European Shortfall As A Historic Constant
For some resson, the Wall Street Journal put up a link on Facebooki to a piece they ran last April, What Happens When Europeans Find Out How Poor They Are? . Coming back to it today, I find they've tucked it back behind a paywall. But the first paragraphs give up the gravamen: Do Europeans understand how poor they are? And what will happen when they find out? Those are the Continent’s big political-economy questions for the next few years—perhaps decades. The widening gap between American and European prosperity is among the most important facts of the global economy. The clearest manifestation is the chasm in per capita gross domestic product: $94,400 in the U.S., according to the International Monetary Fund, compared with $65,300 in Germany, $61,000 in the U.K. and $52,000 in France. I don't know what history books this fellow has been smoking -- I've gradually come to recognize I did well by not taking any undergraduate history courses -- but European and UK u...