Jonah's Alternate History Part I

I always thought alternate history novels were fun reads.   Books like "Man in a High Castle" by Phillip K. Dick or the Alvin Maker series by Orson Scott Card.   In his latest, Jonah presents an alternate version of history, but it isn't fun, it is mostly just weird.   And it gets even weirder when he tries to make an argument about current policy based on events that never happened.   The jist of his column is that he says for for at least a century American progressives have wanted to implement a European-style social democracy.   That part is weird enough, because in 1910 there were no modern European-style social democracies.   He goes on to explain that if we adopted a European-style democracy, everything would go to hell, because Europe simply riding on America's coat tails in areas of defense and economic innovation.    He finishes with this:

Europhiles hate this sort of talk. They say there’s no reason to expect America to lose its edge just because we have a more “compassionate” government. Americans are an innovative, economically driven people. That’s true. But so were the Europeans — once. Then they adopted the policies they have today and that liberals want us to have tomorrow.

Let's think about that one for a minute.   He's essentially saying that back in the day when the Euros were more like us (innovative and economically driven), things were great.   Then when they moved towards social democracies things started to go to hell.   Only problem is the opposite is true.   When Jonah's alternate history starts in 1910, America was already richer than all the European countries combined.   Up until World War II, most European economies were essentially crony-controlled capitalism. The bourgeoisie, in other words.  Europeans were always economically driven, but like to gain wealth by going to foreign lands, killing the inhabitants and taking their stuff, and keeping their own citizens in poverty with no hope of upward mobility.   

Jonah suggests that European economies have been getting worse since social democracies were installed in many countries after World War II (he didn't say post-World War II, but that's the changes started to take place).    Let's look at that briefly.   Economists use a measure called gross national income per capita (GNI) to measure the wealth of individual citizens.   The World Bank has a nifty tool to compare the GNI (and lots and lots of other things) of various countries.   Unfortunately, it only lets you display three at a time, but here we go:

Here's the GNI per capita of Denmark, France, and the United States.   One thing to keep in mind is that when you are looking at compounding growth, you should use a logarithmic graph, instead of a linear one like we have here.   From the graph it looks like GNI was pretty close back in the 1960s, but is far apart now.   The opposite is true.   Back in the 1960s the GNI of the USA was close to double that of France.   Nowadays they are fairly close.    What that says is economically European countries started off far behind the USA and have done lot of catching up in the past few decades.  That's far from losing their initiative or economic drive.  Indeed, far more Europeans gained far more economically than at in period in history.   That's nothing to sneeze at.  

Of course, none of that says we should or shouldn't look at certain European style reforms.   Ideas should be evaluated on their own merits.   But we shouldn't dismiss the discussion simply based on a false history.