Brian Leiter cites statistics purporting to show that residents of European and other Western social democracies are better off than Americans, thereby demonstrating the superiority of social democracy. A few comments on this.
First, if we measure things by revealed preferences, i.e., voting with their feet, this seems false. For example, the number of Canadians moving to the U.S. dwarfs the number moving in the opposite direction, and, anecdotally, despite living in cosmopolitan cities I don’t recall any American I’ve met in my entire life permanently settling in Europe, and I would guess the stats would support my impression that immigration is almost entirely westward.
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.
Third, the differences between the U.S. and other countries can be grossly exaggerated. Take the vaunted “lack of national health care” in the U.S. The U.S. in fact has a quasi-socialized health system, in the sense that the government pays most (yes, most!) of the health care costs (from Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration) and is responsible for a good chunk of the remainder (through tax subsidies, mandates to insurance companies, mandates re emergency care, etc.). Indeed, I remember seeing a study noted in the Economist a while ago showing that the private sector in the U.S. doesn’t account for a substantially larger share of health care spending than in many European nations, but that the U.S. health care system has just been socialized in a more haphazard and inefficient way, creating greater costs while insuring fewer people. Indeed, because the U.S. has higher per capita GNP than the Canada and Europe, the U.S. spends more per student, including per poor student, on elementary education, and, I would wager, in many states more on welfare. So it’s not like we are comparing Nozick to Rawls when comparing the U.S. to other Western democracies, at worst it’s like comparing Dukakis to Gerald Ford, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the U.S. acually actually spends more per capita (due to its great wealth) on the poor (of course, if you define poverty circularly as a percentage of the median wealth, this still makes the U.S. look stingy).
UPDATE: Oh, and it’s been pointed out in various places in the blogospher that Brian’s stats are questionable, in any event. Infant mortality is measured differently in the U.S. than in Europe, making American stats look worse; poverty is define relative to median income, when it should be defined in absolute terms; and I don’t think anyone in their right mind would trade Israel’s health care system for the U.S.’s but Israelis live longer than Americans–it’s called diet and exercise.
UPDATE 2: Leiter has responded. I’m supposed to be on a blogging slowdown, but a few quick thoughts: (1) Israel has the largest gaps between rich and poor other than the U.S. It also purports to be a Social Democracy, and it also has longer lifespans than the U.S., despite what appears to an outside observer to be an incredibly crappy health care system, and despite being significantly poorer than the U.S. What does this mean? Who knows. Maybe Israel’s ethnic heterogeneity, including the discrimination suffered by the Arab population, accounts for the rich/poor gap. Maybe the Mediterranean diet accounts for the lifespan, while Americans’ short lifespans have a lot to do with our obesity. Disaggretating the effects of welfare states on lifespans is certainly beyond either Brian or my capactities, but no economist or statistician has been able to detect a solid relationship between health care spending and lifespan in advance democracies. The Japanese have the longest lifespans in the world, and they have the least Social Democratic system other than the U.S. (2) Whatever the reason the U.S. has such a big military, that money doesn’t get spent on consumption, and allows Canada, especially, to pump up its stats on human welfare; I wasn’t trying to defend current levels of military spending by the U.S. so much as to point out that such spending reduces public welfare in the U.S. but not in Canada; (3) The U.S., when it does socialize things, does a terrible job at it; Medicare is a completely socialized system, but it basically puts no limits on health care, no rationing as in Europe, so spending on it is, and has been, virtually out of control; combine an individualistic, lawsuit-happy society with socialism, and you get the worst of both worlds; (4) the U.S. tries to save more preemies than other countries, and also counts as mortality babies who live only a few seconds, hence the differnces in how infant mortality is measured; (5) the poor in the U.S. lack access to good schools, safe neighborhoods, etc., but rarely to food, shelter,or even t.v.s, stereos, and DVD players. Charles Murray eloquently argued years back that the problems in the schools, neighborhoods, etc., can be attributed to “liberal” policies taking away the ability of the poor to control their own communities by creating safe neighborhoods, but the argument is too detailed to go into here; (6) of the U.S. spends more per poor person than any other country, that wouldn’t necessarily make the U.S. the most equalitarian country, but it should, given Leiter’s premises, give the U.S. the best “scores” for lifespan, infant survival, etc. Since it doesn’t, this suggests that the statistics are not the results of the poor in the U.S. being mistreated relative to the poor elsewhere, unless one could show that the cost of living in the U.S. is so much higher that it overcomes the extra money spent on the poor.
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