One of the truisms that has been accepted by me, and others, is that the US ecconomy has been growing faster than Europe's, and that this reflects the advantages of less governmental control of the ecconomy. I decided to try to find the numbers on this.
I took longer term growth: '73-'00. I think that this is a reasonable measure, starting more than 25 years after the end of WWII. During this time, the social policy of the US and Europe were clearly different. The comparison I took came from the US government, and compared the US ecconomy to the EU 15. (They didn't list the countries, but from the way the data were listed, it is clear that these are well established, older EU members.) During this time, the real GDP growth was 143% for the US and 100% for the EU 15. That seems to clearly favor the US. However, I was also curious to see the per capita growth. This is a better measure of the improvement in the financial position of the average resident. To do this, I obtained the population growth of the US and estimated the population growth of the EU 15. I obtained the estimate of the EU 15 growth by looking at the growth in the total population of Germany, France, Great Britian, and Italy. That population grew from 242 million to 259 million. Since this represents a very significant fraction of the EU 15 population, its growth should provide a good estimate. To go to the final numbers: the US population grew 33% during this time period, while the population of these four countries grew 7%. This results in an 83% per capita growth in GDP for the US over this period, compared to a 86% growth for Europe. These numbers are close enough to be a toss up. Now, it is reasonable to point out that continuous immigration does challange an economy, so matching GDP per capita is an accomplishment. However, considering 1) The differences between the US and European outlooks are much larger than the differences between Republican and Democratic policies 2) Europe has the added burden of higher class consciousness/boundaries in business. It seems obvious that one cannot point to the small differences between the per capita GDP growth in Europe and the US should not be used as a basis for deciding on the relative merit of different US policies. Rather, the best measure should be the differences in the US ecconomy. Let me go to general curve fitting to explain part of understanding. I think it is generally agreed that a planned ecconomy, such as the Soviet Union's, is a disaster. It also seems obvious to me that the lack of post WWII depressions in the US, after a number before WWII, is correlated with government action in the ecconomy. Thus, we have two rougly equal points, a distance apart on the ecconomic scale, and points beyond that are definately below those points. If it was just a curve, without political ramafications, the first place one would look would be between the points, not towards either extreme. Now, this is not a certainty; all curves are not regular and extremely well behaved. Thus, it would make sense to look at the local slope; which I proposed to do by comparing the ecconomic performance under Democratic and Republican administrations. I'd be more than willing to consider data after, say 1948, accepting the 20-47 data as belonging to a different era.** Yes, all Republicans did not have the exactly the same policy over that era. However, one can generally say that the Republican policy is further from European policy than the Democratic on a whole. This allows for a comparision, just as a comparison of two distributions that overlap, but with different means allows for a measure. Dan M. **One might argue for including 45-47. However, if one doesn't include the great wartime improvement in GDP between 41 & 45, I don't think one should include the relatively small letdown right after the war. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
