German Joys

Safe European Home

The Washington Post reports on the far-reaching consequences of the "precautionary principle":

From its crackdown on antitrust practices in the computer industry to its rigorous protection of consumer privacy, the European Union has adopted a regulatory philosophy that emphasizes the consumer. Its approach to managing chemical risks, which started with a trickle of individual bans and has swelled into a wave, is part of a European focus on caution when it comes to health and the environment.

"There's a strong sense in Europe and the world at large that America is letting the market have a free ride," said Sheila Jasanoff, professor of science and technology studies at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "The Europeans believe . . . that being a good global citizen in an era of sustainability means you don't just charge ahead and destroy the planet without concern for what you're doing."

Under the E.U. laws, manufacturers must study and report the risks posed by specific chemicals. Through the Internet, the data will be available for the first time to consumers, regulators and potential litigants around the world. Until now, much of that information either did not exist or was closely held by companies.

The precautionary principle shows us another cultural difference between the European and Anglo-Saxon worlds: attitudes toward techological innovation -- especially when it comes to things you put in or near your body, such as food, chemicals, or drugs.  The precautionary principle 'fits' European sensibilities, and is hardly controversial here, except among certain industry boosters. 

The median attitude toward technological risk in the Anglo-Saxon world is more risk-friendly than on the Continent; thus, England and the U.S. produce more risk-takers than Europe does.  (Note that I'm not talking about risk-taking in general.  I've met plenty of ordinary Europeans, for instance, who have backpacked through parts of the world that the average Brit would think twice about even mentioning.)  One example of techno-risk taking  is drug early-adopters.  I don't know a single European who would take a brain-chemistry-altering drug unless it was specifically prescribed by a doctor (and sometimes, not even then).

Yet England and the USA are filled with people who will do just this.  Consider this article by Johann Hari, an English writer who decided to test whether the anti-narcolepsy drug Provigil would help him concentrate (it did).  In the end, he stopped, saying it was just too risky, considering "our lack of knowledge of what it does to the brain."  But the average European wouldn't even have started taking it in the first place.  Prozac is another example; plenty of respectable psychiatrists and psychologists in the U.S. have argued that if it makes you happier and more stable and doesn't have many side effects, you should probably just keep taking it for the rest of your life.  After all, why wouldn't you want to be happier, more productive, and more stable?  This argument strikes most Europeans as rather creepy, if not sinister.

As with almost all the points I make on this blog, whether you think the European attitude is cringing Luddism or the American attitude is post-human mad-scientist tinkering will probably depend on your perspective...

UPDATE: For more on the title, go here.

Status Reproduction in the U.S. and Europe

In a New York Times article about the American electorate's allergy to elitism, we find the following quotation:

In a nation without a titled aristocracy, an elite education may well be the most important membership card. “American elites have a problem that the Europeans don’t, which is how to assure that their children and their children’s children retain their elevated social position,” said Jason Kaufman, a Harvard sociologist who has written on elites and American culture. “Americans do this through cultural institutions and exclusion — art museums, classical music and tremendously elitist universities.”

Shouldn't read too much into a stray quotation, but, unlike Kaufman, I don't think there's much difference in the way American and European elites reproduce their status.

European countries have abolished privileges attaching to hereditary titles.  Your name may have a "von" or a "de" in it, but that doesn't get you any formal, explicit privileges, except in the very highest reaches of the nobility.  Most of the titled Europeans I know work in ordinary jobs, and have the same concerns as the rest of us.  Of course, noble families do tend to be richer than others, which always helps.  And, as an acquaintance of mine who's a baroness recently told me, the title helps in everyday transactions with government bureaucrats and suspicious landlords.  But if you get poor grades or have no talent, even the most august title isn't going to help you rocket to the top of any hierarchy.  At most, it'll prevent you from dropping out of sight.

In one way, young members of the European nobility have it worse than wealthy Americans: Europe's state-dominated education system has no real counterpart to America's sprawling network of non-selective private colleges of the dumb rich, who will happily accept giant tuition checks to make sure junior gets some college degree, and will even arrange discreet rehab-clinic stays if necessary.  In Europe, a wealthy 19-year old with a glittering title will have to compete against the hoi polloi to get into a state university, because those are the only institutions that confer real prestige.  Most of them do get in, of course, since the less...er, diligent young viscounts will get help from tutors and boarding schools.  But if even that doesn't get them into university, there's no real fall-back option available to them in Europe -- which is why they are often to be found at American colleges of the dumb rich.

Aside from the universities, then, the things Kaufman identifies as markers of cultural cachet for Americans -- museums and classical music -- are used exactly the same way in Europe.  Bourdieu's Distinction says it all here; in fact, one of the main themes of Distinction is that the importance of refined tastes as a sign of social status steadily increased in Europe at the same time as, and because, traditional hereditary privilege was being dismantled.  Especially in Germany, drawing excess attention to your title or wealth is taboo, so in order to establish status distinction, you'll have to sit through a few boring classical concerts, get that precious doctorate (g), and read some books about art and philosophy now and then, just like all your non-titled friends.  (There are also a lot of people who genuinely love art and classical music, bless  their souls, but here, I'm talking about the multitudes who use these things mainly as status markers.)

Multitudes Behind Bars

The latest New York Times story about unique features of the American legal system, "U.S. Inmate Count Dwarfs Other Nations'" looks at the number of people in prison in the U.S.  In a nutshell:

1. The U.S. has the largest number of people behind bars, and the highest per-capita incarceration rate of any country (Russia is second).
2. This is not primarily about America's racial divisions or general violence level: minorities are overrepresented in prison everywhere, and European countries have comparable levels of assault, but much lower levels of murder.  Over half of the murder-rate discrepancy is explained by the number of guns in circulation in the U.S.
3. About the same proportion of people go into prison each year in the U.S. and in other countries, but they stay there longer in the U.S. because they get longer prison sentences.
4. Crime and violence are treated as matters for expert resolution in other countries, but they are seen as political issues in the U.S., which means public demand for longer prison terms translates into law quickly and effectively.
5. Lots of the difference between foreign and U.S. imprisonment rates comes from laws which impose prison sentences for minor drug offenses and property crimes, which rarely lead to prison terms anywhere but America.

It's good to see this much-misunderstood topic being addressed in the U.S. press.  Tyler Cowen rightly calls over-incarceration one of the underreported scandals of American society.*  And there's a nice comparative angle to the piece, too.  The author interviews Michael Tonry and James Whitman, who've done a lot of good work on the question why America has such a drastically higher incarceration rate than comparable countries.

European commentators sometimes exaggerate differences between the U.S. and Europe, but here, there really is a wide gulf.  Western European penal codes typically use prison as a last resort, mandate that sentences be as short as possible, and that prisons themselves should reduce the harm caused by confinement and prepare the prisoner to lead a crime-free life upon release.  The result is a policy that reserves actual prison time only for serious offenders, and sends people to prison for a fraction as long as they go in America.  There's been a conscious policy choice in countries like the Netherlands and Germany to respond to most non-serious crimes (non-lethal assaults and burglaries, drug use and sales, prostitution) with reactions less than imprisonment.  The theory is that these peoples' problems can be managed in the community, and sending them to prison will only aggravate their problems.

Of course, not all ordinary voters agree with these policies.  However, they have no real chance of influencing them.  In Europe, criminal justice policy is made by the national legislature in close cooperation with criminologists, psychologists, and lawyers.  There's no direct public influence (the same can be said of monetary or foreign policy in the U.S.).  This can be controversial, especially after some high-profile incident of recidivism.  Mass-market tabloids will complain of how soft-on-crime judges and lawyers are, just as they do in the U.S.  However, as with so many topics of public outrage, the only result is a few tabloid headlines and a few dozens irate letters to the editor.  Then, everything fizzles.

To get to a point where ordinary Germans could actually exercise direct influence over criminal-justice policy, they'd have to mount a sustained grass-roots campaign and overcome innumerable structural and political hurdles (such as the fact that judges are chosen by a civil-service system that insulates them from external political influence).  Since this isn't feasible, Germans who would like to see tougher criminal laws have only one real choice: switch their vote to another political party.  But even that doesn't bring significant change.  Although political parties in Germany disagree on some aspects of criminal-justice policy, they all agree that making criminal-justice policy should be left to the experts.  In Europe, political grandstanding about crime is just that: grandstanding.  No matter how outraged they become, ordinary citizens can never force drastic increases in penalties. 

Interlude: Education Wonkery

I don't recommend doing so, but if you want to send a German into full-on, spittle-flecked rant mode, just mention four short letters, PISA.  That's the OECD's much-criticized but closely-tracked international comparison of education systems.  If you listened to the resulting PISA rant, you'd think the German education system was collapsing.  But after you've lived here a while, you realize that in this nation of Henny Pennies, anything Germans talk about will seem to be going to hell in a handbasket.  Germany's public-school system actually does decently in international comparison (about the same as France), and generally beats the U.S.

Apropos German public education, Kevin Drum links to a study on school excellence (.pdf) by McKinsey Consulting (!): "School systems, from Seoul to Chicago, from London to New Zealand, and from Helsinki to Singapore, show that making teaching the preferred career choice depends less on high salaries or 'culture' than it does on a small set of simple but critical policy choices: developing strong processes for selecting and training teachers, paying good starting compensation, and carefully managing the status of the teaching profession."

So, it's not teacher pay and benefits in general that make the difference, but rather starting pay.  As Drum puts it: "Gotta nab the bright kids straight out of college before they settle into product management jobs at Lever Brothers."  And look where Germany lands!  Starting teacher pay in Germany, as a percentage of GDP per capita, is almost 50% higher than it is in the U.S.  According to McKinsey, this extra money does seem to attract talented people.  Not that they'd admit it: as in so many other areas of life, what people say about their motivations doesn't exactly correspond to what they do:

In fact, salary is rarely stated to be one of the most important reasons for becoming a teacher, even in systems where compensation is good; in the words of one Finnish teacher, "None of us do this for the money."  However, the surveys also show that unless school systems offer salaries which are in-line with other graduate starting salaries, these same people do not enter teaching.

The numbers above probably understate the difference in living standards for beginning teachers in the U.S. and in Germany.  In the U.S., teachers generally graduate from college with large debts, don't get paid during summer vacation, and, may have to commute far out of town to find housing they can afford.  This explains why many places in the U.S. have introduced subsidy programs to help new teachers find decent housing or pay off their education debts.  Public school teachers as charity cases -- fancy that!  I've never heard of similar programs in Germany, because beginning teachers make a comfortable salary (see above) and graduate with only a tiny fraction of the debt that their U.S. counterparts have to contend with.

The study also advises countries to confer high status on teachers.  Teachers in Germany generally earn the right to become official civil servants (Beamter), which brings with it a smorgasbord of benefits that are the envy of every red-blooded German.  Most American public-school teachers also enjoy civil-service protections but they're not comparable with the extroardinary perks a German Beamter gets.

But here's the question that's probably on the tip of everyone's tongues right about now.  If Germany does spend so much money and confer so much status on public school teachers, shouldn't they be doing much better in the international league table?  I'm willing to cut Germany some slack against tiny, 'boutique' nations like Finland and Singapore, but Germany is also getting its hat handed to it by large, diverse nations like Canada and Australia.  The McKinsey study downplays 'cultural' factors, but you perhaps some are at work here...

Commercial Bail Bonds in the U.S.

In the latest of an occasional series on aspects of the U.S. justice system that are unique in the world, Adam Liptak of the New York Times looks at commercial bail bonds:

Here as in many other areas of the law, the United States goes it alone. American law is, by international standards, a series of innovations and exceptions. From the central role played by juries in civil cases to the election of judges to punitive damages to the disproportionate number of people in prison, the United States has charted a distinctive and idiosyncratic legal path.

Bail is meant to make sure defendants show up for trial. It has ancient roots in English common law, which relied on sworn promises and on pledges of land or property from the defendants or their relatives to make sure they did not flee.

America’s open frontier and entrepreneurial spirit injected an innovation into the process: by the early 1800s, private businesses were allowed to post bail in exchange for payments from the defendants and the promise that they would hunt down the defendants and return them if they failed to appear.

After reading the article, I found myself -- to my surprise -- of two minds about the practice of commercial bail bonding.  The downside is, of course, that people have to pay a non-refundable fee in order to enjoy their freedom before their trial.  Forty percent of them end up not being convicted of anything, but that doesn't mean they get their fee back.  Most of the people paying these fees are also of very modest means.

On the other hand, the system seems to do a pretty good job of making sure that most people (1) spend most of the time before their trial outside of jail; and (2) show up for court at the appointed time.  European countries, in which options for avoiding pretrial detention are much more limited, often draw criticism from human rights groups for excessive pre-trial detention; in fact, this is a recurrent issue within and beyond Germany -- see here, here and here (g).  I'm not pointing any fingers or drawing any policy conclusions (yet), but it's worth thinking about.

Teaching the Dismal Science in Europe and the USA

Stephan Theil, in this article, criticizes German and French economics education for slagging free enterprise and indoctrinating students into a regulation-friendly ideology.  Here's what Theil says about German textbooks:

Germans teach their young people a similar economic narrative, with a slightly different emphasis. The focus is on instilling the corporatist and collectivist traditions of the German system. Although each of Germany’s 16 states sets its own education requirements, nearly all teach through the lens of workplace conflict between employer and employee, the central battle being over wages and work rules. If there’s one unifying characteristic of German textbooks, it’s the tremendous emphasis on group interests, the traditional social-democratic division of the universe into capital and labor, employer and employee, boss and worker. Textbooks teach the minutiae of employer-employee relations, workplace conflict, collective bargaining, unions, strikes, and worker protection. Even a cursory look at the country’s textbooks shows that many are written from the perspective of a future employee with a union contract. Bosses and company owners show up in caricatures and illustrations as idle, cigar-smoking plutocrats, sometimes linked to child labor, Internet fraud, cell-phone addiction, alcoholism, and, of course, undeserved layoffs. The successful, modern entrepreneur is virtually nowhere to be found.

More Pornography; Fewer Sex Crimes?

Whlie doing some completely legitimate research for a thought-provoking academic project, I came across this online paper, which seems to show that liberalizing pornography laws is generally followed by decreases in the incidence of sex crimes in advanced societies (of course, the usual caveats about correlation not implying causation apply):

Within Japan itself, the dramatic increase in available pornography and sexually explicit materials is apparent to even a casual observer. This is concomitant with a general liberalization of restrictions on other sexual outlets as well. Also readily apparent from the information presented is that, over this period of change, sex crimes in every category, from rape to public indecency, sexual offenses from both ends of the criminal spectrum, significantly decreased in incidence.

Most significantly, despite the wide increase in availability of pornography to children, not only was there a decrease in sex crimes with juveniles as victims but the number of juvenile offenders also decreased significantly.

These findings are similar to, but are even more striking than, those reported with the rise of sexually explicit materials in Denmark, Sweden and West Germany. The findings from Europe were, in turn, more dramatic than those reported for the United States. Kutchinsky (1991) studied the situation in Denmark, Sweden, West Germany and the U.S.A. following the legalization or liberalization of the appropriate pornography laws in those countries. The first three countries mentioned, decriminalized the production and distribution of sexually explicit materials in 1969, 1970, and 1973 respectively....

Kutchinsky found (1991) that in Denmark and Sweden adult rapes increased only modestly and in West Germany not at all. In all three countries, nonviolent sex crimes decreased. The slight increase in Denmark and Sweden, was thought by some most probably due to increased reporting as a result of greater and increasing awareness among women and police of the rape problem (Kutchinsky, 1985b, pp. 323). In Japan too, over the two decades reviewed in the present study, there was also most probably an increasing likelihood of reporting which makes the decrease in sex crimes seen in Japan even more impressive.

U.S. Healthcare Lags in Preventing the Preventable

From Kevin Drum, a study that compares the 19 most highly-developed nations in the world on the basis of their success in preventing "amenable mortality," that is, deaths from preventable causes such as "bacterial infections, treatable cancers, diabetes, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease, and complications of common surgical procedures."  Kevin sums it up pretty well, so I'll just shamelessly reprint the original post, snark and all:

A pair of researchers has just published an update that compares various countries on their rates of "amenable mortality," defined as deaths that are "potentially preventable with timely and effective health care." In 1997, the United States ranked 15th out of 19 industrialized countries. So how are we doing now?

Answer: we're now 19th out of 19. The rest of the countries have improved their performance by an average of 16%, while the U.S., that well-known engine of healthcare innovation, has improved by only 4%. So now we're in last place.

But there's a bright side: at least our healthcare isn't funded by the government, like it is in France. Keep that in mind if someone you know dies of preventable causes. Their odds would have been a whole lot better in Paris, but who'd want to live in a socialist hellhole like that anyway?

This difference is likely explained not by the fact that American health-care is "worse" across the board, but that there are large gaps in America's health-care system that leave millions of people without easy access to preventive care.  "Public" hospitals, which provide care to the poor and uninsured, have been closing at a fast clip lately, according to the New York Times: "There are 300 fewer public hospitals today than 15 years ago, with hospitals having closed in Los Angeles, Washington, St. Louis and Milwaukee."

The same article describes treatment of a gunshot victim in the emergency room at Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital, which is likewise chronically underfunded, poorly-managed, and facing closure:

The ER did not have a working X-ray machine that night, so doctors had to roll in a portable one to locate the bullet. The X-rays were produced on film rather than digitally, causing a 10-minute delay in diagnosis. There were gurneys without wheels, and a computer system so outdated that doctors had to call up four separate programs to compile records on a single patient.

The very poorest Americans qualify for a government program called Medicaid which pays for their healthcare, but the case-by-case compensation rates for Medicaid are well below the actual cost of the care provided.  If a hospital has to finance the care of too many Medicaid and uninsured patients, and doesn't get enough well-insured patients to make up the resulting shortfall, it will simply go under.

As with America-Europe comparisons in so many other fields (education, political influence, etc.), the pattern in Europe is of stellar health care for the rich, and consistent access to reasonable quality health care for everyone else.  Reasonably good health care is all most people need, and its easy availability in Europe probably goes a long way to explaining the graph above.

In the U.S. there's even more stellar health care for the rich, pretty good healthcare for the middle class, and a drastic drop-off in quality and availability for the lower-middle class and below -- that is, people who cannot afford to pay for the medical services they need.  It's just speculation, but I rather doubt it's preventable deaths among America's upper-middle class that are reflected in the Commonwealth Fund study... 

Italian Aspirin Extortion

From a New York Times article about Italy's malaise:

Small proposals bring protesters to the streets, one hurdle to making changes as protected interests seek to preserve themselves. Pharmacists shut their doors this year when the government threatened to allow supermarkets to sell aspirin. The cost for just 20 aspirin tablets at a pharmacy is $5.75.

It's not just Italy -- this is a European phenomenon.  It seems more than outrageous for Italy's pharmacists to insist on extorting such sums from their customers -- especially in a country that, as the rest of the article makes clear, is sliding into poverty. There's no real reason for pharmacists to exist anymore, except to control the distribution of genuinely dangerous or specialized drugs.  Yet European countries have all sorts of loopholes and subsidies that keep specialty pharmacist shops alive, and that give them monopolies on the distribution of harmless things everyone needs, such as aspirin. 

Now, I'm pretty sympathetic to the goal of these regulations, which seems to be to keep lots of small independent pharmacists in business.  A small businessman who runs a pharmacy likely has more pride and independence than some minimum-wage cashier in an anonymous drugstore chain.  But there has to be a much better way of achieving this goal than giving them a license to gouge their customers...

A Million Johns Can't be Wrong

First, a general note: there will be only light blogging as I visit friends in Berlin this weekend.  Lucky me!  Further, to echo something Atrios said, "I do request that people occasionally pause for a minute before they post a comment."  So far, I think the pretty-much-unmoderated comments policy here works pretty well, but the occasional trolling comment, gratuitous insult or ad hominem attack always makes me reconsider. 

With that friendly request, onto today's topic.  It's a little blue, so send the kiddies to bed. 

According to figures released by the former German government, there are approximately 400,000 prostitutes plying their trade more or less legally in Germany, servicing around 1.2 million men per year day.  I'd say the 1.2 million is an understatement, but that's probably as close as we're going to get to official numbers on this subject. 

My local public-radio station just interviewed some of the men and women (G) in this trade.  Of course, you never know how reliable these informants are, but none struck me as totally implausible.  Some of their voices seemed to have been disguised.  The johns ranged from a divorced father of three who liked to visit conventional bordellos to a younger single man who frequented a street in the Rhineland known for street prostitution.  The men gave the usual reasons for prostitution: not enough sex from their wives or girlfriends, or not the kind they want (there still seems to be a taboo against oral sex in Europe), inability to start relationships with women (too shy/too busy), or a decision, after several failed relationships, that paid sex is better than no sex at all.  One of the men said that he knew full well that sex was supposed to be best when it was experienced as a "whole" along with love and companionship, but that paid sex was still worthwhile because it created at least an echo of the "whole" experience.  (Isn't that basically what television does?).

Only one prostitute was interviewed, 'Elvira'.  She said she began working to finance a heroin habit, but has since gone clean and gotten a traineeship in a "reputable" firm.  She still nevertheless goes out on the street once a week for adventure -- to "dive in" to another world -- and to supplement her pay so that she and her child can afford some luxuries once in a while.  Most of the men don't want anything particularly adventurous; many want nothing but oral sex ("french style", in German slang), because they can't get it from their significant other. (This, by the way, is probably the number one complaint about German women in the masculine world.  Ladies Respected female colleagues, don't flame me in comments, I'm just passing it on.)  When asked whether she was turning tricks voluntarily, she thought for a minute, and said yes.  She feels sorry for the women who are obviously drug-addicted, and thinks the men who hire them are creeps.  She also finds the language the johns use to desrcibe the women in online forums degrading.

The largely legal status of prostitution in Germany is one of the most interesting points of cultural comparison (I say "largely" because not all aspects of the trade are legal; the details are complex, and I don't want to bore you with them here).  The political polarities surrounding prostitution are very different from those in the U.S.; the recent left-wing Red-Green government, far from trying to eliminate prostitution as inherently degrading and dangerous to women, instead passed a "prostitution law" to give working women some rights.  The new grand coalition government has not sought to repeal the law; the consensus you find in Germany is that prostitution is an inevitable part of all human societies, so trying to wipe it out would be fultile and probably counterproductive.  Besides, prostitution has a long, storied, and more-or-less open history in Europe.  Just because you may not like the Catholic Church doesn't mean you're going to go around tearing down cathedrals.

However, I wonder how long this will last.  Just look at all the public-policy initiatives Germany and/or Europe has taken over from the U.S. in recent years.  (Note that I'm not endorsing any/all of these.  Once again, just passing it on).  Fifteen years ago, Germans were snickering at the puritanical Americans who had outlawed smoking inside public buildings.  Couldn't happen here, they said.  Five years ago, they were chortling at the politically-correct Americans who had destroyed private contractual autonomy by making racial and gender discrimination between private persons illegal.  Couldn't happen here, they said.  They're still amazed to find out that you cannot drink alcohol in public places in the U.S., but the voices are growing ever louder to limit public drinking in Germany as well.  And let's not even mention speed limits on the autobahn...

Is largely-legal prostitution going to be next?  I personally doubt it, but I'm not sure exactly why I doubt it.  Perhaps someone can help me clarify what I think in comments.

UPDATE: A commenter spotted my mistake, it's 1.2 million men per day.  I've corrected the post accordingly.

U.S. Alone in Sentencing Life Without Parole for Minors

The New York Times is starting a series on "commonplace aspects of the American justice system that are actually unique in the world" and begins with the possibility of sentencing juvenile offenders to prison for life without any chance of parole:

In December, the United Nations took up a resolution calling for the abolition of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for children and young teenagers. The vote was 185 to 1, with the United States the lone dissenter.

Indeed, the United States stands alone in the world in convicting young adolescents as adults and sentencing them to live out their lives in prison. According to a new report, there are 73 Americans serving such sentences for crimes they committed at 13 or 14.

James Whitman, whose fine book on comparative criminal justice I've read but never gotten around to reviewing, comments on the differences between U.S. and European thinking on criminal justice: 

Specialists in comparative law acknowledge that there have been occasions when young murderers who would have served life terms in the United States were released from prison in Europe and went on to kill again. But comparing legal systems is difficult, in part because the United States is a more violent society and in part because many other nations imprison relatively few people and often only for repeat violent offenses.

“I know of no systematic studies of comparative recidivism rates,” said James Q. Whitman, who teaches comparative criminal law at Yale. “I believe there are recidivism problems in countries like Germany and France, since those are countries that ordinarily incarcerate only dangerous offenders, but at some point they let them out and bad things can happen.”

The differences in the two approaches, legal experts said, are rooted in politics and culture. The European systems emphasize rehabilitation, while the American one stresses individual responsibility and punishment.

Corrections professionals and criminologists here and abroad tend to agree that violent crime is usually a young person’s activity, suggesting that eventual parole could be considered in most cases. But the American legal system is more responsive to popular concerns about crime and attitudes about punishment, while justice systems abroad tend to be administered by career civil servants rather than elected legislators, prosecutors and judges.

I'll have some comments about this a bit later, as time permits.

Prescription Drugs by Mail? Not Yet.

One of the features of German life that expats notice right away is how expensive and difficult-to-get-at drugs are.  You can get find 100 tablets of aspirin for 99 cents on the shelf of any normal American drugstore. In England, they're a bit more expensive, but still freely available.

In Germany, though you must go an Apotheke -- a licensed pharmacist -- to get these over-the-counter medications. There, you will be required to ask for the aspirin, which is kept behind the counter. It's incredibly expensive. Even the online version in Germany costs more than ten times what it does in the U.S.: 9.38 Euro (G) (about $12.50) for 100 tablets. It apparently has to be imported and re-imported in order to make Internet sale legal.

Yes, we're talking about good old fashioned aspirin here, not some sort of nitroglycerin-laced Super-Aspirin. This price difference might strike you as trivial, unless you're one of the millions of people who are told by their doctors to take aspirin every day. And the same is true of cold medicines, laxatives, and other routine medical products that have some medicinal effect, but that you do not need a prescription (Rezept) for.

This seems to be another example of rent-seeking in the German economy. Nobody doubts that pharmacists (or chemists, if you prefer the British term) should be involved in the distribution of dangerous medications. But once upon a time, German pharmacists were able to convince the legislator that they needed to be in control of distribution of innocuous, everyday stuff like aspirin and cold medicine. They likely dragged out the German show-stopper argument: Sicherheit (safety). How can somebody without a college degree be trusted to dose themselves with something as terrifyingly dangerous as aspirin?* Now they can force anyone who wants to buy aspirin to visit their shops and pay their prices. You can bet they're not going to give that up without a fight.

But alas, as with so much rent-seeking behavior, it's getting a run for its money now. A chain of drugstores in Germany (that is, places in which you can buy soap, fingernail clippers, dishwasher detergent, herbal remedies, vitamins, and pet food -- but not drugs) has decided to wade in to the prescription-drug business. You can go into one of these places, put your prescription in a bag, and it would be filled by a pharmacy in the Netherlands (which operate under fewer restrictions) and shipped back to Germany. You come back a few days later and pick it up while you do your other shopping. Yes, you heard me right -- they ship your prescription to Holland to get it filled.

Of course, this triggered a counter-offensive from various interest groups and government agencies. The Landgericht Düsseldorf (G) has just basically punted on the issue, saying it doesn't have jurisdiction. Nobody knows who will win the legal dispute in the long run. But in the meantime, you'll still have to visit your friendly neighborhood Apotheke for your aspirin.

* Keep this in mind next time you hear someone sneer: "Americans have no sense of personal responsibility -- why, they allow people to sue companies when they injured themselves in the most idiotic ways!"

More on Diversity v. Welfare

In response to Michael's comment, let me expand on the ethnic diversity/social welfare spending post, which I think makes an interesting point that you rarely see in mainstream media commentary.

As I read the Glaeser/Alesina study (I haven't read their entire book), they are making a positive, not a normative argument. Essentially, they assume that racism is simply a part of human nature; that all of us are programmed -- quite possibly genetically -- to prefer associating with people who share our race or ethnicity. As far as I am aware, this assumption is not controversial among evolutionary biologists:

Racism is a subset of ethnocentrism, the tendency to favor genetically, socially, and culturally similar in-groups over alien out-groups. Edward O. Wilson has argued that selection favored those humans who were the quickest to recognize, fear, hate, and drive away or kill strangers, thereby securing a margin of safety for themselves and their kin. It does appear that ethnocentrism, or at least xenophobia, is in some degree biologically programmed.

[David T. Courtwright, Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City, Harvard Univ. Press, p. 31). Of course, this inborn tendency is often reduced by socialization, just as with other evolutionary drives (another example: about 35% of males are willing to say they would commit rape if they could be guaranteed that they'd never be identified or punished).

Surveys consistently uncover plenty of racial and ethnic prejudice across all societies, and usually disprove the contact hypothesis. That is, increased contact with people of difference races or ethnicities is just as likely to deepen your distrust of them as it is to reduce it. I can't tell you how many Germans I've met who denounce anti-black racism in the United States, but then turn right around and lament the 'inherent' laziness and criminality of Turks or Poles. To paraphrase Czeslaw Milosz, it's always the other country's Indians who are the innocent victims of oppression -- the ones in your own country deserved their fate.

People exist who regard race and ethnicity as irrelevant cultural constructs, but this view is widespread only among elites. (Who, in turn, sometimes have a hard time distinguishing the views of the people they meet everyday from the very different views held by majorities of their fellow citizens.) Outside of these elites, average people regard ethnic differences as very real, and very important. How do you identify who's racially or ethnically different? Simple: they look different, they go to a different church, they have different customs, and/or they speak a different language. 

You also learn how to identify 'others' from the your group's collective cultural memory. Just ask any resident of a country that was once part of the Ottoman Empire what they think of 'the Turks', and you'll get an earful. I've already tried this experiment on Bulgarians, Serbs and Greeks, and gotten very similar results. Many houses in these countries contain secret doors -- which their owners will proudly show you -- used for centuries to flee from marauding Turkish soldiers.

These are the not-pretty facts of human nature that explain the social welfare / civic cohesion study results. Assuming some degree of widespread ethnocentrism as a given, you would expect it to be easiest to convince people to participate in collective-welfare schemes if almost all the people who would benefit came from their 'group.' You would expect it to be especially hard to set up these schemes if the people who stood to gain the most from them or to gain disproportionately from them were ethnic minorities. And that's pretty much what you see.

Thus, racism doesn't drive the creation of social-welfare systems; it simply complicates their creation in diverse societies.

Racial Diversity and Social Welfare Spending

The Boston Globe has a piece about American political scientist Robert Putnam's findings that racial and ethnic diversity tends to undermine social cohesion and civic participation. It features the following paragraph:

In a recent study, [Harvard economist Edward] Glaeser and colleague Alberto Alesina demonstrated that roughly half the difference in social welfare spending between the US and Europe...can be attributed to the greater ethnic diversity of the US population. Glaeser says lower national social welfare spending in the US is a "macro" version of the decreased civic engagement Putnam found in more diverse communities within the country.

Which led me to this review (.pdf) of Glaeser and Alesina's book (an earlier paper by the authors themselves making the same points is here (.pdf), which finds that voting systems and racial diversity explain most of the difference in social welfare spending:

Voting systems affect redistribution by changing the incentives of politicians. In majoritarian systems, where each politician represents a single electorate (as in the US and Australian House of Representatives), politicians' main incentive is to look after the interests of their local areas....

By contrast, under systems of proportional representation (as in many European countries and New Zealand), several politicians represent the same district. This leads to a different incentive rather than aligning themselves with a region, politicians tend to develop class-based affiliations, increasing the pressures for universal programs, which often redistribute resources from rich to poor....

The remaining difference in welfare spending, Alesina and Glaeser conclude, can be explained by the fact that the US is more racially diverse. A variety of studies on prejudice have shown that people tend to be hostile to those who are different from them along some salient dimension. Often, the most important dimension is race or ethnicity. In the US, a quarter of the population is African-American or Hispanic. In Sweden, 95 per cent of the population are of the same race, ethnicity and religion. The potential to exploit racial antipathy will therefore be considerably greater in the US than Europe.

That racial diversity is an obstacle to forging a common coalition around distribution from rich to poor has often been noted. Writing in the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels anticipated that America's ethnic divisions would impede the growth of a US socialist movement....

Race and redistribution are powerfully linked. Alesina and Glaeser show that US states that are more ethnically diverse tend to have more negative attitudes towards welfare, and lower levels of social welfare spending. The same pattern holds internationally countries with more racial and ethnic heterogeneity also tend to spend less on welfare programs. The simplest interpretation of this finding is that people are less generous to those who are different from them, but Alesina and Glaeser also highlight another factor: politicians who use racial hatred to discredit redistributive policies. Barry Goldwater, Pat Buchanan, Jorg Haider, Jean-Marie LePen and Pauline Hanson have all used hatred against racial minorities as a way of building an anti-redistribution constituency.

Fits in nicely with Goetz Aly's recent book on National Socialism (G), which argues that Hitler purchased the support of many sectors of German society with promises of social-welfare benefits. National Socialism was really this thesis turned into proactive policy -- ethnic non-Germans were killed or forced into slave labor, and their property was given to ethnic Germans.

To forestall comments from certain readers, let me note, obviously, that neither I nor any of the people cited in this message claim that social welfare programs are an expression of racism. This is just a possible explanation -- one that seems to be getting more convincing every year -- for the difference between American and European social welfare policies.

There Goes the Neighborhood!

I know one frequent commenter who may find this interesting.  A conservative website reports that a recent study of American cities by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam (no right-winger himself) shows that ethnic diversity may have serious drawbacks:

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties.

Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. ... 

Putnam emphasizes that the long-term effects of immigration are generally positive, when there's a responsible policy in place. However, he "acknowledges that most empirical studies do not support the 'contact hypothesis.' [i.e. that tolerance grows with increased contact with people of different ethnicities].  In general, they find that the more people are brought into contact with those of another race or ethnicity, the more they stick to their own, and the less they trust others."

My two cents on this. To me, Putnam's research (assuming it's being accurately portrayed by John Leo, a man with a distinct agenda) confirms the need for an anti-discrimination law like the one Germany passed in 2006. This may seem a bit counter-intuitive, so let me explain my reasoning. First, humans have likely been programmed by evolution to prefer associating with people who share their ethnicity, a point E.O. Wilson made nearly 30 years ago. Yet, the growing interdependence of nations and increased mobility mean that we're coming in ever more frequent contact with people different from us. Germany's already got a lot of immigrants, they're here to stay, and Germany probably needs more of them. What Putnam's research shows (not that it's all that surprising) is that this influx of immigrants will cause strains.

To preserve as much social harmony as possible, a two-way compromise needs to be maintained. First, the immigrants need to adapt, to some reasonable degree, to life in Germany. Second, and as a conscious bargained exchange with the first requirement, Germany needs to make it official policy that, as long as immigrants have made honest efforts to adapt to the extent their abilities permit, access to jobs, housing, and other opportunities will not be restricted based solely on their ethnicity. There's a difference between an employer who has a policy of "only fluent German speakers need apply" and one who has policy of "no Turks need apply." The latter approach needs to be illegal, attempts to achieve it "through the back door" also need to be illegal.

Yes, punishing people who discriminate on the basis of ethnicity costs money, but it's money well-spent.  It shows Germany is keeping its part of the two-way bargain and is therefore justified in demanding integration from immigrants. Put another way, no reasonable immigrant will be satisfied with a social compact that says "You will be discriminated against unless you learn to speak reasonable German and make some effort to fit in. However, even if you do all of that, you might well still be discriminated against by certain powerful people just because your last name is Yildiz or because you're a Muslim. We aren't going to do anything about that, because of freedom of contract, individual automony, blah blah blah."

Sicko Coming to a Theatre Near You

Michael Moore is a big star over here in Germany -- translations of his books top the best-seller lists, and Farhenheit 9/11 did land-office business. (As you might imagine, I have veeerrry mixed feelings about this.) His new mocku-rocku-documentary on the U.S. heathcare system, Sicko, will surely be a hit as well.

The opening scene of the movie, according to Jonathan Cohn's review "portrays...Rick, who accidentally sawed off the tops of two fingers while working at home. With no insurance to pay the bill and limited funds at his disposal, he has to choose whether to have the hospital reattach his middle finger for $60,000 or his ring finger for $12,000. (He chooses the ring finger.)."  Cohn -- who writes books about the healthcare system -- gives the new flick a cautiously positive review: "Sicko got a lot of the little things wrong. But it got most of the big things right."

Moore also compares the U.S. healthcare system, which leaves 45 million people uninsured, with the systems in Cuba, Canada, Britain, and France. The first three choices are more than questionable, given the problems these systems face and the extremely loud bitching emerging especially from Britain. The comparison to France, though, is right on-target:

As Paul Dutton explains in a new book called Differential Diagnoses, the French prize individual liberty, so they created an insurance system that, today, allows free choice of doctor and offers highly advanced medical care to those who need it. One of this system's most appealing features, which Moore showcases, is the availability of 24-hour house-call service via a company called SOS Médecins. (Moore travels along with one of the company's doctors as he rides around Paris one night, taking dispatch calls like a taxi driver and then administering at-home medical care to a young man with some kind of stomach problem.)

All of this does cost money, naturally, and Moore acknowledges what many assume is the French system's big drawback: its high taxes. But Moore also provides the same answer that any good policy wonk (including yours truly) would: They pay more in taxes but less in private insurance. In fact, the French system, like every other one in the rest of the developed world, costs less than ours overall.

The French like their system a lot--more than the citizens of any other country, including the United States, if you believe the opinion polls. The World Health Organization likes it a lot, too: It has ranked France's system tops in the world.

I am satisfied with the German healthcare system, which also does well in international rankings. I'm currently covered by the national healthcare scheme. You can choose which doctor you'd like to visit, you don't have to wait for an appointment, and prescription drugs are quite cheap. Granted, I haven't had a major medical emergency over here (thank G-d), but I have confidence that I'd get good care if I did.

Yes, you can find Germans bitching about it, but then again, Germans bitch about everything.* Any health-care system will have shortcomings. For instance, the U.S. healthcare system appears to have a big problem with getting the right prescription drugs to people in the right doses. Germany, for its part, has a physician brain-drain problem (G).

However, one of these countries provides solid medical care to basically everybody, and the other doesn't. That, to me, is a difference worth erasing.

* Yes, I know this is an unfair generalization. However, as generalizations go, it is excruciatingly accurate. Just trust me on this one.

George Bush - Capital Punishment's Worst Enemy?

Andrew Moravcsik writing in 2001 on why the United States won't be abolishing capital punishment anytime soon, noted that "President Mitterrand abolished the death penalty in 1982 [sic] despite 62% percent of the French being retentionists; only last year did poll support dip for the first time below 50%. Two-thirds of the German population favored the death penalty at the time of its abolition. Today 65-70% of Britons, nearly 70% of Canadians, a majority of Austrians, around 50% of Italians, and 49% of the Swedes favor its reinstatement." [These numbers come mainly from a 2001 article by Joshua Micah Marshall in the American magazine The New Republic.]

However, it seems that support for capital punishment in Europe has sharply dropped since then. Here are the results from a March-April 2007 poll:

Do you favour or oppose the death penalty for people convicted of murder?

	Favour	Oppose
South Korea	72%	28%
Mexico	71%	26%
United States	69%	29%
Britain	50%	45%
France	45%	52%
Canada	44%	52%
Germany	35%	62%
Italy	31%	64%
Spain	28%	69%

More info is here.  Polling about capital punishment is notoriously sensitive to question formulation and events near the time of the poll, so it's hard to derive conclusions from comparing different polls. Nevertheless, it does seem to be the case that support for capital punishment in many Western European countries has dropped sharply -- even drastically -- in the past few years. As recently as 2003, 67 percent of Britons wanted the death penalty brought back "for certain crimes." Even Spain, which suffered a devastating terrorist boming in 2004, remains one of the most abolitionist countries in the world.

What explains the sharp drop? I have a theory that I'm willing to throw out: George W. Bush. No, really, I mean it. First, George W. Bush is a supporter of capital punishment, a fact which is highlighted in European press coverage. This means his presidency draws attention to the issue, which means more coverage of flawed trials and executions in the United States (and, more rarely, elsewhere in the world). European press coverage of the death penalty is uniformly hostile, so it stands to reason that the more of it there is, the less support the death penalty will have.

Second, I'd be willing to bet that the numbers for death penalty support and opinion about American and opinion about George W. Bush are strongly correlated. Since Bush and the United States are so closely identified with support for the death penalty, a European who has been disgusted by Bush's policies (and by their largely negative portrayal in the European press), might start to reconsider his support for the death penalty, simply on the theory that "anything he's for is probably worth being against."

That's just one theory. Does anybody have any others to propose?

A Canadian Praises a Merkel

From the Toronto Globe and Mail website, a Canadian compares German energy efficiency policies to German ones:

Jason Schwartz from Hamburg, Germany, Canada writes: Canada does have a lot to learn from Germany about reducing its emissions. As a Canadian who has been living in Hamburg for the last 5 months I have noticed several things about the German mentality that I will make sure to push for when I get back home.

Germans recycle, they plant trees, they generally walk places, there are parks (that are busy every nice day) and In farmers fields they have windmills as far as the eye can see. In Germany their windmills are turned on and actually generate energy. They all drive fuel efficient (new) cars. Their public transit system is actually comfortable and truly a better alternative to driving.

They don't waste things like water or electricity (because they cost a fortune here). They hang their clothes to dry instead of always putting them in the dryer.

They invest in the sciences and industry and encourage scientific advancement. With more money in the sciences there are more innovative technologies that can help the whole world reduce their emissions.

Canadians as a whole, take so many things about our lifestyle for granted because things like Gas, Electricity and Water are so cheap we just use more then we actually need. Just for the record Germans pay about 1.4 euros (about $2) a liter for gas and they don't complain about it either.

Well-put. The U.S. should be doing more to economize, but it gets disproportionate blame for energy inefficiency. Canada has higher per-capita energy consumption than the United States. And even Canada is not the highest energy consumer; the Gulf states and even tiny Iceland use far more per-capita. Let's also keep in mind that the largest factors driving energy consumption are not the personal qualities of a country's inhabitants, but (1) its level of economic development; (2) its size; and (3) extreme climate. Canada has all three factors. So do most parts of the U.S.

That being said, I agree with Schwartz. Germany has the advantages of a mild climate and small size (it's about as big as Montana), but it's also taken steps to maximize energy efficiency that the U.S. and Canada could learn from. As Schwartz points out, there's no beating high prices as a means of curbing demand.  Especially when they're combined with policies that increase elasticity of demand for energy.  Demand for gasoline in the U.S. is pretty inelastic because in most U.S. cities, there's no workable alternative to driving.  For Germans who find gas too expensive, there's always an option -- bike, tram, walking. Some, if not all of these measures could be implemented in the U.S. and Canada if there were the political will, and I, for one, would like to see it happen. [h/t Ed P.]

German Joys Review: America Right or Wrong

A few days ago, I posted some thoughts on American parochialism. Anatol Lieven, a Cambridge-educated historian and foreign-affairs expert, has a few, too, as he shows in his 2004 book America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism. (ARW) Lieven's target is not so much America's the insularity itself; he knows there are good excuses for it. His point is that this insularity is dangerous in a country that throws its weight around as much as the U.S. does.

Lieven begins ARW with a 1989 conversation he had with a U.S. diplomat then stationed in Pakistan. Lieven had recently ventured into the countryside to speak to the Afghan warlords the U.S was funding. He found they were "a serious threat to peace and progress in Afghanistan [and] pathologically anti-Western." Lieven and a colleague asked the diplomat whether he agreed with the U.S. government's policy of funding these men.

The diplomat responded that with a long, indignant speech: he was sure the Afghan resistance was going to build a "successful free market democracy." "This diatribe," writes Lieven, "reflected a messianism rooted in the American creed but was accompanied by a total ignorance of Afghan history, society, tradition, or reality in general." As early as page 3, we see, Lieven is not going to pull any punches. In his view, a similar worldview has driven American policy ever since, and helped determined the United States' response to September 11:

This book seeks to help explain why a country which after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had the chance to create a concert of all the world's major States -- including Muslim ones -- against Islamist revolutionary terrorism chose instead to pursue policies which divided the West, further alienated the Muslim world and exposed America itself to greatly increased danger.

Lieven underpins this bracing critique of American nationalism and insularity with formidable research and anecdotes from his years as a reporter. He also builds a convincing case that defects in American public discourse contributed directly to the foreign-policy blunders that have dominated recent headlines.

A few days ago, I posted some thoughts on American parochialism. Anatol Lieven, a Cambridge-educated historian and foreign-affairs expert, has a few, too, as he shows in his 2004 book America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism. (ARW) Lieven's target is not so much America's the insularity itself; he knows there are good excuses for it. His point is that this insularity is dangerous in a country that throws its weight around as much as the U.S. does.

Lieven begins ARW with a 1989 conversation he had with a U.S. diplomat then stationed in Pakistan. Lieven had recently ventured into the countryside to speak to the Afghan warlords the U.S was funding. He found they were "a serious threat to peace and progress in Afghanistan [and] pathologically anti-Western." Lieven and a colleague asked the diplomat whether he agreed with the U.S. government's policy of funding these men.

The diplomat responded that with a long, indignant speech: he was sure the Afghan resistance was going to build a "successful free market democracy." "This diatribe," writes Lieven, "reflected a messianism rooted in the American creed but was accompanied by a total ignorance of Afghan history, society, tradition, or reality in general." As early as page 3, we see, Lieven is not going to pull any punches. In his view, a similar worldview has driven American policy ever since, and helped determined the United States' response to September 11:

This book seeks to help explain why a country which after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had the chance to create a concert of all the world's major States -- including Muslim ones -- against Islamist revolutionary terrorism chose instead to pursue policies which divided the West, further alienated the Muslim world and exposed America itself to greatly increased danger.

Lieven underpins this bracing critique of American nationalism and insularity with formidable research and anecdotes from his years as a reporter. He also builds a convincing case that defects in American public discourse contributed directly to the foreign-policy blunders that have dominated recent headlines.

Al Gore, Sounding Habermasian Themes

A few days ago I posted excerpts of an essay by Juergen Habermas in which he stressed the importance of reasoned, informed public discourse. Now comes Al Gore with a similar message. In an excerpt from a new book of his called The Assault on Reason, he argues that the "strangeness" of America's public sphere helps explain some of the mistakes my home country has made lately.

I think these two contributions make nice bookends. Pay attention to the quality of your discourse, says Habermas. It's critical to democracy, and it is subject to breakdowns. You must provide the people with the oatmeal of informed discussion before they get the dessert of celebrity gossip. Make sure you provide them with enough background information to allow reasonably informed decision-making. When the market won't do this on its own -- and there's little reason to think it will -- the state will need to step in and bring it about some other way.

Otherwise, you'll end up making terrible mistakes. After cataloging some of the self-inflicted wounds America now finds itself trying to bandage, Al Gore continues:

It is too easy—and too partisan—to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America's public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power—remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.

American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong....

At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excess—an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy, Britney and KFed, Lindsay and Paris and Nicole.

While American television watchers were collectively devoting 100 million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness. For example, hardly anyone now disagrees that the choice to invade Iraq was a grievous mistake. Yet, incredibly, all of the evidence and arguments necessary to have made the right decision were available at the time and in hindsight are glaringly obvious.

Vacation Policies in Europe and the USA

A recent report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. compared government policy on paid vacation time among OECD nations. No surprises here; the chart says it all:

A couple caveats here: the report's authors don't seem to have considered U.S. state law. I suspect that that more liberal U.S. states probably do provide mandated paid vacation, and it might be helpful to know which ones do. Nevertheless, as the authors correctly note, there's no federal regulation on the subject, so states are free to act as they please. As for Germany, the authors note: "[T]here is only one national public holiday, German Unity Day. Other public holidays are determined on the state level, and vary between 0 and 16."

Of course, American workers do get holidays. As usual, though, the amount of vacation you get will vary with your social power:

On average, private-sector workers in the United States have about nine days of paid vacation per year, plus about six paid holidays. . . . .  [P]art-time workers, low earners, and workers in small establishments (fewer than 100 workers) are less likely to receive paid vacation and paid holidays, and when they do, these workers receive fewer paid days off. Lower-wage workers are less likely (69 percent) than higher-wage workers (88 percent) to have paid vacations.

Mandatory paid vacation is a classic welfare-state policy. Policies like these serve at least three functions. First, they ensure that everybody gets some vacation. Second, they 'signal' that leisure time is an important social value and policy goal. As the report notes, most European employers actually go above the minimum requirements voluntarily. Third, they ensure that the gap between rich and poor in vacation time does not become too large.

In any society, the highly-qualified or well-connected have a lot of autonomy concerning how much they choose to work. Of course, many choose to work extremely hard, but they don't have to; they can bargain away money and prestige in favor of leisure time (or time with the family) whenever they wish. It's the less-qualified, 'interchangeable' workers that get the short end when there are no policies to protect them. Put another way, if you're a low-skilled employee in Europe, you're not more likely than an American low-skilled employee to get more than the legal minimum of paid vacation. But, as we see, that legal minimum is very different...

Habermas on the Press and the Market

In the Sueddeutsche Zeitung today, Juergen Habermas sounds the alarm (G) about excessive market influence on Germany's quality daily newspapers. In the United States -- once the home of aggressive investigative reporting -- troubling signs have emerged at some of the nation's top newspapers. The Los Angeles Times has been ruthlessly re-organized, and the Boston Globe has closed all of its overseas bureaus. At a time when the U.S. is fighting two wars.

Habermas, whose 1962 Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is considered a classic of modern sociology, warns of a similar process on the horizon in Germany. News and information, he warns, cannot be treated as consumer products.

I note that Habermas does not mention blogs or other online information sources even once during the entire piece. Yes, blogs are still in their infancy and, and their influence is often exaggerated by fans. Still, Habermas' lack of curiosity about this looming transformation is disappointing. That caveat aside, Habermas, as usual, makes interesintg points. Excerpts, translated by yours truly:

TV as “Toaster”

This argument about the special character of the product “education” and “information” reminds one of the slogan that was heard in the USA when television was introduced: This new medium, it was said, was nothing more than a "toaster with pictures." This implied that there was nothing wrong with leaving the production and consumption of television programs exclusively to the marketplace. Since then in the USA, media enterprises create television programs for viewers and sell the attention of their audiences to advertising buyers.

Wherever it has been generally introduced, however, this organizing principle has inflicted political and cultural devastation. Our [German] “dual” television system is an attempt at damage control. The media laws of the various German states, the relevant decisions of the Federal Constitutional Court, and the programming guidelines of the public broadcasting agencies reflect the idea that the electronic mass media should not merely satisfy the consumer’s easily-commercialized need for entertainment and distraction.

Listeners and viewers are not only consumers -- not only market participants – but also citizens with a right to participate in cultural life, observe political events, and contribute to the process of opinion formation. On the basis of this legal framework, programs which secure the population a relevant “basic package” of information cannot be made dependent on advertiser-friendliness and their ability to attract sponsored support.

...

Me Vote for Pretty Candidate!

I sometimes get a bit of grief for not responding to comments more often. Let me say that I follow the comments on this blog closely. I'm often delighted or amused by what I find there. Also sometimes irritated, which is also a good thing. However, anyone who's ever actually run a blog knows that the key to keeping up active readership is to post something new as often as possible -- preferably every day. My day job often leaves me little time to tend to good old German Joys. Thus, when I have limited time, that time is better used, on blogalicious grounds, to post something new.

However, I would like to take up some comments Don made about my post of a few weeks ago on Bryan Caplan's new book, in which Caplan concludes a lot of things (summary here), one of them that Northern European voters seem to be more rational than their counterparts in other democracies.

Don took issue with my description of European political discourse as more rational and well-informed than in the U.S.:

European discourse more politically sophisticated? What do you mean by discourse, Andrew? Conversations with your landlady, Stammtisch debates, German media discussions?

Let us consider U.S. media and blogs as an example of public discourse. One list of links can be found under http://aldaily.com/ on the left side. Many are international, but most are U.S. Now, compare that list to media and blogs under http://www.goethe.de/wis/med/lks/ enindex.htm#1734508. In terms of variety and depth, not to mention energetic creativity and breadth of scholarship, the U.S. is ahead IMHO.

Blogs aside, though, that's my story, and I'm stickin' to it. I have now followed current affairs in Germany and France for a few years, in the original languages. The difference in quality and depth of information available to the average person in those countries and in the U.S. is sobering. That's why I have no trouble accepting Caplan's thesis. I haven't read Caplan's book yet, but I'd wager what he's talking about is the fact that average Europeans generally have a more accurate idea of what their nations' policies are, and what the various political parties stand for.

There is no debate among political scientists that the average American voter is incredibly ignorant. Ilya Somin recently brough a lot of the strands of research together in this readable Cato Institute policy analysis: "When Ignorance Isn't Bliss: How Political Ignorance Threatens Democracy."* He quotes political scientist John Ferejohn: “Nothing strikes the student of public opinion and democracy more forcefully than the paucity of information most people possess about politics.”

Somin brings together literally dozens of examples of the ignorance of the average American concerning basic facts relevant to American domestic and foreign policy. Some examples:

• 70% of Americans, as of November 2004, did not know that Congress had recently expanded federal coverage for prescription drugs, the largest, and most highly-publicized domestic policy initiative of the Bush Administration.
• Just after the hotly-contested 2002 Congressional elections, only 32% of voters knew that the Republicans controlled Congress before that election.
• Just after the hugely-publicized takeover of Congress by the Republicans in 1994, 57% of American voters did not recognize the name of Newt Gingrich, the leader of the Republicans at that time.
• In 1964, only 38% of American voters were aware that the Soviet Union was not a part of NATO.

"Majorities," summarizes Somin, "are ignorant of such basic aspects of the U.S. political system as who has the power to declare war, the respective functions of the three branches of government, and who controls monetary policy." (p. 4)

And his examples are just the tip of the iceberg. According to a 2001 PIPA study, Americans estimate that America spends 20% of its annual budget on foreign aid, overestimating the actual amount by about 40 times. As Bryan Caplan points out in the essay I linked to, 41% of Americans think foreign aid is one of the two biggest items in the American budget. Not surprisingly, many Americans want the allegedly "massive" foreign aid budget cut. PIPA ran a survey before the 2004 Presidential Election (unfortunately, the link I have no longer works, but I saved a copy of the syllabus on my computer) in which Bush supporters, by large majorities, stated their incorrect beliefs that President Bush had signed the Kyoto Treaty, supported the creation of an International Criminal Court, and favored the inclusion of labor and environmental standards in trade agreements. 56% percent of Republicans now favor referring Darfur war criminals to the International Criminal Court, even though the President they (presumably still) support opposes American participation in the court. 68% of Republicans believed, incorrectly, that President Bush actually favored American participation in the ICC in its present form.

The examples could go on and on. This isn't a debate about which policies are wisest -- it's a debate about whether voters even know what the policies are. Huge numbers of Americans do not have basic information about the political process.

There are plenty of reasons for this, but I would chalk a large part of it up to American television, the main source of news for the average American. Except for a few channels, it's all for-profit. These stations are competing for viewers, which means they are under pressure to package news in ways that attract viewers. This means heavy on the sex, violence, and scandal, and keep it short and snappy. Average length of a story on broadcast nightly news in the United States: 138 seconds, including the anchor's introduction.

Does anyone really doubt this? It slaps every European visitor to the USA in the face as soon as they turn on an American television. It slaps me in the face every time I return to the U.S. When I traveled throughout the U.S. with European friends in the summer of 2001, they were amazed to see that every channel they switched to, in every hotel we stayed in (and in the waiting rooms and restaurants that had televisions blaring into them), the story was...Chandra Levy. Yes, Chandra Levy.

Laqueuer: Europe's Doomed. Moravcsik: Fiddlesticks!

This blog's been getting pretty dialectical lately, so let's have another thesis-antithesis post. Walter Laqueur pronounces on Europe's future in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

In brief, by the turn of the millennium, at the very latest, it should have been clear that Europe was no longer on the road to superpower status, but that it faced an existential crisis — or, perhaps more accurately, a number of major crises, of which the demographic problem was the most severe. That began to be recognized almost immediately, but there was confusion, because the crisis seemed intractable — it had been discovered too late. One could only hope that the newcomers indifferent or hostile to European values would gradually show more tolerance, if not enthusiasm, toward them, or that multiculturalism, which had been such a disappointment, would perhaps work in the long run.

Those were not exactly strong hopes, and they certainly do not explain the illusions of some foreign observers, particularly Americans, who continued to claim that the 21st century would be Europe's. They maintained that there had been a revolution in Europe, of which Americans were not even aware. Europe had a vision of justice and harmony very much in contrast to the American dream, which no longer existed. The European vision emphasized the collective, in contrast to the narrow stress on individualism in the United States. It preferred the quality of life to amassing money. Americans had to work harder than Europeans, had fewer holidays, did not live as long as the Europeans, and, generally speaking, enjoyed life much less. Europeans were selfless, it was argued. As one observer put it, power politics was a thing of the past; Europe's main weapons were justice and the law. Coming from Europe, that idea would spread all over the world and become the main instrument in world politics.

Now for the antithesis: Europe's doom isn't inevitable. Let's not forget that many who predict it also desire it, for a variety of reasons ideological and economic (not that Laqueur belongs in this category). If Walter Laqueur gets you down, I'd suggest Andrew Moravcsik's cautiously optimistic assessment:

To most who live in Europe—or have visited lately—all this [doomsaying] seems wrong, even absurd. As the European Union turns 50 this week, let us consider all that has been achieved. Europe arose from the ashes of the Great Depression and World War II to become whole and free. Half a century ago, only a utopian would have predicted that, today, one can traverse Europe from Sweden to Sicily without encountering a border control and—most of the way—using a single European currency. Or that a tariff-free single market would exist, cemented by a common framework of economic regulation.

Europe is now a global superpower of world-historical importance, second to none in economic clout. It has constructed one of the most successful systems of government—the modern social-welfare state, which for all its flaws has brought unprecedented prosperity and security to Europe's people. It is the single most successful advance in voluntary international cooperation in modern history. The original European Economic Community of 1957 has grown from its founding six members to 27, knitting together just under 500 million people from the western Aran Islands of Ireland through the heart of Central Europe to the Black Sea. Its values are spreading across the globe—far more attractive, in many respects, than those of America. If anything, Europe's trajectory is up, not down. Here's what the critics get wrong.

Now for my two cents. Laqueur thinks that opposition to America's foreign policy and values, especially as embodied by the Bush Administration, drove many commentators to overestimate Europe's prospects. It's a sort of wishful thinking: "I find Europe's approach so much more pleasing and consonant with my views, therefore it must be the wave of the future."

I don't disagree with Laqueur on many points. It's become clear that there are worrying fissures at the heart of many European countries. Further, Europe's stock (as a shining beacon of reason and conciliation compared to the U.S.) has hit a new high against the background of the Bush administration, but will fade once someone halfway competent enters the White House. I'm not quite as pessimistic about Europe's demographic future as Laqueur, but there's no doubt that a demographic time bomb is ticking, and the people who might be able to defuse it are still bickering bitterly with each other.

I'm a Europhile not because I think European values will prevail, but because I think they should prevail. Sure, Europe's social welfare systems do saddle it with some competitive disadvantages. That's why I found the parts of Jeremy Rifkin's European Dream -- the parts in which he assumed away these disadvantages -- so unconvincing. They're there, and they're found not only in some EU and national policies, but also in the mindset of many denizens of Europe. However, from what I have seen and experienced, Moravcsik's thesis holds: the competitive disadvantages are greatly outweighed by the benefits social welfare systems bring to European residents. And there's no question that many of the foreigners I talk to here in Germany are quietly impressed by Germany's social-welfare system. Many of the leaders of the countries these people come from promise their residents a welfare state, but Germany actually delivers one. As long as the vast majority of the world's population continues to prefer welfare-state models to unrestrained capitalism, the European dream will remain alive.