A reasonable Krugman take

Given that I noticed Noah Smith saying the other day that he would do a post soon about how Europe must be doing something wrong (he was looking at average adjusted incomes between the US and Europe, I think), this column by Krugman is pretty good and balanced.

 I will gift link to it, but here are some key parts:

Our global standing is never as good or as bad as conventional wisdom has it at any given moment. And the downside of getting puffed up about our relative performance is that we may fail to learn from things other nations do better.

I say this as someone who’s seen us go through multiple ups and downs on this front. There was the manic Morning in America phase of the mid-1980s, followed by the depressive mood of the early ’90s: “The Cold War is over and Japan won.” Then came a late-90s surge in triumphalism as America temporarily took the lead in taking advantage of the internet, which receded as other countries also got online, productivity gains from information technology petered out, America led the way into global financial crisis and China emerged as a powerful economic rival.

Now the boastfulness is back, with a special emphasis on trashing European economic performance. For example, I’ve been seeing media organizations that really should know better saying things like this: “America’s economy is nearly twice the size of the eurozone’s. In 2008 they were similar,” which appeared on a chart in The Wall Street Journal.

You can read the next bit, but further down:

Put it this way: Just comparing dollar values of G.D.P. in America and Europe arguably overstates the true gap in economic performance by a factor of around 10.

My take is that all modern economies are at roughly the same level of technology. They’re also all capable of achieving remarkable things when they put their mind to it. Have people noticed how quickly Pennsylvania managed to reopen I-95 after a section of the crucial highway collapsed?

But our sophisticated, capable societies often make different choices. Some of these choices are just that — choices where there isn’t necessarily a right answer. For example, one reason European nations generally have lower G.D.P. per capita than we do is that their workers get a lot more vacation. We have more stuff; they have more time. De gustibus and all that.

In other areas, however, some countries almost surely get it wrong. Europe’s lagging growth probably does, in part, reflect inflexibility and resistance to innovation. Americans, on the other hand, should ask themselves why we seem to be worse at building livable cities or, to take one important aspect of life, not dying: U.S. life expectancy had fallen far behind comparable countries even before Covid.

The point is that advanced countries are, in important ways, laboratories for economic and social policy: Nobody is the best at everything, and we can learn a lot by looking at things other countries seem to do better than we do.

Yes:  it is pretty incredible the decrease in life expectancy in the US, not to mention the way a significant number of Americans go bankrupt from medical treatment each year.   

Simple economic measures and comparisons should never be the only way of measuring quality of life...