I have friends in Germany. Anecdotally, many eastern Germans are quite nostalgic for the communist past. Fewer opportunities – but less risk, less uncertainty, more peace of mind; this is not black and white.

I agree 100% with your points that lower, and even much lower GDP can be quite tolerable, and I have lived happily in Thailand and China quite simply. I wish more Americans (Brits too) recognized what you are saying here.

But I ask you to consider those folk you remember from your travels in East Germany…. to the extent they seemed less joyful was it partly because their lack of economic freedoms made them less the “author or their own life”?

And when you consider the amazing range of opportunities open to your children and mine….would you for a second want our children to be stuck in East German economy, even if they had the full range of civil liberties?

Dave

But your statement still resonates with a disdain for the economic liberties and economic well-being of those East Germans you traveled amongst, and I’ll include more context because it really clarifies your meaning: “But real problem with East Germany was not its comparative level of economic development or the level of health care its citizens could receive (rather good, actually). It was the fact that it was a police state where people were denied the basic liberties.”

How does this square with the Middle East? A large number of people in places like Saudi Arabia seem perfectly capable of focusing more on the US than their own overlords.

“Tim, you seem to be moving rather more quickly than is warranted from economic growth, to technological progress in general, to improvements in medical technology, to improvements in health outcomes (same goes for Tyler’s response on his site btw).”

Europe can probably free ride off of the US market for medical technology so long as the US government doesn’t screw up the market too badly. (This will apply to things with low marginal cost and high research costs only—something like drugs. If the technology turns on really expensive machines, Europe will have to wait for the price to come way down if its economic growth has lagged for a couple of decades.)

“Hmm, let’s see. I write:

“But the real problem with East Germany was not its comparative level of economic development or the level of health care its citizens could receive (rather good, actually).”

and David Meleney reads:

“Professor Bertram’s position is that the poverty of the East Germans he encountered …..was not ‘a real problem.’”

Remedial reading class needed?”

Having lived for short periods with poor people in the 3rd world, I am awaiting a more detailed explanation of the difference between what Professor Bertram said and my paraphrase of his statement.

Awaiting remediation,
Dave Meleney

[Simple. Your elementary comprehension failure has two parts: (1) To say that X is not “the problem” with respect to some question does not imply a denial that X is , unrestrictedly, “a problem”; (2) my comment concerned the level of economic development of the country and your reading of it concerned the poverty of its citizens. It is perfectly possible for one country to have a higher level of economic development than another country whilst its citizens are in greater poverty, because, e.g. of the diversion of productive resources to goals other than consumption. CB]

I seem to remember, throughout the 90s, how guff about “Italia: quinta potenza industrielle” worked to keep 59 million people quite content, deflecting attention away from the elite and domestic problems.

People normally live in a homogeneous environment and their social iteractions don’t involve visiting palaces. In fact, they may have a much better chance of meeting foreign tourists with fancy camcorders than their own overlords. No fellow countryman ever invited me to spend a summer on his yacht or hitch a ride on her personal jet.

Or to put it another way, your girlfriend is relatively unlikely to dump you because she has decided to move to Norway where the standard of living there is higher.