Talk about upending accepted certainties! While Europe is now in the hands of right-of-centre parties (France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Denmark and David Cameron pacing restlessly in the wings), America has “gone socialist.” Nationalising the financial sector by the back door, considering massive subsidy of production industries, increasing state spending on healthcare and education, promising big investments in all manner of greenery, and limiting executive salaries: is Barack Obama beating Europe at its own game? “We are all socialists now,” Newsweek trumpeted in February, predicting that, “as entitlement spending rises over the next decade, we will become even more French.” General Jack D Ripper, Dr Strangelove’s nemesis, who fulminated against fluoridation of the water as another of communism’s nefarious advances, must be rotating in his Valhalla.
How quickly things change. It seems just a few months ago that the presidency of the younger Bush—unilaterally going to war, refusing to submit to international treaties, disparaging the seriousness of global ecological catastrophe—convinced bien pensant opinion that the gulf between the US and Europe was stark and growing ever wider. Indeed, old and well-worn mental ruts are hard to steer out of. It remains a staple of political discourse on both sides of the Atlantic that Europe and America are worlds apart. Everyone knows this.
The “wide Atlantic” thesis claims that there are fundamental differences between Europe and America. These are the contrasts: America believes in the untrammelled market, Europe accepts capitalism but curbs its excesses. Social policies either do not exist in America or are more miserly than in Europe. America’s lack of universal health insurance means that many people die young and live miserably. Because the market dominates, America’s environment is less cared for. Since social contrasts are greater in America, crime is much more of a problem than in Europe. Meanwhile Europeans are secular; Americans are much more likely to believe in God and accept a role for religion in public life. The two societies are thus divided along several faultlines: competition vs co-operation, individualism vs solidarity, autonomy vs cohesion.
This is all familiar. But is it true? With the Obama administration moving the US to the left there is a perception of the Atlantic narrowing again, to the dismay of American conservatives—being “too European” is a stick Obama’s opponents are fond of beating him with. But were the contrasts between Europe and the US ever as great as both sides imagine?
One way of answering this question is to look at the quantifiable evidence. Not all differences can be captured by numbers, but statistics allow us a first pass over the terrain and to compare reliably. If we compare four areas: the economy, social policy, the environment and—hardest of all to quantify—religion and cultural attitudes, the evidence in each case allows two conclusions. First, Europe is not a coherent or unified continent. The spectrum of difference within even the 16 countries of western Europe (which is what we are mainly looking at here) is far broader than normally appreciated. Second, with a few exceptions, the US fits into this spectrum. Either, then, there is no coherent European identity, or—if there is one—the US is as European as the usual candidates. Europe and the US are, in fact, parts of a common, big-tent grouping—call it the west, the Atlantic community, or the developed world.
***
It is universally observed that America is an economically more unequal society than Europe, with greater stratification between rich and poor. Much of this is true. Income is more disproportionately distributed in the US than in western Europe. In 1998, for example, the richest 1 per cent of Americans took home 14 per cent of total income, while in Sweden the figure was only about 6 per cent. Wealth concentration is another matter, however. The richest 1 per cent of Americans owned about 21 per cent of all wealth in 2000. Some European nations have higher concentrations than that. In Sweden—despite that nation’s egalitarian reputation—the figure is 21 per cent, exactly the same as for the Americans. And if we take account of the massive moving of wealth offshore and off-book permitted by Sweden’s tax authorities, the richest 1 per cent of Swedes are proportionately twice as well off as their American peers.
What about poverty, not the same thing as inequality? Because inequality is greater in America, relative poverty is by definition also higher. But absolute poverty rates look different. If we take absolute poverty to be living on the actual cash sum equivalent to half of median income for the original six nations of the EU, we see that many western European countries in 2000 had a higher percentage of poor citizens than the US; not only Mediterranean countries, but also Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland and Sweden. Unemployment benefits in the US, often portrayed as derisory in the European media, are actually higher than in many European nations. Greece, Britain, Italy and Iceland spend less than the US on unemployment, measured per capita.
The US welfare state is often portrayed as miserly and undeveloped compared to Europe. And so it is, if the standard is taken to be Sweden or Germany. But if we look at the span of social policy across Europe, a different picture emerges.
Of course, America has no universal system of health insurance. Michael Moore’s 2006 film Sicko will ensure that no one forgets that. As a result, 15 per cent of its population is not covered. There is no question that being uninsured is unfair and brutal, nor that the lack of universal health coverage is the most pressing problem of American domestic politics. The true disgrace of American healthcare is that infant mortality is higher than anywhere in Europe. President Obama seems determined not to let the financial crisis sidetrack his promise to improve access to health insurance.
Yet despite the too large fraction of those who are not insured, Americans are relatively healthy and well-serviced by their healthcare system—to judge by disease survival rates. For diabetes, heart and circulatory disease and strokes, the incidence rates and the number of years lost to sickness are firmly in the middle of the European spectrum. And for the four major cancer killers (colorectal, lung, breast and prostate), all European nations have worse survival rates than the US.
Looking also at other forms of social policy, we see that the US fits broadly into the lower half of the European spectrum. As with its unemployment assistance, US spending on disability benefits is higher than in Greece and Portugal per capita, and practically at the same level as France, Italy, Ireland and Germany. (All figures used for comparison here account for differences in costs of living). State pensions in the US may fall into the lower half of the European spectrum. But examine instead the total disposable income of the retired in America as a percentage of what the still active receive. Only in Austria, Germany and France do the elderly fare better.
It is commonly known that the American state does not help out much in terms of family provision. Parental leave is not statutory and there are no guarantees that women can reclaim their jobs after pregnancy. Family allowances as such do not exist. On the other hand, if one counts resources channelled via the tax credit system, as well as outright cash grants and services, and if one measures them as a percentage of GDP, the US ranks higher than Spain, Greece and Italy for family benefits. Public spending on childcare (daycare and pre-primary education) puts the US into the middle of the European scale. Total spending on pre-primary care per child is higher than anywhere but Norway.
True, public social spending in America—that is, monies channelled through the state—is low compared to many European countries. But other avenues of redistribution are equally important: voluntary efforts, private but statutorily encouraged benefits (like employee health insurance) and taxes. Given all of these, the American welfare state is more extensive than is often realised: the total social policy effort made in the US falls precisely at the centre of the European scale.
And if we shift our focus to education, the contrasts across the Atlantic are, if anything, reversed. A higher percentage of Americans have graduated from university and from secondary school than in any European nation. America’s adults are, in this sense, better educated than Europe’s. And the US lavishes more money per child at all levels of education than any western European nation. Europeans often believe that good US schools are private and serve only an elite. Yet American education is, if anything, less privatised than most European systems. Public education was among the first social programmes to receive massive public funding in the US and this has remained the case ever since.
Simone de Beauvoir was convinced that Americans do not need to read because they do not think. Thinking is hard to quantify; reading less so. And Americans, it turns out, do read. The percentage of illiterate Americans is average by European standards. There are more newspapers per head in the US than anywhere in Europe outside Scandinavia, Switzerland and Luxembourg. The long tradition of well-funded public libraries in the US means that the average American reader is better supplied with library books than his peers in Germany, Britain, France, Holland, Austria and all the Mediterranean nations. They also make better use of these public library books than most Europeans. The average American borrowed more library books in 2001 than their peers in Germany, Austria, Norway, Ireland, Luxembourg, France and throughout the Mediterranean. Not content with borrowing, Americans also buy more books per head than any Europeans for whom we have numbers. And they write more books per capita than most Europeans too.
***
American popular culture is fascinated by violence, much as Japanese culture is by suicide. Whether in The Godfather or the television series The Wire, the image America broadcasts about itself is crime-ridden and violent. Most foreigners have been content to accept that analysis at face value. Not that it is entirely untrue. A horrendous number of murders are committed in the US, almost twice the per capita rate of the nearest European competitors, Switzerland, Finland and Sweden. Nor is there any doubt that the US imprisons a far higher percentage of its population than any of its peers. But in other respects, America is a peaceful and quiet place by European standards. US burglary rates are fairly high, but below the Danish and British. The incidence of theft is lower than in six western European countries. Assault is in the middle, on a par with Swedish and Belgian rates. Rape levels are high, but other sexual assault rates are moderate. Only Denmark, Belgium and Portugal have lower rates; Austria suffers three times the American rate.
American drug use is quite high too, but still—excepting cannabis where the figures are a smidgen above Britain’s—within the European scale. American white-collar crime is at the middle to low end of the spectrum. The French suffer over six times the American rate of bribery. And the total American crime figures are in the low middle of the pack. Indeed, only relatively small countries—Finland, Austria, Switzerland and Portugal—are less crime-ridden than the US.
But what about other aspects of the social environment? In ecological terms, America is thought to be a wastrel. Big cars, big houses, long commutes, cold winters, hot summers, profligate habits: such perceptions of the country have combined with the Bush administration’s cosy relationship with the oil industry and its refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol to paint the nation as an environmental black hole. Once again, the numbers tell a somewhat different story.
Although oil use per capita is high in America, measured as a function of economic production (in other words, putting the input in relation to the output) it remains within European norms, and indeed lower than in Portugal, Greece, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Iceland. Between 1990 and 2002, America’s carbon dioxide output rose, but per unit of GDP it fell by 17 per cent—a greater reduction than in nine western European countries. In its output of renewable energy, the US is middle of the spectrum on all counts, whether biogas, solid biomass energy, geothermal or wind. Only Austria, Denmark, Italy and the Netherlands have higher levels of spending (public and private) on pollution abatement and control as a percentage of GDP than America. Despite the myths of a hyper-motorised nation, Americans own fewer passenger cars per head than the French, Austrians, Swiss, Germans, Luxembourgers and Italians. Per capita, Americans rely on their cars more than Europeans. But adjusting for the size of the country, automobile usage is lower only in Finland, Sweden and Greece. Similarly, Americans produce a lot of waste per head, though the Norwegians are worse, and the Irish and Danes are close competitors. But they recycle as well as the Finns and the French, and better than the British, Greeks and the Portuguese. Since 1990, Americans’ production of waste has scarcely gone up per capita, while in all European nations for which figures are available, there have been big increases—70 per cent in Spain, almost 60 per cent in Italy and over 30 per cent in Sweden.
“The old world developed on the basis of a coalition—uneasy but understood—between humanity and its surroundings,” the Guardian reassures its recycling readership. “The settlement of the US was based on conquest, not just of the indigenous peoples, but also of the terrain.” Yet, despite such common European conceptions, American conservation efforts are strong by European standards. The environmental activist Jeremy Rifkin insists that Europeans, unlike Americans, have “a love for the intrinsic value of nature. One can see it in Europeans’ regard for the rural countryside and their determination to maintain natural landscape.” Actually, the percentage of national territory protected in the US is about double that of France, Britain or even Sweden. And conventional American farmers are far less “chemicalised” than their European colleagues. Thanks partly to their use of GM crops, they use pesticides sparingly. The Italians use over seven times as much, the Belgians even more.
***
Despite perceived differences in its economy and care for the environment, perhaps the most fundamental assumed gap between the US and Europe is in values. Americans are said to be nationalistic and religious, while Europeans are post-nationalist and secular. But even here there is reason to doubt the stereotypes.
Yes, Americans are patriotic and nationalistic, but according to the World Values Survey, undertaken between 1999 and 2001, not more than some Europeans. Unsurprisingly, Germans are least proud of their nation, and rather unexpectedly, the Portuguese—not the Americans—are most, with the Irish tied for second place. Granted, Americans are more likely to think that their country is better than most others. But more Portuguese, Danes and Spaniards feel that the world would be improved if other people were like them, and a larger fraction of Americans admit that there are aspects of their country that shame them than do the Germans, Austrians, Spanish, French, Danes and Finns.
Even on religion, there is reason to question an absolute polarity between the US and Europe. “Religion is palpable in US schools, places of work and public institutions,” claims the Guardian. “God is invoked by soldiers and politicians in a way that would seem inappropriate in Britain.” Puzzling, then, that Britain’s head of state is known as the “Defender of the Faith,” and the established church has 26 seats in the upper legislature. The American observer of Europe is often baffled at European claims to secularism since official expressions of religion are so public, and yet—apparently—so taken for granted. A 10th-century depiction of the crucifixion, for example, is part of every Danish passport, regardless of whether its bearer is, as many nowadays are, a pious Muslim.
American church attendance and religious belief is not off the European scale if one compares them with Europe’s Catholic regions. A smaller percentage of Americans consider themselves religious than the Portuguese and Italians. Proportionately fewer Americans say they believe in God and always have than the Irish and Portuguese. Moreover, sociologists tend to explain high American church attendance as the outcome of market forces as much as spiritual ones. Greater competition has led to a richer variety and higher quality of offerings, while Europe’s state-monopoly religions struggle to provide for their citizens’ spiritual needs. If the issue is thus one of supply and less of demand, the contrast between Europe and America may not be between religious and secular mindsets, but between how—if at all—largely equivalent spiritual needs are fulfilled.
This is certainly a conclusion suggested by looking at attitudes to science across the Atlantic. Without question, Americans are more likely to believe in creationism than Europeans. Yet the modern American creationist, interestingly enough, no longer takes scripture as sufficient reason to believe the biblical account of the origins of the world. The debate is instead conducted on the turf of science, with creationists attempting to argue the fine points of the age of the fossil record, suggesting that orthodox evolution has gaps as a seamless explanation, and otherwise indicating their acceptance that the modern world speaks the language of science. The realm of scientific quackery in Europe, on the other hand, is much wider than in the US. Consider the sway of self-evidently daft positions like anti-vaccinationism among the Hampstead Bildungsbürgertum, or the equally irrational rejection of the fruits of scientific reasoning, like the anti-GM movement. Astrology is more widely believed in several European nations than in the US, and homeopathy is relied upon much more often in Europe.
So if Americans are, on the whole, more religious than most Europeans, it does not follow that they have less overall faith in science. Societies with a strong faith in science can also have strong religious beliefs. True, proportionately fewer Americans firmly agree with the Darwinian theory of evolution than any Europeans other than in Northern Ireland. But in other respects, Americans believe in the Enlightenment project of human reason’s ability to understand and master nature. They fall in the European middle ground in approving animal testing to save human lives. Perhaps most tellingly, more American pupils agree with the statement that science helps them to understand the world than in any European nations other than Italy and Portugal.
***
They may be scientific, then, but Americans are also thought of as diehard individualists who live in a society of sharp elbows and an ethos of live and let live. They are imagined to be unusually anti-governmental in their political ideology; practically anarchists by European standards. Yet a Pew Foundation survey in 2007 found that proportionately fewer Americans worried that the government had too much control than did Germans and Italians, with the French at the same level and the British just a percentage point lower. And a higher percentage of Americans trust their government than all Europeans, except only the Swiss and the Norwegians (although no people, truth be told, demonstrate much faith in their elected representatives.)
But talk is cheap, and these findings may indicate desire as much as reality. The trust of Americans in their state apparatus, then, can be measured more concretely by their willingness to pay taxes. Unlike many Europeans, Americans pay the taxes required of them. Only in Austria and Switzerland are the underground economies as small. Tax avoidance is over three times the American level in Greece and Italy. The archetypal Montana survivalist—so beloved of the European media—holed up in his shack, determined to resist the government’s impositions, is as uncharacteristic of America as the Basque or Corsican separatist, ready to kill for his cause, is of Europe.
***
These are just a few examples of the way in which the presumed chasm dividing the Atlantic is not, in fact, nearly as deep as opinion among the chattering classes and their mouthpieces believes. Why, then, does this notion persist? For one thing, the European press wants the juicy, titillating lowdown. And America certainly dishes that up. Is there any other nation that washes its dirty laundry so publicly? Hence that genre of such fascination to the European chattering classes: the tedious travelogue by the sophisticated European, whether BHL, Baudrillard or Borat, observing American yokels and reporting back with the smug assurance of superiority to other sophisticated Europeans.
Moreover, Europe’s various cultures are ones still steeped in the lore of national stereotypes and quite happy to wring whatever elixir can be had from them. Who can forget Edith Cresson, Mitterrand’s prime minister, convinced that no Frenchman was gay, while the English were all limp-wristed poofs? Or consider the extent to which no Europeans, however otherwise politically correct, can be shaken in their conviction that the Roma really are shifty and thieving. Having a transatlantic whipping boy is convenient and serves politically useful purposes, especially if there is little else that you can agree on. The purveyors of anti-Americanism in Europe appear to have rediscovered the truism that nothing unites like a common enemy. And the Bush administration played into their hands by serving up caricatures by the spadeful. It will be interesting to see how the European pundits deal with Obama once he does something they do not like. While Bush could be portrayed as an ignorant cowboy, which of the available stereotypes will they dare lambast Obama with?
Here, we come to the grain of truth to the Atlantic divide. If there is anything that most separates American society from Europe, it is the continuing presence of an ethnically distinct underclass. Even as other outsiders have successfully assimilated, the tragic resonances of slavery in the black urban ghettos of America continue to prevail. Indeed, take out the black underclass from the crime statistics and American murder rates fall to European levels, below those in Switzerland and Finland, and even squeaking in under Sweden. Child poverty rates, which are scandalously high in the US, fall to below British, Italian and Spanish levels if we look at the figures for whites only. PISA scores for American whites (ranking secondary school proficiency) come above every European nation other than Finland and the Netherlands. This is not to excuse the atrocious negligence with which the problems of racism have been dealt in the US. But it does suggest that, far more than any grand opposition of worldviews or ideologies, it is the still unresolved legacy of slavery that distinguishes—to the extent anything does—America from Europe. Whether Obama’s election will mark a turning point in this respect remains to be seen.
And if it is this distinct urban underclass that most distinguishes the US from Europe, Europeans should take notice. Europe’s birthrates have plummeted and immigration continues unabated. It is a demographic certainty that an ethnically and religiously distinct lower class in Europe will grow in the decades to come. Perhaps Europe will turn out to have been lucky. Having instituted universalist social policy, highly regulated labour markets and redistributive fiscal policy in the belief that it was all, so to speak, being kept “in the family,” Europe may weather the expansion of its social community. On the other hand, the social fabric may fray.
No one is arguing that America is Sweden. But nor is Britain, Italy, or even France. And since when does Sweden represent “Europe”—at least anymore than the ethnically homogenous, socially liberal state of Vermont does America? Europe is not the continent alone, and certainly not just its northern regions. With the entrance of all the new EU nations, it has just become a great deal larger. These new entrants are not just poorer than old Europe. They, like Europe’s many recent immigrants from Asia and Africa, are religious, sceptical of a strong state, unenthusiastic about voting and allergic to high taxes. In other words, from the vantage of old Europe, they are more like Americans. And so as Europe expands, the argument made here for western Europe—that the differences across the Atlantic have been exaggerated—will become irrefutable.
The data in this article comes mostly from those organisations that provide internationally comparable figures: the UN, Unesco, Unicef, WHO, the IMF, the World Bank, Eurostat, the Sutton Trust, the World Values Survey, the ILO, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the International Association for the Study of Obesity, the World Resources Institute, the International Energy Agency, the International Social Survey Programme and, above all, the OECD.
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Comments (7):
In response to Baldwin’s article, one might rephrase the comments of another poster, like the following: statistics is the art of having a conclusion and providing the supporting evidence for it.
While seemingly arguing that Europeans and Americans are more alike than they think, Baldwin actually confines himself to rebuke traditional criticism of the US in specific areas, such as religious fundamentalism, environment and health care.
A correct approach to transatlantic relations problems should be focusing on real differences any time they occur, and devise proper strategies to overcome them. This is not what Baldwin does at all.
By contrast, he claims that certain very serious American problems, such as excessive religious influence and environmental policies, are at least as serious in Europe (while they are not), or do not even exist in fact (while they do). Baldwin picks statistics selectively to fit his own argument.
The first, most serious methodological distortion is that only seldom does he compare US figures to the western European average, which he should do if he’s set to prove that the US , in that particular regard, is within the European spectrum.
Most of the time, he compares the US data to those of one or few European countries, which is clearly incorrect. For each indicator, Baldwin should contrast the US value to the estimated average of the corresponding values of Western European countries.
The most striking example of this is wealth concentration. He compares almost exclusively to Sweden rates, to show that wealth concentration is higher there than it is in the US : “The richest 1 per cent of Americans owned about 21 per cent of all wealth in 2000. Some European nations have higher concentrations than that. In Sweden —despite that nation’s egalitarian reputation—the figure is 21 per cent, exactly the same as for the Americans.”
So what? Even if that were true, it hardly proves that European average of wealth concentration is higher than the American!
In another comment about religion, Baldwin quotes surveys as showing that “a smaller percentage of Americans consider themselves religious than the Portuguese and Italians. Proportionately fewer Americans say they believe in God and always have than the Irish and Portuguese.”
That doesn’t prove that, as an average, catholic Europeans “feel” more religious or believe more in god than Americans. If other catholic European countries such as Spain, France, Austria and so forth, had lower rates for these indicators than the US, the average of “people-who says-they feel religious” or who believe in god in European catholic countries would be still below that of Americans. Portugal , absurdly quoted twice in religious comparisons, hardly represents the whole of catholic Europe .
As to the substance of Baldwin ’s distortions, they would require an extensive rebuttal, which it is not possible to carry out here.
I shall then confine to the most notable ones.
The most absurd is about religion. It really takes quite an intense academic dishonesty to portray religious attitudes in Europe the way Baldwin does.
As we’ve seen, Baldwin claims that Americans are not significantly more religious than Europeans from Catholic countries because in some of the latter people would feel “more religious”.
This indicator is highly misleading. Feeling religious has little if nothing to do with permitting your personal religious beliefs to affect public political life, which is the core of the difference between Europe and the US .
In very few, if any, European countries, issues such as abortion and gay marriage draw the same, immense amount of public scrutiny during electoral campaigns as they do in the US. In the allegedly very religious Italy, the law legalizing freedom of choice about abortion was approved definitely in 1978 and has been completely unchallenged ever since.
Moreover, Baldwin is very quick at downplaying church attendance rates in the US , but is forced to acknowledge that they’re higher than in Europe .
But it is the nature and the extent of religious fundamentalism in the US that makes a serious comparison with Europe totally ludicrous. In the US you have immensely influential pastors, with millions and millions of followers, such as the late Jerry Falwell, endorsing the most radical political-religious platforms.
The most relevant example is given by the Southern Baptist Convention, the second largest religious group in the USA (see for example http://www.demographia.com/db-religusa2002.htm.) During the last presidential campaign, the SBC organized a 40 days prayer vigil where, among other things, believers would be indoctrinated as how to choose the “right” political candidate. Under the section “Wisdom to elect the best officials”, including enjoyable sub-sections like “God to raise up candidates”, biblical quotations would inspire the correct selection. The agenda of the vigil is readily available on line: http://ilivevalues.com/documents/prayer/40_Day_Guide-full.pdf (see especially pages 4 and following.)
This not to say that the overwhelming majority of Americans endorse these excesses. Still, it is absolutely impossible to find equally influential religious groups in Europe who would have ever done something like that.
The second major distortion of the article concerns environmental policies.
First, there’s no way to downplay the importance of the Kyoto protocol, which the US has refused to ratify.
Global warming has become a global threat to the same survival of the planet as we know it today. The same international bodies who provided key evidence leading to the Kyoto negotiations, has provided recently definitive confirmation of this threat (see http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg1.htm)
Nevertheless, the response to this environmental challenge couldn’t have been more different across the Atlantic . Baldwin, studiously enough, does not mention that Europe has been totally united in endorsing Kyoto . So much so that the entire European Community, not just each European country, is a signatory of the Kyoto Protocol: http://unfccc.int/files/na/application/pdf/kp_ratification20090624.pdf.
The reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is related to energy production policies, but also to efficiency standards. It does underscore major differences in the organization of the economy.
The US refusal to ratify the protocol of Kyoto has deep, significant domestic roots.
Baldwin fails to recall that during the Clinton administration the US Senate, which is in charge with ratification of international treaties, rejected overwhelmingly not only the Kyoto negotiations, but also any treaty imposing reductions of gas emissions. The so called “Byrd-Hagel” resolution, no. 98 of 105th Congress, First Session, approved unanimously, put it as bluntly: ” [...] it is the sense of the Senate that–
(1) the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol to, or other agreement regarding, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992, at negotiations in Kyoto in December 1997, or thereafter, which would–
(A) mandate new commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions [...]”
The US strong opposition to Kyoto precedes, does not start with, the Bush administration.
As to the matter of oil consumption, Baldwin produces again a great deal of misinformation. For example, rejecting figures about oil consumption per capita in the US , he quotes oil consumption per GDP unit instead, in order to show that such ratio has declined considerably in comparison to Europe .
But this is totally off the mark. The ratio oil-energy/GDP may decline even if energy consumption actually goes up, as long as GDP grows faster: if energy consumption goes up by 2%, but GDP rises by 4% oil per unit of GDP falls. Frankly, it is quite embarrassing that an academic like Baldwin made such a blatant mistake.
Baldwin also neglects the importance of lobbying in the US energy policy. For historical reasons too, nowhere in Europe are oil corporations as influential as in the US . Their massive lobbying even prevented the adoption of fuel efficiency standards, which are commonly used in Europe . The US reliance on oil and its dramatic consumption of energy cannot be explained away by pointing to GDP ratios.
More importantly, however, the available statistics on energy consumption per GDP unit do not support Baldwin ’s claims at all.
What UN indicators call “Energy intensity” is much higher in the US than in almost any European country, with the exception of Iceland (http://unstats.un.org/unsd/ENVIRONMENT/Questionnaires/country_snapshots.htm)
Another issue that deserves comments is education. Baldwin makes the typical mistake of relying simply on attainment levels: instead of focusing on what American study or read, or on students’ performance, Baldwin sticks to statistics about how many Americans hold a degree.
This does not substantiate much. If you set to find out about educational standards, you need to show what subjects are studied, to what level, the accuracy of the sources and how students perform at that.
Admittedly, much of these standards are conventional, as it may be difficult to argue that a particular curriculum is “better”, or “more “suitable” than another.
In any event, the bottom line is that there’s strong evidence showing that the educational performance across the US is extremely uneven, much more than in Europe , and that educational performance in many important subjects fall far short of European standards.
First, there’s the question of education financing. Federal spending per student in public school is a very misleading criterion. Why? Because no matter how much the federal government spends for each public school in absolute terms, federal outlays still accounts for a negligible share of school funding.
The Department of Education reports that primary and secondary education in the US is supported overwhelmingly by State and, often even more by, local authorities, with the federal government contributing (http://nces.ed.gov/ccd/pubs/npefs03/tables.asp). Resulting disparities in school quality across the nation, contingent on each state economic performance, are obvious.
For example, local administrations get their resources mostly by taxation on property. It follows that schools quality changes dramatically depending on whether students reside in a high income district or not.
This is a very well known fact in the US , also reported by numerous private organizations trying to fight this inequality. The most famous and authoritative is probably Teachers for America , which provides abundant statistics about the educational marginalization of millions of Americans (www.teachforamerica.org/mission/national_injustice.htm).
By contrast, in Europe , primary and secondary education is financed overwhelmingly by national income taxation. Accordingly, disparities in schools quality are not nearly as strong as they are in the US . This contrast in the means of financing does NOT point to better education in Europe , but DOES underscore a fundamentally different ideology in terms of social policy.
Another key difference in US and European educational systems, totally ignored by Baldwin , is given by educational standards
In most European countries, the central government set specific national educational standards for primary and secondary schools, which include the attainment of a significant knowledge in a number of subjects as a necessary degree requirement.
By contrast, in the US each state and even local school boards retain the power of determining educational achievement standards. This is another factor causing educational performance to vary considerably across the nation.
Mississippi could determine that you’re proficient in history if you know that George Washington was not a peanuts dealer, whereas in New York you may not be proficient even if you know in detail about Reagan’s policies in Central America throughout the 1980s.
Indeed, the most accurate reports about educational standards in the US do confirm that plenty of states set achievement scores at low levels.
Consider for example the report “The proficiency Illusion”, published by the Fordham Institute in 2007. The report goes as far as pointing to the “the folly of a big modern nation, worried about its
global competitiveness, nodding with approval as Wisconsin
sets its eighth-grade reading passing level at the 14th percentile
while South Carolina sets its at the 71st percentile. A youngster
moving from middle school in Boulder to high school in
Charleston would be grievously unprepared for what lies
ahead. So would a child moving from third grade in Detroit
to fourth grade in Albuquerque .”
As to students’ performance, consider first some of the findings of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), a survey published every five years by the US department of Education. According to the 2006 results, made public in 2007, 53% of twelve graders (approximately high school graduates) in the US performed below basic in US history: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/main2006/2007474.pdf (see page 9).
On the other hand, in its 2006 report, The National Geographic Society highlighted the young Americans’ shockingly poor performance not only in geography, but also in the knowledge of foreign world in general(http://www.nationalgeographic.com/roper2006/findings.html.) Among the findings: Only 37% of young Americans can find Iraq on a map—though U.S. troops have been there since 2003.
6 in 10 young Americans don’t speak a foreign language fluently.
Half of young Americans can’t find New York on a map.
I challenge Prof. Baldwin to show that most European students didn’t know, as early as 2006, where Iraq was or that over 50% of high school graduates from any European country performed insufficiently in the study of their own history.
I cannot be supportive in any way of Prof. Baldwin’s approach and conclusions for a very simple reason: despite appearances to the contrary, they do not advance at all a constructive debate in transatlantic relations. Far from it.
Baldwin does not focus on “general” differences between the European and the American geopolitical areas, but, by and large, on very specific issues, such as health care, wealth distribution, crime, religion and environment: exactly those areas where the differences between USA and Europe have proven, unfortunately, very sharp.
If he had claimed that, despite these differences, Europeans and Americans are not necessarily bound to move farther apart, BECAUSE THEY DO CONVERGE IN OTHER AREAS, then I could have certainly agreed. But Baldwin doesn’t do it.
I enjoyed your article. Not to nitpick, but…
When speaking of big tent names “the developed world” is an anachronism. Japan, South Korea, and Singapore are considered “developed” by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Together, we are talking about almost 200 million folks who are not “Western” or “Atlantists”, etc. Japan is no longer the sole non-Western developed nations, and the way things look the Pacific club will get larger in the next 50 years.
[...] intresserad av likheter och olikheter mellan de nordamerikanska och europeiska samhällena. ”A narrower Atlantic: Despite America’s move to the left under Obama, it’s still assumed that Europe and [...]
Thank you for a well written and interesting article Mr Baldwin.
Dario: Unfortunately, I find your rebuttal less than convincing. I agree that perhaps a more stringent statistical methodology may lead to different conclusions, but I fear you’ve fallen into the very hole you seemed to dig for the author. Namely, you seem to only pick specific points that are convenient to carry your argument…and for which another could easily pick a separate set of points to refute (in religion, education, etc.).
Using what could be described as a reverse scientific method, by which one seems to have a foregone conclusion and then fit convenient ‘facts’ to it (and disregard all others), doesn’t provide much value to the debate.
Yes, Obama want to change full pattern of U.S.but see what is happening in America, all super rich making havoc against Obama, they are play ever green card of race against him, some call him Hitler, some crying of his fake birth certificate, some call him socialist.
I do not think he will be successful as a president of U.S.
In next election he must return to Chicago.
I have to agree with Dario, he thinks that Baldwin confined himself to rebuking tradition criticism on the US, and this is exactly what Mr. Baldwin did. Some statistics used made me laugh, for example “Child poverty rates, which are scandalously high in the US, fall to below British, Italian and Spanish levels if we look at the figures for whites only.” This is absolutely ridiculous. Maybe let us compare American and European culture by looking only at people who have just migrated to the US from Europe, and using that argument we can say that the US and Europe are culturally identical?
This is an admirably researched article and Baldwin has made clever use of all the data that is available.
Peter Baldwin’s article, however, demonstrates the wiiiiide gap which exists in between US-American and European scholarship: He has written a “typical American” argumentative essay” supporting and forcing his argument by making selective use of statistical data, whereas we over here in good old Europe (still) attempt to do “objective” academic work and to write “balanced” studies presenting a fair account of the subject in question.
However, since that theory of objectivism in academic research has long since been challenged and many a so-called “objective” account of facts has long since been detected to be just as subjective and perspectivist as all other learned studies as well, I don’t see any problem with the American model of doing scholarship along argumentative hypotheses anymore, as long as there are others which represent the opposite argument with the same force. And they didn’t take long to show up, as is to be seen on this webpage. Even those who honestly attempt to write a fair and balanced article about a certain subject have to select their data and fall victim to their subconscious contemporanean prejudices and values.
Having lived on both sides of the Atlantic – and also visited other parts of the world – I would even say that the US and Europe are much more closer to each other in the most decisive aspect of their cultures, i.e. capitalism: While most Americans tend to be shocked by Continental Europe’s high taxation rates, one has to note that tax rates in Continental Europe are high only for income taxes, affecting primarily the ordinary employees and the lower middle classes. The upper middle class and the elites have found many ways to evade being taxed or to reduce taxation substantially. And when it comes to inheritance taxes, one has not only to note that wealthy European heirs have to face much lower taxation rates compared to the American level, but to take into consideration that many a European country has completely abolished estate duties. So who is more “capitalist” then, the US or Europe?