The Other Reason Europe Is Going Broke

by Adam Davidson

The New York Times Magazine
January 4, 2012

One great way to start a bar fight during an American Economic Association conference is to claim that the U.S. economy is preferable to Europe’s. Someone will undoubtedly start quarreling about how G.D.P. per capita doesn’t measure a person’s happiness. Someone else may point out that if you look at income inequality and entitlements, the average European is doing much better.

But G.D.P. per capita (an insufficient indicator, but one most economists use) in the U.S. is nearly 50 percent higher than it is in Europe. Even Europe’s best-performing large country, Germany, is about 20 percent poorer than the U.S. on a per-person basis (and both countries have roughly 15 percent of their populations living below the poverty line). While Norway and Sweden are richer than the U.S., on average, they are more comparable to wealthy American microeconomies like Washington, D.C., or parts of Connecticut — both of which are actually considerably wealthier. A reporter in Greece once complained after I compared her country to Mississippi, America’s poorest state. She’s right: the comparison isn’t fair. The average Mississippian is richer than the average Greek.

Europe is undergoing not one but two simultaneous economic crises. The first is a rapid, obvious one — all about sovereign debt, a collapsing currency and austerity measures — that we hear about all the time. The second is insidious but more important. After decades of trying, Europe as a whole still can’t quite figure out how to be flexible enough to compete in the global economy.

The story of how Europe lost its flexibility can be told in three stages. First came rapid growth that economists called “convergence.” With a lot of help from the U.S., Europe developed massive industrial capacity in the postwar years. Many of Western Europe’s economies grew so fast that governments could easily afford health and unemployment insurance and other benefits that, by U.S. standards, were remarkably generous. Most observers expected that its wealth would soon “converge” upon that of the U.S.

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