Wednesday, September 01, 2004
Gee Mom when I grow up I want to live 12- by 10-foot glass box with 6,000 scorpions for 36 consecutive days....
OK this my French bashers should like:
Alabama, France of the South
If the European Union were a U.S. state, it would rank forty-seventh in per capita GDP, according to a report from Timbro, a Swedish free-market think tank. (Yes, there really is one.) In annual income the average European is on a par with residents of Mississippi, West Virginia, and Arkansas. (And the report excludes the newer, poorer EU nations of Eastern Europe.) The picture isn't much rosier even in wealthier European states like France and Britain, both of which have per capita GDPs slightly lower than Alabama's. Only tiny Luxembourg scores better than the American average. The United States' material advantage extends beyond income: Americans spend 77 percent more annually than Europeans, own more appliances, and (presumably thanks to our wide open spaces) have homes providing, on average, 721 square feet per person—nearly twice the average size of European residences. The study's authors allow that fast-growing GDP is "not the be all and end all of happiness and prosperity," citing more "intangible" (and quintessentially European) factors such as equality, leisure time, and the environment. But they note, with a defensiveness undoubtedly endemic among Swedish free-marketeers, that "material resources" are a "precondition of much of the wellbeing which people like to call intangible."
Fredrik Bergström and Robert Gidehag, Timbro
OK this my French bashers should like:
Alabama, France of the South
If the European Union were a U.S. state, it would rank forty-seventh in per capita GDP, according to a report from Timbro, a Swedish free-market think tank. (Yes, there really is one.) In annual income the average European is on a par with residents of Mississippi, West Virginia, and Arkansas. (And the report excludes the newer, poorer EU nations of Eastern Europe.) The picture isn't much rosier even in wealthier European states like France and Britain, both of which have per capita GDPs slightly lower than Alabama's. Only tiny Luxembourg scores better than the American average. The United States' material advantage extends beyond income: Americans spend 77 percent more annually than Europeans, own more appliances, and (presumably thanks to our wide open spaces) have homes providing, on average, 721 square feet per person—nearly twice the average size of European residences. The study's authors allow that fast-growing GDP is "not the be all and end all of happiness and prosperity," citing more "intangible" (and quintessentially European) factors such as equality, leisure time, and the environment. But they note, with a defensiveness undoubtedly endemic among Swedish free-marketeers, that "material resources" are a "precondition of much of the wellbeing which people like to call intangible."
Fredrik Bergström and Robert Gidehag, Timbro
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