Vive la Difference (non)

Vive la Différence
A review of The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe are Alike, by Peter Baldwin

In January the new permanent president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, renewed the European Union's urgent call for a new tax. There was no time to waste: Brussels needed the dough to preserve what Van Rompuy called the "European way of life." As a statement released by his office last November put it, "The financing of the welfare state...will require new resources."

As the reaction against Obamacare demonstrated, if the president of the United States said he needed more money to preserve the "American way of life" and then made clear he meant ponying up more money for welfare schemes, most voters would wish him an unemployment check without delay. But they would be shocked to discover in Peter Baldwin's very amusing book, The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe Are Alike, that the "European way of life" pretty much describes how people in, say, Iowa live.

In fact, Baldwin, a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, reached his conclusion in a distinctly Midwestern way: he harvested. Baldwin's numbers—fertilized by studies from the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and other international organizations and institutions, where statistics grow as thick and high as Iowa corn—fill his book. They show that despite our assumptions, despite a thousand op-eds, and a couple of centuries of squabbling and bickering, and even wars and revolutions, the statistical differences between Western Europe and America are trivial—in fact less than the differences between various European states. All that stuff about us Americans and them Europeans? Statistically speaking, them is us. Incroyable, non?

However, one vast difference between Europeans and Americans is in the mastery of groundless condescension. So this is a great book to take to a dinner party in Paris or to a curb-sweep in Glasgow. What can be more tiresome than meeting a hung-over Brit and waiting for the inevitable jibes about misery and mayhem, poverty and illiteracy in the U.S.A.? Let them eat Baldwin. They'll be shocked to learn that going by the numbers—on money and work, crime and violence, health care and education, the environment and the family—we're depressingly alike.

One graph after another in this highly contrarian and entertaining book shows a big black line indicating where America stands in the European tables, and it's almost always somewhere in the middle, often with Scandos and the make-believe Luxembourgers a notch or two above us, the British and Irish a notch or two below. In common with most other Western Europeans, we give thanks that we're not Portuguese, who seem to have a hard time with almost everything. The differences are as minor as Baldwin says: generally speaking, to use a term from the '60s, we are all bozos on this bus. We all work hard, raise families, pay taxes, and die—and we do these things in remarkably similar ways. When Le Monde ran its famous headline, "We are all Americans," on the morning of September 12, 2001, what they might have meant on any other day was "We are all middle-class people with weight problems who recycle and watch too much TV."

For those on the American left who love holding up European solutions for American problems, Baldwin's collection of discoveries will be a blow. Who knew that in the U.S., taxes are more progressive than in all of Europe? Or that American social welfare policies are as generous as Van Rompuy's cherished continental welfare state? Or that the Germans are even more litigious than Yanks? Or that for education, state spending by Americans and Europeans is about the same and achieves about the same results? Or that Americans have been more successful in reducing carbon dioxide output per unit of GDP than nine European countries, some of them notoriously sanctimonious? Or that the French, Austrians, Swiss, Germans, and Italians—with their expensive public transportation networks—all own more passenger cars per capita than Americans do? Or that New Yorkers are the politest big-city residents on either side of the Atlantic? Fuggedaboutit! Europeans ridicule perceived American religiosity, yet, as Baldwin notes, "About a third of Germans, Austrians, and Irish, and even more French and Swiss, believe that fortune-tellers can foresee the future."