About 20 years ago, I used to give one lecture in class on comparative growth rates from the World Development Report. Id recite some of the silly clichés about the economy as dramatically as I could and cite the example of a country that violated it. Everybody knows that you cant give unions any power; heres the growth rate of Germany. Everybody knows that cradle-to-grave welfare stifles incentives; heres the growth rate of Sweden. The US does everything right; heres the growth rate of the US oops, its smaller than all the others. My students were of course shocked that the US wasnt at the top in everything. I just went to the Penn World Tables, and calculated from their data the growth rate of per capita GDP for 1990-2007 for some of the countries I used to talk about:
UK 2.2 Belgium 2 Sweden 1.93 USA 1.86 Germany 1.6 Italy 1.35 Note that the Belgians can do better than the US with no federal government at all. We also had a budget before the US. I'm just sayin'. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
