Where is inequality greater?

Sorry, but this is an unusually ignorant post. It not only invents a place called “Europe” which seems to be a substitute for certain parts of France and Germany, but it then goes on to make broad and highly questionable statements about this place.

Tyler states “In this country you can love NASCAR and be proud of it. Millionaires won’t look down on you much for that taste. In Europe you are expected to dress well and be educated and not watch too much TV.”

a) On what planet US do people not look down on each other for their tastes. I may inhabit elitish circles but there’s plenty of Americans who look down on most of the habits of people living between either coast. I would also point out that the pressure to conform in US high schools, (and to conform to some fairly idiotic things in my elitist european opinion) is especially strong.

b) Finland has about the least strict societal dress code you are likely to come across and lots of people watch lots of TV. I believe the same is true in the rest of the Nordics. Your understranding of “Europe” is clearly very partial.

how much of this is cause and effect? is a society that promotes income equality doomed to have an offseting increase in other forms of inequality? or is a society with greater cultural inequality more likely to support income equality, since it doesn’t threaten the higher cultural status of elites?

in the end we’re all status seeking primates.

I think the whole point and allure of NASCAR is a complete lack, or even disdain for subtlety. I suspect the rich in America are more likely a bourgeois rich, and have some sympathy for that. The more “refined” money, probably not so much.

I’m not a fan, but I think I get it, and could be if the sport itself wasn’t so boring. I find F1 incredibly boring as well. I find almost all racing boring. In fact, anything with anything resembling a track I find boring. This may be why I don’t like baseball either. There just aren’t enough interesting things happening on a defined path. Maybe why I’m a libertarian!

It reminds me of a piece I once heard from a BBC foreign correspondant. He recounted the fantastic meals he’d had with well-heeled politicians and bureaucrats. Then contrasted with what he ate and drank with a billionaire from the US – basic burgers, and coke. The point being the US elite are, or make an effort to be, more in touch with proletarian level culture than those in Europe. (But Brussels gets fantastic restaurants.)

Whether this is actually true or not as a generalisation I have no idea.

Bryan Caplan says Veblen-like,
“If you’re at least upper-middle class, the convenience is worth the price.”
Do we conclude, we should preserve much of the public domain for the wealthy?
However, I gather most households own a car in many European countries,
while they drive far less than U.S. car owners.
Anyway, the real preference for European transportation by the 80% lower and middle class lies not in driving cars but in public transportation.

Shouldn’t an economist ask not “what transportation system do the wealthy prefer”,
but “which transportation system leads to a higher GDP?”
I haven’t a clue.
A public transportation system like Hong Kong’s largely has a circular train system on which 100,000 people live at each stop. Large grocery stores, restaurants, … reside on the first three floors of 60 story buildings beside each train station. You get a piano lesson or a tutor comes to your apartment from the same 60 story building. Your grandparents live in an adjacent 60 story building. This concentration reflects many efficiencies.

In the U.S., even the poor use their cars. Cheap energy and cheap cars give the poor and middle class a great freedom that forces local markets to compete against more distant markets; and a great freedom to attain more remunerative employment.

Digressing as the poster and commenters did, we can ask,
“if we specialize our friends from the population of people, do we and the GDP gain?”
Again, I haven’t a clue.
But Jane Addams (at whose Chicago Hull House, America’s most famous philosopher John Dewey considered working)
said in Democracy and Social Ethics, 1902,
“…there is a conviction that we are under a moral obligation in choosing our experiences,
since the result of those experiences must ultimately determine our understanding of life.
We know instinctively that if we grow contemptuous of our fellows,
and consciously limit our intercourse to certain kinds of people whom we have previously decided to respect,
we not only tremendously circumscribe our range of life, but limit the scope of our ethics.”
And perhaps limit GDP increases to the top 20% of the population,
so limiting the nation’s whole GDP,
which comes from all people.

This discussion seems to be narrowly avoiding the major difference between the transportation networks of US and Europe: geography. Way back in the early days of the Republic we envied the canals of Europe for their more efficient transportation value, especially for freight. So we built some canals too. And guess what, aside from the Erie Canal, they were mostly boondoggles, because our geography, specifically the Appalachian Mountains, made them almost completly useless.

Europe is a small, dense place so getting around it is fundamentally different. We may never reach their levels of population density, so it’s foolish to assume that we can approach transportation the same way.

“It’s odd … to cite Finland as Western Europe”

Only if you were born after 1990. The term “Western Europe”, as I’m sure you know, is overwhelmingly used to refer to the European countries that did not fall to communism. In any case, the same argument applies to the Nordic countries and Norway and Denmark as every bit as western as France and Germany. Germany, like Sweden, is actually rather central so maybe that’s not Western Europe either.

I think you’re scrabbling a bit here.

boy, the prejudices of americans about europe in this thread are surpassed only by the prejudices of europeans about americans. what a fascinating discussion.

I am completely baffled by the windshield perspective in Kaplan’s post. Isn’t it much better for the poor to have decent public transportation in urban centers? Why is that just an upper-middle class thing? Similarly, what do the tolls and speed limits have to do with anything when there’s excellent long distance rail (and comically cheap flights too)?

Also agreed that there’s plenty snobbery in the US. You can’t even live in Brooklyn without being looked down upon, let alone Iowa.

As pointed out over at Caplan’s blog, to take one of his examples, you can get from Paris to Strasbourg on the TGV (French for very fast train) in 2hours 20 minutes, and the best deal currently is 15 euros each way. If you have a large family (more than 3 children) it may well be cheaper. I think in calculating which system is better for the rich you need to take account of all the alternatives.

Lol, I followed both posts (here and at Caplans blog) and at both the comments are getting more and more hilarious by the minute.
Just some things to think about:
@ Peter Whiteford: Show me the TGV ticket for 15 Euros. I have yet to see it. For this particular route a single *starts* at about 96 $ I think, non-refundable ones might be cheaper, but not by much.

@argument about “oh, our country is so big”, that makes it sound like the average american travels half-way across the continent every weekend, any proof for that?

@about the wilderness: How many americans actually go to yellow stone and the like more then once in ten years or so?

@anon Yes, certainly there are ignorant people everywhere, but for example most european countries are smaller (such it isn’t that easy to ignore the rest of the world), and make children go to school longer, so they learn at least some what more about the world. Exceptions apply of course, like the British … (konce met a guy who lives 30 mins from london but hadn’t been there till he was 18) For the not upper-class americans from my experience europe either doesn’t even exist or their view of it is similiar to that of some alien world. (at least I imply that from the butt load of question that just left me speechless …)

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“A few of you are attacking what you thought or wished I said instead of what I actually wrote. Consider for instance the simple sentence: “I wonder sometimes whether inequality of status — as opposed to wealth — is greater in Western Europe or in the United States.” It’s odd to call what follows an unsupported speculation or to cite Finland as Western Europe, for a start” — Tyler Cowan

To judge by every one of the posts here, your complaint is justified, Tyler. Not a one has dealt with this issue. So let me begin:

1) For several decades now, sociologists have distinguished between three categories that rank people within and across countries:

— social class: Always proxied in contemporary surveys of aggregate data by income or wealth or both, though deeper studies find that self-rankings show that “class” is not an objective category, but rather a matter of subjective interpretation. (Actually, Marxist intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th century, at any rate in West Europe and the USA, knew that this was the case too: they would rail at the British and even more American working “classes” and deplore the absence of self-conscious identification with the rest of the “proletariat”, see the proletariat as unable to change its status without class-conflict and class-warfare, and see the class enemies as being the “bourgeoisie” — which always seemed to include aristocrats, upper middle-classes, middle middle-classes, and lower middle class shopkeepers, say.

— social status: This is what you are interested in, and for the moment let’s just define this as the degree to which there is in a society respect or deference (or both) for certain groups of people. These may be the wealthy, aristocrats, or the intellectually or professionally accomplished (think of the deference given professors in pre-Nazi Germany or M.D.’s in the USA until the last three or four decades, with professors ranked 2nd or 3rd behind them in “respect). Note that deference for aristocrats, to single them out, is a matter of heriditary status, which marked noticeably all European societies down until 1914 . . . with uneven changes afterwards, and especially after WWII. By contrast, deference for respect for professionally or intellectually accomplished people, or self-made rich people, reflects a different sort of judgmental values: ascriptive as opposed to achievement.

— power: In the last few decades, at any rate in democratic countries, this refers strictly to political power. Traditionally, of course, Marxists saw all power as lodged in the ownership of production, and hence the state in capitalist countries was little more than a “committee of the bourgeoisie in different guise.† In the 1950s and 1960s, some French and other Marxists — desperate to make sense of the growing power of the state (including nationalization and redistributive tax and income policies) — saw “some† independence, with the state controlled by the so-called far-sighted capitalists who wanted to defuse the revolutionary thrusts of the always exploited proletariat. Hardly anyone, even on the left these days, pays attention to such ideological fatuity.

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2) Traditionally — which means in the middle ages, then on into the early modern age, and then into the 18th and the early and mid-19th centuries of the democratic, nationalist, and industrial revolutions — all the countries of Europe, even in the more industrialized western and northern areas, were governed by elites who overlapped markedly on all three of these measures.

Generally, too, the further south and east you went into Europe, the more backward economically and democratically the countries happened to be, and the more landed aristocrats, traditional upper-class urban bourgeoisie (lawyers, accountants, top civil servants), many of the much smaller industrial middle classes, and top-dog religious leaders in the Catholic and Orthodox Christian religions banned together to maintain traditional power, wealth, income, and status against the threats of liberal and democratic intellectuals and (some) newer middle class industrialists, then — drawing more and more of the expanding middle classes — banned even more tightly to stem the threats of the new industrial working classes, increasingly attracted after the 1880s and 1890s to Marxist socialism. Essentially, the power-holders and their ardent supporters in Iberia, Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Czarist Empire, much of Germany, and the new Balkan countries adopted radically reactionary ideologies that, together with ultra-nationalism, anti-semitism, anti-liberalism, and anti-Marxism, polarized their societies and led most of them after 1918 to side with more radical fascists and Nazis.

In Czarist Russia, under the relentless pressure of WWI, the autocratic monarchy fell; the moderate conservative-liberal coalition that took power in 1917 couldn’t consolidate power; the Communists took power; the civil war that followed pitted mainly diverse and weak reactionary warlords against the Red army; and the Soviet Union became a totalitarian Communist country, reverting since the collapse of the Soviet state into a new form of reactionary autocracy in the guise of relatively meaningless democratic elections.

In Britain and in Northern Europe, the traditional interlocking elite groups of landed-wealth, aristocratic status, and monarchical and aristocratic political power proved flexible enough in these countries to move toward constitutional democracy, compromises with the middle classes (given the vote in Britain as early as 1832), and with the organized working classes . . . given the vote in the latter decades of the 19th century. All this occurred peacefully. Yet until 1906, aristocrats continued to dominate British cabinets, and the House of Lords ruled co-equal with the Commons until 1912 . . . its last major power of stopping key legislation removed only in 1947. Essentially, these traditions of compromise and institutional flexibility allowed Scandinavia, Holland, and Britain to escape the polarizing ideological tendencies that marked all of the rest of Europe outside the Soviet Union into Communist, radical Socialism, some moderate Socialists, waning middle-of-the-road Liberal parties, and militarized and militant reactionaries and fascists . . . with each and every country except Belgium and France experiencing either reactionary, fascist, or Nazi-racist dictatorships by the end of the 1930s.

As for France, it emerged as a very unstable country, politically, in and after the French revolution. There have been 14 or 15 different regimes since 1789, including five since 1939: the 3rd Republic (weak and challenged by the left and right since 1875, and collapsing in the rout of the French army by the Germans in May and June 1940); the semi-fascist Vichy regime; the weak parliamentary regime of the 4th Republic (1945-1958, the latter collapsing when the French military in Algeria threatened to invade the mainland), and the much more stable and more ideologically moderate 5th Republic.

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3) Since 1945, the traditional overlap between class (wealth), social status, and political power had been drastically modified everywhere in Europe.

In East Europe, the triangular interconnection was destroyed by Communism, and has not survived its collapse after 1990, with democracy and new, more market-oriented capitalism leading to a more diverse kind of class-status-power nexus. In West Europe, including Germany, Austria, Italy, and Spain and Portugal, democracy has solidified, prosperity has blunted class and status conflicts, and — along with France — these Central and Southern EU members look more or less like Britain, Holland, and Scandinavia in matters of far more diverse class-status-and-power differentiation. For that matter, even in Britain — with its celebrity monarchy, its modified House of Lords, its aristocratic and upper-class media-hype — the country looks much like its counterparts on the Continent these days, and even to an extent like the USA with its open celebration of respected millionaires, billionaires, and business leaders.

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4) The US?

From the outset, except in the slave-holding South, there was no aristocracy and no medieval traditions of ascriptive deference. Moreover, until the arrival of large numbers of poor, illiterate Irish immigrants in the 1840s, later similar immigrants from Italy, East and Southern Europe, and Russia, the US — as Tocqueville noted in the 1830s and recent social and economic studies show — had the most egalitarian land distribution of any country in the world. Similarly, in the 1840s, approximately 70% of white males enjoyed full electoral suffrage, whereas in England at the time, the most advanced in parliamentary democracy, the counterpart was about 11%. Similarly, from the 17th and 18th century onward, entrepreneurship was extolled and admired. Until the frontier was closed in the1870s, the Homestead acts allowed any immigrant or native-born American to acquire hundreds of acres of land for the taking.

The outcome?

Generalizing, there was — especially after the destruction of the slave-holding South by 1865 — a marked separation between class (wealth and income), status, and political power . . . with, say, the traditional “upper class† East Coast WASPS retreating from politics and trying to monopolize the prestigious old universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, brokerage houses, big banks, and prestigious law firms, plus gathering for social reasons in exclusive clubs and creating the Social Register that discriminated against new thriving entrepreneurs, industrialists, brokers, and later new media like the movies . . . many of them Jews, and almost all outsiders otherwise as well. FDR was, in effect, the last of these WASP members to become president.

And so, generalizing further, the US never really experienced, then, the full overlap of elite groups that combined class (wealth), status (respect or deference), and political power that existed even in Britain and Northern Europe, never mind the rest of Europe, right down until 1945.

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5) How about in June 2008, more specifically today with Tyler’s question about social-status in Europe as opposed to the US?

Whatever differences exist across the two sides of the Atlantic aren’t nearly as noticeable as they once were. That doesn’t mean there aren’t still differences. Entrepreneurs are found, in one survey after another, to be less highly regarded in West Europe than here, though there are differences across EU countries (the British, with more entrepreneurship than most Continental countries, the most snobbish about such pushy types; the Germans, with far less than the British, more endorsing in opinion polls). Intellectuals are more highly regarded in France than in Britain, Scandinavia, Holland, or the US (and other English-speaking countries) . . . which says a lot probably about the more pragmatic intellectual traditions of these countries than those in France, Germany, Italy, Austria, or Spain. On the other hand, professors are more highly regarded in the US than ever (right behind physicians), whereas they are not as notably respected in most of the mass university systems on the Continent, not even in Germany now. And WASP elites of the East Coast types, like their cardboard 2nd-rate imitators in localities elsewhere, have definitely been in retreat as sources of social status and influence for decades.

As for wealth-holders, they tend to dominate much of the US Senate, but that has nothing to do with hereditary wealth except in a few families (the Kennedys, say), and virtually presidents since FDR (and in the 1920s) come from modest backgrounds or are self-made successes, the exceptions being JFK and Bush-W. (Bush Sr. was a self-made millionaire.) The same is true in state and local government.

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6) Granted all this, I would add a few personal observations of my own . . . someone who has studied or taught in a traditional British university and in universities in France, Germany, and Switzerland.

Social mingling is, at elite levels like Oxford or Cambridge — never mind other British universities — far more inclusive than anything I noticed in France or Germany. In Oxford, for instance, one of my two best friends was a Jewish guy whose father was a (legal) bookie. He was invited by Lord James Douglas Hamilton, the son of the Duke of Hamilton, to visit the family castle for 10 days during a Christmas holiday. My friend said he was well received and mingled happily with all the Dukes, Earls, Ladies, Sirs, and what have you that were there. (My friend became a dramatist and theater-critic in London, then moved here in the 1980s and is today one of New York’s most prominent theater-critics.)

By contrast, at Bordeaux University where I taught in the mid-1970s, it was unthinkable for students of different social status to mingle at all. Hence no college associations, no clubs, no dances, no intramural sports, no dating across those status lines whatsoever. It was even worse, as I found out from friends, at the various campuses of the University of Paris. Odd no? The wealthy or status-clinging French have to keep a low profile, far more so than in Britain where they are celebrated openly in the media, along with the celebrity-Queen and her half-daft family, but — as in the 18th and 19th centuries — the French upper-class or upper-status groups refuse to mingle freely with others, whereas in Britain, as in centuries past, the upper status-groups have been far more flexible in embracing others, especially if they were or are accomplished professionally or intellectually or financially or in business.

And, to return to the US-West European differences in social status, there is far more open admiration in the American media for business success and innovative business leaders — not necessarily corporate heads (! More and more disliked in surveys these days) — than you would find anywhere in Europe these days.

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7) If the US and West Europe — at least the Continental EU countries — continue to differ noticeably, it’s in politics and the policies of statist regulation, taxation, and redistributive welfare policies. (Britain is much more like the US here.)

Politically, for several reasons — some set out in (4) above — the American people have never generally taken to large state power. Our constitution is unique in setting up a separation of power, with multiple checks and balances, along with a still fairly strong federal system of states and localities. We have, moreover, been far more innovative in developing efforts to give the “people† an ongoing say in government at all levels: hence we pioneered and are still the only country with (i) the referendum initiative, (ii.) the recall election (last used in California in 2003), (iii.) the primary system for choosing all candidates for the presidency, Congress, and state and local elections, (iv.) anti-monopoly regulation that goes back to the late 19th century, and (v.) direct or indirect voting for all local, state, and federal judges . . . the latter, of course, indirect through votes in Congress. Nothing like this exists anywhere in the EU.

By contrast, the state was and remains far more active in economic life than it ever was here (or in Britain, except for the period from 1945 until the Margaret Thatcher reforms of the 1980s). We have never had Marxist socialist traditions on the left; all the Continental countries had them, with moderate but Marxist-influenced Social-Democrats splitting from Communism after 1918 and first gaining power in Sweden in the 1930s and later everywhere in West Europe after 1945. (In France and Italy, the two biggest political parties in 1947 were Communists, subservient to Moscow: a clear sign of class hostilities). On the right, we have never had militant reactionary conservative movement dominated by pre-democratic, pre-modern capitalist elites of the sort that flourished everywhere on the Continent save in Scandinavia and Holland, never mind more radical mass Fascist movements that came to power everywhere in East Europe, Austria (the Dolfuss regime), Italy, Spain, Portugal, and — in racist Nazi radicalism — Germany and Austria in the 1930s.

Nor has there ever been since the slave-holding South collapsed in 1865 a tradition of paternalistic moderate conservatism of the sort found in Christian Democracy or in Scandinavian and Dutch conservatism or the Tory wing of the British Conservative Party with its roots in the 17th century struggles with the absolutist-tending monarchies.

As a result of both these differences — political innovation of a unique sort, a far more centrist ideological tradition, and suspicion or skepticism about concentrated central state power — Americans continue to differ markedly from Europeans about almost all strong redistributive and welfare policies. (The big differences were brought out decades ago and confirmed in repeated survey data. Thus American trade union leaders in the mid-1980s expressed far less support for ambitious redistributive income policies than did, believe it or not, Swedish industrialists — the latter all owning or managing private-owned firms. Whether or not Obama is elected next November, he and the Democrats in Congress are unlikely to do more than initiate their health plan proposals — which will surely be modified in Congressional give-and-take — and raise taxes back to the level of the Clinton era, though there may be some populist legislation to tax oil companies’ profits as well. )

Michael Gordon, AKA, the buggy professor: http://www.thebuggyprofessor.org

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Something that I have found different from my hometown (Guayaquil) and the european cities in which I’ve been to is that here in most american cities nobody walks as much as europeans and people in latinamerican cities do. In these cities people walks to the theater, grocery, laundry, even school, college, or a very common one is walking a few blocks from your workplace to your favorite restaurant, etc.
Because there are a lot of colonial and medieval cities in these places, there is a lot to see while walking too. Of course, as a local you may not be amaze for what surrounds you.

I love it when someone visits a couple of cities, and comes to a conclusion which is diametrically opposite what I observe. What planet does Bryan Caplan live on? One where the data automatically adjusts to fit his conclusions?

Traffic in the Ruhr, or the UK, or the Netherlands, is diabolical– probably at least as bad as Atlanta. Even with the congestion charge, London traffic is only marginally better than Manhattan traffic, (arguably worse), and Manhattan is an island.

So the UK has high car taxes, high gas taxes, few road tolls (except London and the Birmingham bypass) and diabolical traffic.

The one advantage you have in London over New York, let alone any other American city, is that the bus actually takes you somewhere, and relatively cheaply. But the Tube is stuffed– it can’t handle the load. German cities (and Paris) at least have well-functioning U-Bahns and trams, generally.

The real factors are:

- density of cities – the requirement for the provision of minimum levels of parking in all commercial and residential zoning in the US means that US cities sprawl, and that means public transport is uneconomic

- provision of public transport – European cities have good public transport. British cities have mediocre public transport. American cities have little or no public transport outside of the usual suspects (Washington, NYC, Boston etc.). And the low density sprawl prevents there ever being any

If the US was truly interested in poor and lower middle class people, it would allow higher housing density, as Europe does, thus allowing cheaper housing. But zoning in the US is all about keeping out people of lower socio-economic orders: let them live in the Inland Empire

- a steady US political refusal to believe that oil is a scarce, strategic resource, and therefore there is an externality in its consumption, to be addressed with taxation

But Europe has manic traffic. And this is bad for middle class people as well as rich people. Poor people take public transport.

valuethinker: “density of cities – the requirement for the provision of minimum levels of parking in all commercial and residential zoning in the US means that US cities sprawl, and that means public transport is uneconomic”

European cities are also sprawling Their pre-automobile inner cores might be dense, but the post-automobile suburbs are starting to look very much like U.S. suburbs.

U.S. pre-automobile cities have dense cores as well, but the growth is all in the suburbs.

Residential zoning gets blamed for much of the sprawl in the U.S. But is that really the only reason? Families will choose single family housing whenever it is affordable. That preference, combined with the huge population growth of metro areas, meant that sprawl was inevitable.

Court-mandated forced busing also contributed heavily to sprawl in the U.S. After the Supreme Court ruled that children in independent school districts need not be bused to adjacent school districts to achieve integration, the flight to the suburbs exploded. Parents can endure quite a long commute in order to keep their kids off schoolbuses and in the perceived safety of their neighborhoods.

valuethinker: a steady US political refusal to believe that oil is a scarce, strategic resource

Are you implying that modern sprawl leads to increased energy consumption? That may have been the case in the pre-internet world, when geographic clustering of businesses was still desirable. But today the geographic dispersal of employment locations is common. Sprawl allows many more single-family houses to be located close to those dispersed employment locations.

The gas price comparison seems like a red herring to me.

Having spent appreciable time driving in Spain – though admittedly not in other EU countries so I welcome corrections to what I’m about to say – driving is not significantly more expensive from a fuel perspective.

Filling a VW Passat with diesel 8 months ago (last I was in Madrid) cost about 50 euro where it cost about $35 to fill a VW Jetta (my brother owns one).

On that 50 euros, one could travel the equivalent of 700 miles. In the Jetta, 300 if lucky, and the Jetta is a smaller, less powerful car (both are manual in this case).