I believe this one is pretty common.
Secret postcards
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For another view on European attitudes try this:
http://www.eurotrib.com/?op=displaystory;sid=2007/9/10/9417/13559
(If it’s relevant the author is a French banker, involved in wind farm finance.)
This postcard was probably mailed by a European woman living in the USA. Years of anti-American indoctrination is being shattered, but admitting it to the outside is still too hurtful for their identity.
In Europe not a lot of ‘em would say this I believe.
Robertfeinman, I do not doubt that there are various statistical issues which might erroneously heighten France’s actual youth unemployment figures.
But here’s the bottom line: The state of California roughly has the same GDP as France. WITH HALF THE POPULATION OF FRANCE. You can’t mess around with that type of stat. its a clear fact. Europe just isn’t producing as well as the US. why, I don’t know.
I’ll repeat my suggestion that those interested in Europe participate in the eurotrib.com blog. It’s a nice change from US-based sites since it gets many viewpoints from elsewhere.
Those who have questions can probably get answers from the group.
robertdfeinman,
I did look at the site, though I didn’t get down to the part about youth unemployment the first time. I did this time, and I can tell you categorically that his numbers are simply misleading.
He makes a distinction between “youth unemployment as a percentage of the youth population” (where France isn’t so far behind the U.S.) versus “youth unemployment as a percentage of the youth labor force” (which is where the well-known 20% unemployment number comes from). Here’s the story:
The former numbers don’t include all those French kids who are in school. This is highly distorting when you consider that far more French youth go to college, and for more years, than American youth. There are two reasons for this. First, college in France is free. Second, THERE ARE NO JOBS FOR YOUTH.
I remember hearing an academic from Columbia who said he was “studying” this phenomena of French youth getting far more education than their American peers, and how that would redound to their eventual benefit at our expense. He must have noticed me laughing in the audience because afterward he asked if I had any data that contradicted his. I said, “Yeah. I was born in France. A third of my family, many of my cousins live in France. Several of them are on their second graduate degree in Medieval Literature or Historical Deconstruction and such, because they can’t get real jobs, or simply don’t want to. That’s the generation you’re implying I should be concerned about.”
I’ve said before that at least some of the criticisms of European economies are wrong or exaggerated, but I gotta call bunkum on that Figure 1.1 and the assertion that France only has 7% child poverty rate while US has 20% – it reports relative poverty, hence it mostly reflect the higher median income in US rather than more children actually living in real poverty.
If you’re gonna accuse others of playing with stats for ideological purposes you shouldn’t be doing it yourself.
As an aside, the figure for UK (16% child poverty rate) though meaningless by itself does reflect the fact that UK does pretty bad on all kinds of poverty and inequality statistics.
I think Tyler is right. Being European, and in Europe, I feel US commentators often overestimate the prevalence of general hatred for everything American. Then again, I may have missed my classes in anti-American indoctrination.
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