France in comparative perspective

Abb, there are well over 400 varieties of cheese in France. He’s referring to a remark by Charles de Gaulle about how impossible it is to run a country with 246 kinds of cheese.

[Mars: Thanks, but if I’d thought it ok to reproduce the entire article on CT, I’d have done so. CB]

I suspect that if our Martian friend’s Economics prof had remembered to record the comparative GDPs of 40 million Frenchmen and 500 million Chinese on his last visit back in 1945, his pupil’s amazement at the current ratio would have been in the other direction.

Brad DeLong also has a healthy excerpt.

Dan, you seriously don’t know that France’s economy has grown tremendously since 1945?

Yes, but I speculate that China’s has grown by a much larger ratio over the same period. Then again, I was too lazy to actually dig up the figures–anybody care to confirm or refute my intuition by citing the correct ones?

Dan, are you a commie or something?

I really don’t know what you’re getting at, Harry, but my best guess–forgive me if I’m incorrect–is that you think me such a fanatical, blinkered partisan conservative as to be pained by my own observation that China’s economy may well have gained ground on France’s over the last sixty years. If that was indeed your thinking, then I’m afraid the joke’s on you–I don’t even consider myself a conservative, let alone a partisan one, and politics, left or right, anti-French or anti-Chinese, never even crossed my mind when I posted. I was merely irked that Chris seemed to be touting as clever and insightful Thornhill’s self-evidently incoherent, nonsensical “Martian’s” comparison of France and China.

Or is the joke on me–perhaps Chris found it “hard not to smile” at Thornhill’s observation precisely because he recognized it as utterly risible?

Jet, I understand that France today is much wealthier, per capita, than China. But if you’re going to boast–as Thornhill did–that France was decimated by World War II, and is now doing spectacularly better than China, might it not be relevant that China ended World War II even further behind France than it is today?

As for “low hanging fruit”–well, any economic advance looks like low-hanging fruit once many countries have achieved it. Was the postwar economic surge in Western Europe easier, harder, or equally difficult to achieve, compared to China’s industrialization? Personally, I’d say it’s impossible to answer–in each case, many countries ended up accomplishing exactly the same transition, while many others failed to do so. We can only judge, in retrospect, which policies seemed to help, and which seemed to hurt.

By the way, just for the record, I had no idea when I posted my first comment that Thornhill was doing anything other than trying (and failing miserably) to be contrarian in an amusingly clever way. I now gather, though, based on the excerpts posted on Brad DeLong’s blog, that Thornhill was in fact being stupid in the service of a political agenda, rather than in an attempt to be cleverly quirky. That might explain why Chris and Harry seem so willing to cut him so much slack here–and lends a certain rich irony to Harry’s implication that I was being politically partisan by pointing out the inanity of Thornhill’s point.

Finally, I’m certainly not an “American free market” triumphalist today, any more than I was a “Japanese corporate culture” triumphalist twenty years ago, when it was fashionable. Rather, I retain a somewhat cynical belief in the inevitably transitory nature of prosperity (and, oddly enough, a somewhat naively optimistic belief in the inevitably transitory nature of squalor). That makes me at least mildly bullish on Europe these days, given that its economic growth has been so soft for so long now.

But at least the American and Japanese triumphalists in their respective eras had the excuse of being drunk on their own recent successes. To be a European welfare state triumphalist today is to value ideology over facts and politics over common sense. It is, in a word, stupid.

Dan Simon:Yes, but I speculate that China’s has grown by a much larger ratio over the same period. Then again, I was too lazy to actually dig up the figures—anybody care to confirm or refute my intuition by citing the correct ones?

From the OECD’s “The World Economy: a Millenial Perspective”, GDP per capita in 1990 international $:

1950: USA 9,561; France 5,270; China 439.

1998: USA 27,331; France 19,558; China 3,117.

I should probably convert these into productivity figures but I don’t think it’s worth the bother. The natural reading is that China gained on France and France gained on the USA. Both had the “advantage” of coming from behind.

How you conclude that “to be a European welfare state triumphalist today is to value ideology over facts and politics over common sense” is not clear to me. Just by being too lazy to actually dig up the figures?

Not that one should be triumphalist about the welfare state – that makes about as much sense as being triumphalist about traffic lights.

Isn’t “Martian economist” a bit of a redundancy?

Or at least a clue that Martian civilization hasn’t advanced far enough to be worth paying attention to.