wonder who should get credit for them. The country in which they did most of their work? The country in which they got their compulsory and undergraduate education? The country in which their wife (or, in rarer cases, husband) was raised? The country in which their parents were raised? Lots of academics end up in the US simply because they can make more money here, and they would have done just as good work elsewhere. Conversely numerous academics working elsewhere studied or worked in the US at crucial points in their careers. The only Nobel prize winner I know worked almost exclusively in Europe (mainly the UK) but did a post-doc at U.W. Madison during which time he was in contact with 2 other reseachers with whom he shared the prize in the year he won. U.W. Madison has never claimed any credit for his Nobel, but probably should have done.

You’re quite right, except that it’s not workers who have low productivity, but enterprises. That’s why you see all those fully automated attendant-less gas-stations and car parks in France, but not in the US. There’s nothing wrong with eliminating unnecessary manual jobs.

France: Labour productivity (PPP-GDP per hour). Graph 2.”

That’s easy. Load up the cost of employing people (35 work week, no reduction in pay, lots of benefits, long paid vacations etc etc) and only those workers with the higher productivity to make it worthwhile employing them will have jobs. Those with lower productivity will be unemployed and thus not included in the productivity per labour hour figures.

Maybe 10% unemployment overall, 20% youth unemployment, 20% immigrant unemployment, 40 % or more immigrant (or children of such) youth unemployment.

No one, certainly not those hyper rational French , would think that was a good idea now, would they?

Oh, wait….

Zakaria is a son of the Indian elite who’s knowledge of the US or EU scenes extends little further or deeper than typically impeccable book-learnin’ and chats with the upper-middle brow crowd he runs with. Sure, he’d be an interesting party guest, holding forth confidently on the state of the world and all, but, as a repeat guest, he would soon get tiresome. At least Tom Friedman makes a show of talking to people outside of the bos-wash scene. Whenever I see Fareed in action, I want to work da mic like Walter Mondale: “When I hear your new ideas I’m reminded of that ad, ‘Where’s the beef?”

Mrs T, that factoid was done to death years ago.

Well sure, if they want to be like the Swedes that’s their affair—that is, if they really want to be poorer than Mississippians.

First: the report I gave the URL for is called CHILD poverty in RICH countries. It’s not about adult poverty, and it ain’t about Cambodia. If you want to read about adult poverty in Cambodia, read another report ok?

Second: THIS IS A DIRECT QUOTE FROM THE REPORT:

‘The tensions between relative and absolute measures of poverty are illustrated by events in the Republic of Ireland and in Central Europe. The Irish economy has recently been growing at an annual rate of 7 or 8 per cent. Unemployment has fallen, wages have risen, and social security payments have increased. But the incomes of those without jobs and of the low paid, though rising, have not kept pace with average incomes.
Relative poverty, as measured by the numbers living below 50 or 60 per cent of average income, has therefore been rising. In such a context, it may prove difficult to persuade politicians and public that a rise in the numbers below the relative poverty line represents a genuine increase in poverty.
The same apparent contradiction can operate in reverse. The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland all suffered falls in national income of 15 to 20 per cent in the first half of the 1990s. Real living standards clearly fell – something ignored in calculations of relative child poverty that use a fixed percentage of the falling average
income.
Accepting the notion of relative poverty means accepting that poverty may be worsening even if
the absolute living standards of the poor are rising. Relative poverty is about inequality; its premise is that what constitutes an acceptable
quality of life changes over time, and that falling behind the average by more than a certain amount means effective exclusion from the
normal life of society.’

In other words, life ain’t simple, and no one (NO ONE) pretends it is. Ipso facto, simply quoting GDP figures out of context can also give a wildly misleading perspective on the wealth of a country, yeah?

If anyone cares, you can read the whole report (or at least the first ten pages) to get an intro to these complex issues.

But my point was much simpler. The American Right NEVER quote statistics about child poverty (either relative or absolute), and it’s not just because whichever way you look at it (i.e. relative or absolute) there is a lot more child poverty in the US than in Sweden.

Why not?

(Final note: in actual fact, for most cases there ain’t much difference. AS the report states: ’
Most of the industrialized nations remain in
approximately the same region of the child poverty league table whichever measure is used. Only the United States and Canada suffer a sharp fall from grace when measured by a relative as opposed
to an absolute standard. Only the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland suffer a dramatic demotion when measured by the equivalent of the US poverty line.

income and wealth statistics usually follow a Pareto distribution, a fact which is often considered to be indicative of some surprising deep underlying reality by the physicists who discover this fact roughly once every three years.

Maybe something similar could be done for the scientific and economic sectors?

soru

Yeah, it’s not like European researchers have been sequencing the human genome or making breakthroughs in mammalian cloning or identifying HIV or anything like that recently. Losers.

Just to add my two cents to the substantive discussion above, it’s somewhat disingenuous to pretend that Europeans are working less in the sense of enjoying their vacations. Most European countries have very high unemployment rates, which is part of the reason that their high hourly productivity doesn’t result in high per capita GDP.

More generally, I’m getting pretty sick of the
endless We-Are-Better-Than-The-Euros articles
(although Zakaria is far less obnoxious than
most, especially Friedman). Why attending church,
having lots of babies, not paying taxes,
fearlessly invading foreign countries on a
regular basis, and having Spanish-speaking
Catholic immigrants (rather than Arab-speaking
Muslim immigrants) should make us the greatest
country in the world I’m still trying to figure
out, despite what Fridman, Zakaria, etc.. keep
telling me.