Americans in Europe

It may be true for some individual Americans to live in social democratic societies, but would it be true for everyone? That is – would the world be better off if America were a social democratic nation? It would seem to me that the U.S. plays a role in the world that is largely determined by its lower-tax culture – that of economic engine and technological innovator. Would the standard of living of everyone fall if the U.S. could no longer play that role?

For instance – I have family in Ireland, and they have better cheaper health care than the U.S. But one of my uncles got cancer, and was treated at a center that had modeled itself on the Mayo Clinic – it was set up with direct help from the Mayo. If the American innovations had not been transported to Ireland, he probably would have died.

While there are Americans who have permanently settled in Europe (I in Paris count as one, my brother in Cambridge U.K. as another), they are fewer than Europeans who have gone to the U.S. partly because there are greater barriers to immigration (and getting work) in Europe than in the U.S. It’s also probably true that the standard of living (size of house, etc.) is higher in the U.S., which is probably more of an attraction than health care unless you’re already sick.

On health care, I would prefer to be in the U.S. than in France for treatment. The difference between the hospital in my (small) home town U.S.A. is as good as anything as I’ve seen in Paris (with the best being the American Hospital in Neuilly…). Of course, I would want and need a job in the U.S. which paid for my insurance to be able to afford the care.

The French seem better on preventive medicine, especially prenatal care for the entire population. They also still eat better – less processed foods and the like – and live wiser – fewer gunshot wounds – so it’s not completely fair to compare the U.S. and French health-care systems based on costs, since the American system has more problems to handle.

I once related to a British university professor (in comparative government, no less) how I came down with appendicitis while I was home in the US, which I was a little disappointed by, because I was curious about the British National Health Service and, besides, it would have gotten me out of exams.

He responded by telling me, as someone who had firsthand experience of both the American and British healthcare systems, that I’d never know how lucky I was.

Mondo writes: “It is absurd to think that so-called revealed preference data (which Bernstein does not supply, in any case) rebuts hard quantitative evidence showing that European social democracies provide a better quality of life for their citizens.”

Well, yes and no. It is certainly true that most any study of revealed preferences will ultimately break down into the “merely” anecdotal. Chris and Scott, being non-U.S. residents, unsurprisingly are familiar with many more Americans who have chosen to become non-U.S. residents than David Bernstein, who is a U.S. resident. (For my part, as a U.S. resident, in my fairly limited contact with Europe and more extended contact with Canada, I can’t think of a single U.S. citizen I’ve known to have chosen to move permanently away from America, while I can name a half-dozen Europeans and Canadians (one being my grandmother) who moved to the U.S. to stay.) The desire for a nice suburban home, or easier access to university education, or any number of other middle-class aspirations no doubt brings many hundreds of thousands to the U.S., whereas a longing for a healthier, less violent, more secular social environment no doubts drives large numbers away. However interesting it might be to simply look at raw immigration numbers (which, as Andrew notes, are skewed by the unequal policies between the U.S. and Europe), there’s only so much insight you can derive from studying the choices individuals and families make.

I’m more interested in Anne’s question: “would the world be better off if America were a social democratic nation? It would seem to me that the U.S. plays a role in the world that is largely determined by its lower-tax culture – that of economic engine and technological innovator. Would the standard of living of everyone fall if the U.S. could no longer play that role?” You hear versions of this all the time along the lines of: Europe and Canada are able to invest in their populations more than the U.S. because they don’t have to pay for their own defense. (Indeed, Bernstein makes this part of his argument.) But Anne’s question is broader than that, and more challenging too.

Berstein’s question is also somewhat miss-formed if we are trying to ask it as a Rawlsian Veil-of-ignorance type question. There is good reason to think one might well choose the US if one was pretty sure one would be well off. It’s not certain, but it wouldn’t be crazy. If one thought one would be a professor, it would perhaps even be smart to choose the US. But, if you didn’t know who you’d be, and thought there was a good chance you’d be among the worst off, you’d be a fool to choose the US over much of europe. (Interestingly Hayek also proposes using a method like this to judge countries. He claims to have used it himself in deciding where to send his kids when he fled the Nazis. He chose the US, but points out that he could do this becuase he was pretty sure his kids wouldn’t be put in an african-american home. Otherwise he’d have chosen Sweden. I think it’s clear he didn’t mean this as a racist, just as a way of admitting that if you include all the possible people, it would be a bad bet to choose the US over many other countries.)

Another reason not to take the VC very seriously.

The differences between the US and Western Europe are small enough that immigration between them is not determined by crude socioeconomic factors.

I wager that few Germans move to the US because the US GDP/capita is a few percentage points higher; likewise few Americans feel the urgent need to move to France solely because UN charts show the average Frenchman lives a couple of years longer.

Mostly, arguments such as that advanced by Bernstein (or his mirror images here on CT) amount to blogospheric dick swinging: “My country’s GDP/health care out-trumps yours; therefore I win this argument”.

I’m tired of people comparing aggregate statistics from Europe and the US as if these places were monoliths.

If you’re a European looking to move to, say, New York City, for the charms and opportunities that place offers which you can’t find anywhere else in the world, you have one set of criteria on which to base your decision. If you’re looking to move to Colorado for *that* place’s unique charms, you have a very different set of criteria. In neither case will the infant mortality rates in Mississippi or the literacy scores in Idaho influence your decision.

Same goes for an American looking to do the artist-in-Paris or villa-in-Tuscany thing. The disconnect between statistics and emigration rates says no more than that, once you get to a high enough level of wealth (a level which the US *and* the EU countries have long since achieved), the things that make people move are not so easily captured in social statistics.

I live in DC, and believe me it’s not primarily rock stars and millionaires from Europe who move to the U.S. There are thousands of Europeans who live here, studying and holding down middle-class type jobs. I’d say it’s less that Europeans find America so attractive and more that Americans just love America. As for the idea, expressed by someone, that blacks would be better off in a Sweden that has no idea how to integrate even its Muslim population, you gotta be kidding. Maybe an individual black person, but if 12% of the population was black, there would be major problems. Finally, I agree with those (and Bernstein) who point out that that the U.S. is also a social democracy. But posters haven’t noted one of his points: that the U.S. has high infant mortality etc., even though the U.S. likely spends as as much or more on such programs other European countries. The U.S. may have a stingier welfare state given its resources, but it has greater resources. So Leiter has to explain why, e.g., U.S. literacy rates are so low even though the U.S. spends more per student on public school education than any other country in the world.

Addendum to earlier comment:
Hypothesis — Since people are bad predictors of what will make them happier, they fail to predict that the social services and benefits given to residents of N. Europe will make them happier. In fact, these services and benefits actually make residents happier.

You shouldn’t be amazed Chris. 1) GIs frequently go back to settle in places they were posted for a long time; 2) Very high German immigration to US at turn of last century so people look back there. 3) Germany is BIG and economically important.

Mexico is what amazes me. Would the figures be much smaller if we cut off the 100 miles south of the border?

Bernstein:
“Second, the U.S. would be much wealthier relative to Europe and especially Canada if they didn’t mooch off of the U.S.’s military protective umbrella. Canada has a whole twenty thousand soldiers under arms, not enough to fend off the NYPD. Give Canada the U.S.’s per capita defense budget, and the U.S. Canada’s, and the population movement will become even more pronounced, and of course all of Brian’s statistics would be affected to the U.S.’s advantage.”

Comment:
A. American defense spending as a percentage of GDP dropped even before the end of the Cold War, and still more thereafter. That is, whatever drag defense put on the economy diminished.
B. Whether defense spending has to be maintained at its present high levels–whether the terrorist threat needs to be addressed by such spending–is open to question. The most distinguished student of international affairs America has produced, Kenneth Waltz, believes that the real security requirements of the nation could be met by a much smaller budget.

Since the key issue here seems to be the differential rate of migration, I don’t suppose any of you considered the possibility that language might well be a far more important reason for the difference? University educated Europeans are a good deal more likely to speak English than university educated Americans are likely to speak, well, anything.

Mexico is not surprising. I suspect lots of retirees with income in $$ and expenses in pesos. Better weather.

“Mexico is not surprising. I suspect lots of retirees with income in $$ and expenses in pesos. Better weather.”
– Posted by cw

Especially if they were born there,a nd retained Mexican citizenship. Then it’s returning to one’s homeland, with a $$ income.

If you read about what’s going on in Baja, Mexico, American retirees are basically colonizing that area. I believe there was an article in the NYTimes about it.

Also, you may find this article interesting on the effect of illegal immigration in the US regarding crime. It’s not pretty.

“In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.

• A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia, the dominant force in California prisons, on complex drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery every day in L.A. County. The gang has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico.

• The leadership of the Columbia Lil’ Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.’s MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in 2002, says former assistant U.S. attorney Luis Li. Francisco Martinez, a Mexican Mafia member and an illegal alien, controlled the gang from prison, while serving time for felonious reentry following deportation.”

I’d be interested to read about how much crime in Europe is linked to illegal immigration. I’ve often wondered if large scale immigration from specifically one group leads to increased ghettoization and crime. There are many other groups that immigrate legally and in far smaller numbers but have really low crime rates. I’m reminded of what happened to the Irish when they first came to the US in huge numbers and were ghettoized. If groups immigrate as a trickle instead of a flood, do they end up accepted more by society as well as more successful in the long term?

Dan Simon, likening immigration to moving into a cemetary is more than a bit ridiculous. Also, imo if you are right about how the US can give greater upward mobility, then it would be a failing in those other countries that they can’t do the same for their own citizens.

“It seems to me that part of our problem in the US is the wide-spread belief, even among those on the left, that US is close to being a “pure” capitalist country.”

Very true. Oddly, only those on the right tend to make this point. The folks at Reason magazine, or the NRO, emphasize that America is nearly socialistic. My friends on the Left dislike America because they feel it is much closer to being a pure capitalist country than Europe is.

I lived in Southern Germany from 93 to 99, for what thats worth. What I found amazing was the number of Europeans that I met who had emigrated to the US and then decided they didn’t like it and returned to Europe. The single biggest reason they returned was the lack of vacation time. Many of these people had lived in California, Florida or some other sunny place, some place very different than rainy Europe, and almost everyone would remark on the difference in tax burdens, but the clincher was almost always the idea that 2 weeks vacation a year was sufficient.
As an example; I know an engineering VP at Erickson in Sweden, she is brilliant. She was with Bell Labs in the late 80s, developed some wonderful innovations there, they offered to double her salary – she wanted four weeks vacation versus two. After six months of back and forth with management she packed her bags and returned to Sweden.

Yours in the sands.

One thing that’s always struck me as curious: if life in European social democracies is so much better than in the States, why do people in those countries kill themselves more frequently?

I also think that any health/life expectancy comparisons that don’t factor out the impact of gun deaths in America are limited in their ability to reveal anything important about the impact of social-democratic policies, since the much higher rate of gun deaths in the U.S. is not the result of the lack of a social safety net.

Even if you grant the statistical claims, they can’t prove what Leiter thinks they do. Leiter’s argument assumes that rational people would gladly trade the benefits of the American system –greater economic freedom, greater cultural dynamism, more openness to immigration, less intrusive government, greater technological innovation, etc. — for improved life expectancy and reduced child-mortality rates. But Leiter has no evidence for this. It’s just an a priori assumption about what a “random human” would be like. Not coincidentally, this random human would want a society very much like the one Leiter wants. Somehow this doesn’t seem like a slam-dunk argument.

“My question is: since they were poor and came looking for work, well then, weren’t they by definition the losers???

Work that thru your little deterministic conservative heads, won’t you? The people who stayed in Europe did so because they succeeded there. The odd ones out (my forefathers & mothers among them), had to hit the road so to speak since nobody really had any use for them.”

LOL, a little history can be a dangerous thing. Much of Europe, especially at the time in question, had a quite rigid class structure which would stymie advancement in the lower classes no matter what their innate ability or drive. So those who left were indeed lower class, but not lower abilityand obviously did not have a lower drive to change. The US at the time did not have such a rigid class structure, which is one of the reasons why the Communist Party per se never gained as much traction in the US as it did in Europe.

Some argue that this dynamic has changed dramatically and that the US is much more class-bound, but that is an argument for another day.

Leo wrote:

As for the idea, expressed by someone, that blacks would be better off in a Sweden that has no idea how to integrate even its Muslim population, you gotta be kidding. Maybe an individual black person, but if 12% of the population was black, there would be major problems.

That raises an interesting point that I do not believe has been made yet. I seem to recall in an early discussion on CT (I think Bert may have been the instigator of that as well) of a Nobel laureate’s book in which he tried to argue that because blacks in America had a lower life expectancy than persons living in China or India therefore it was evidence that income inequality was the case. Many of us (rightfully) pointed out that this was not a valid conclusion because of the differences in genetics and lifestyles, which already gave the latter groups a longer life expectancy we were in effect comparing apples to oranges.

It seems that those who are chomping at the this bit of “proof” of how the Nanny States of Canada and Western Europe are supposedly better are making a similar error in that they are comparing more culturally homogenous society (Canada and certain European nations) to one which is more ethnically diverse, has a very different immigration situation (particularly with our southern neighbor), and may have other relevant differences as well without making the appropriate adjustments to make an accurate and valid comparison.

Maybe an individual black person, but if 12% of the population was black, there would be major problems.

Or maybe not. You cannot argue with an “if”. Seems there are common problems with integration of Muslim immigration everywhere. Because there are significant cultural and religious differences that are often upheld very rigidly by those immigrants themselves. Integration is a two-way process. If the effort is lacking or scarce on one end, it all becomes more difficult on the other too. I can’t make you integrate if you don’t even want to, you know?

Just what does that have to do with black people, I don’t understand.

The real question behind all this of course is: why compare nations in such absolute terms at all. I personally find it totally pointless.

Even though the average standard of living is higher in the USA than in Europe, there is still one more little thing to consider: the USA currently lives with borrowed money. It is easy to fake prosperity with a credit card… until the payment day arrives.

The federal deficit and the trade deficit together add up to about a trillion dollars a year. I’m pretty sure that if the Americans together had to cough up this extra $1T each year (that is, an extra $4000 per every single American), it would have a pretty noticable effect on their average standard of living. Probably wouldn’t buy that new SUV and so many lattes that year.

In this light, imagine the following scenario take place in the USA. There will simply be no more living with borrowed money as a nation, so taxes are increased to make up the government spending, and at the same time, spending is simply cut and cut and cut until there is no more deficit. As a result of these cuts, quite a few people no longer get the money they previously got from the gummint in some form, perhaps as a subsidy or as a salary.

At the same time, the trade deficit is eliminated with import restrictions and duties. (I know. This is just a hypothetical scenario, so bear with me.)

But pray tell: how would the average American standard of living compare to, say, to that of Canada, Britain or Germany in this scenario? It would probably still be higher, but definitely not as much higher as it is now.

Myself, of course, I am interested to see where my above reasoning went wrong.

If I see two households so that the first one spends $20K more a year than the second one for all kinds of better stuff (they have a plasma HDTV instead of an ordinary TV, a bigger house altogether, steak for dinner instead of meat loaf etc.), I can’t help but conclude that the first household is wealthier than the second one, and that its members enjoy a higher standard of living.

However, if I later learn that the first household does not fully pay its expenses from the father’s paycheck but racks up an additional $10K of debt every year, whereas the second household does not accumulate any new debt, I would adjust my opinion on the comparative wealth of these two households. The annual standard of living first household would still be $10K higher than the second one, but not $20K higher.

I don’t see how this would be any different with nations.

Thorley Winston: “I think if you look at the unfunded liabilities of the United States and compared them to those in the UK, Canada, Germany, et al., it would probably turn out that unfunded liabilities of the United States are smaller as a percentage of GDP”

At least for Canada, this is not true, according to this web page:

http://www.fin.gc.ca/budget03/bp/bpc2e.htm

(see the table “Net Foreign Debt per cent of GDP”, where the Canadian and U.S. curves recently passed each other)

Since Canada currently has a budget surplus, the debt and debt/GDP ratio are not going to increase, unlike in the United States. (Nicely enough, Canada also has a trade surplus.) Of course, Canadian citizens pay more taxes for the government services that they get, whereas Americans simply borrow the money that pay for the government services for them, so the American households have more money in hand for a higher standard of living.

This makes my two households analogy apt, if the households are USA and Canada. I don’t know about the debts and deficits of the major European countries. However, I recall reading that France and Germany have some problems with their deficits. But I doubt that they are even close to the U.S. budget deficit in 2004, not per capita nor per GDP.

Premature births in Europe which end almost immediately in death are counted under miscarriages. In the US they count as infant death.

I’ve heard this recounted several times as doctrine by Americans of the conservative tendency, but have never actually found any links to supporting data.

In fact, Sebastian, I think you’re offering a simplistic summary of a more complex set of criteria: in the US, 20 weeks gestation is taken to be the dividing line between early foetal death and stillbirth; in the UK, it’s 24 weeks, while in continental Europe, either 24 weeks or the WHO’s definition of 28 weeks are used. But the synoptic studies I’ve seen which use the 24-week model still show the US lagging far behind.

In summary, you’re quite wrong to say that any premature birth in Europe which ends in death (or even a third trimester miscarriage) is considered an early foetal death: that definition applies only to those more than 12 or 16 weeks premature. In fact, the US definition is right on the limit of viability — and doesn’t take into account foetal weight, the main determination of viability during the 20-24 week period.