“The French government has always been very good at making things where government support is critical,” like trains, nuclear power plants and airplanes, Mr. [Joel] Mokyr says. “But the French are not terribly good at creating Googles or Microsofts, where private action is central.”
The French engineering company, Alstom, after all, is the world market leader in high-speed trains. But a well-informed person would be hard-pressed to name a leading French information technology company. Indeed, many of France’s best computer brains work in Silicon Valley. These Franco-geeks, who number in the thousands, even have two associations, SiliconFrench and DBF.
“The French business system is constraining for individuals while supportive of scientists and engineers working on large, rigid systems that actually benefit from top-down decisions and slow change,” says Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple executive who helped organize DBF and is a partner at Allegis Capital in Palo Alto, Calif.
Here is more. Looking toward culture, the French are relatively strong in cinema and contemporary classical music, but weak in painting and rock and roll. Contemporary fiction you could argue either way, though I incline toward the negative. I am not sure if these patterns fit into the broader thesis above, though perhaps health care would.
I see no evidence presented that trains, nuclear power plants, and airplanes either 1) critically require government support or 2) actually benefit from top-down decisions and slow change. Perhaps instead such industries have been universally hobbled by top-down decisions and slow change thanks to the unfortunate interference of government “support”.
Perhaps Mr. Mokyr’s statement should be rephrased as “The French are not terribly good at creating Googles or Microsofts, where private action is allowed.”
I guess the thesis supported here is the varieties of capitalism school of political economy; i.e. there are many paths to the promised land.
oh, “rock and roll” is such a vague term these days. some French pop/rock music is really great, especially that on the very fringes. they’re just not very good at marketing it, and this might pretty well be the case with their other stuff as well.
or is it lack of motivation, rather than lack of marketing skill? it seems it’s pretty easy to become a non-starving artist in France, yet much harder to become a millionaire artist…
France is bad in IT? Do software companies count as IT? If yes, I gues Ubisoft counts as IT. You know,
the French company responsible for Rayman, Splinter Cell, Beyond Good and Evil, and many more.
Look, I love to bash big government. I especially love to mock French failures related to big government.
But I find the claim that France lacks a leading IT company, laughable. I agree with the article’s point
that there is some kind of economic activity severely held back in France but not the US, but it’s failed
to pin down what that is.
Incidentally, it may very well be that Ubisoft receives government favoritism. If you’ve ever seen how a
video game studio has to work to be successful, you’d know that there’s no ****in’ way that Ubisoft
could be making these games while adhering to French labor law, such as the workweek limits.
There are some very good French rappers. A decent number have become relatively famous (as famous as international rappers can be) in the US. Perhaps the two most famous are MC Solaar and IAM. David Brooks even wrote a column denouncing French rappers as the source of the anger that caused the riots in the banlieues in 2005. See the wikipedia page on french rap: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_rap
Europe as a whole lacks strong IT companies. ICL, Phillips, Olivetti and Bull have all fallen by the wayside as American firms like IBM and now Indian ones like Infosys have prospered.
France is great at luxury goods and high-end brands and tends to be poor at small-scale, entrepeneurial businesses although the latter is mostly due to poor government policy and an unwillingness for French SMBs to export as well as small German companies have.
For what it’s worth:
Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Olivier Messiaen
All great composers. I never defend the French, so today is the day!
eddie,
The French trains are the world’s fastest. They also are a much lower per capita emitter of
GHGs than most high income countries because they have one of the highest percentages of
electricity supplied by nuclear power in the world, with no safety or other problems so far.
I would also say that their road system is excellent. They have the clearest and best signage
on roads I have seen anywhere, period.
In music, they have had some pretty good jazz musicians, although I think they have been weaker
in that area more recently than in the past.
Ubisoft and Alcatel were the 1st things i thought of when i read this post. And if France is behind in internet companies, it is probably b/c they adopted Minitel far in advance of the widespread US adoption of the Internet. The US is behind Europe in the development of mobile internet applications, for the same reason — the leaders in one generation of technology are often slow to switch to the next generation.
Oh, on the Ubisoft thing… Most of their big hits like Splinter Cell, Prince of Persia, etc. were all developed in Montreal, not France.
Chauvinism masquerading as economics is still chauvinism. As a proprtion of exports, weightless ‘knowledge’ exports from France are higher than from the US. For example, champagne. There is no US Moet. France’s high-value fashion industries – The US doesn’t have a Chanel. Perhaps you would argue that the govenrment is responsible for Chanel? Or the US is weak in fashion? The fact of French leadership in fashion and perfume does not exclude US excellence, any more than US leadership in some fields excludes French excellence.
France owns the world’s largest publishing companies and the two largest advertising agencies. These are only a few examples. In February this year, the Economist magazine reported a study by McKinsey, which shows “Europe has 29% of the world’s leading 2,000 or so companies, broadly in line with its 30% share of world GDP. It punches its weight in most global industries except IT, where America is leagues ahead.” Within Europe, France punches above its weight. So the US leadership in IT is interesting, but to assert a general point about government interference from that statement is wildy bad practice. Generalisations about countries or races don’t ever tell economists anything meaningful. When the generalisations are simply wrong, and based on jingoism then economists should be presenting the facts, not the myths.
What would have happened to Michael Dell if he had started his company in a country one fifth the size and working in a minority language but otherwise identical to the US?
I think he would have had a harder time raising capital in the early days, hit international barriers before reaching decisive scale advantages and faced larger and better funded competition upon entering a larger market.
Some things work better in the US because it has, up to now, the largest single market and not just because of micro effects like tax rates which are not so very different in Europe.
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Having never been to Europe, I somehow agree with what the Apple executive said. The French, perhaps like the Chinese, actually *want* a more paternalistic government. So the government can make more top-down decisions as long as they live up to the expectations. A system like this may loose on the front of diversity. I wonder whether the government usually has a stake in the country’s classical orchestras.
‘There is no US Moet.’
Actually, there is.
Suppose France puts a handful of elites in charge of the government and puts that government in charge of enterprise. And suppose that one outcome of those decisions is that the French get to ride around on excellent trains.
How does that prove they are “good at” trains? In a vacuum few would choose to develop fast trains at the expense of any number of other priorities. The trains are indeed fast and clean and plentiful. But the French are falling behind comparable economies in educational attainment, wealth opportunity, and creativity.
What French trains may in fact be best at is attracting more than their fair share of resources. The result is you can travel swiftly and easily around France witnessing what a general basket case the French economy is on its way to becoming.
The Ipad is a piece of junk. But I cant wait to see people at the Starbucks table working on the mac, while reading an ipad and getting a call on their Iphone. That would be freaking hilarious!!!
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