At the time of the Paris riots, last year, I remember Matthew Yglesias calling for a much needed reality check for those pundits who, all of a sudden, knew about everything French and had a list of reasons why the country’s politics were wrong - and which pretty much boiled down to “they don’t do things like the US”. In Brazil, we get similar reasoning from lots of conservative bloggers and journalists, when they’re not simply saying Brazilians aren’t compatible with civilization.
Today, via Bruce Sterling’s excellent blog, I see that Cory Doctorow has recently talked about this:
The American lifestyle frankly sucks. The media is generally shit. The food stinks. We spend too much time in traffic and too much time taking care of a badly built McHouse that has the ergonomics of a coach seat on a discount airline. Add to that the lack of health care (…), the enormous wealth-gap between the rich and poor, blisteringly expensive tertiary education, an infant mortality rate that’s straight out of Victorian England, and a national security apparat that shoves its fist up my asshole every time I get on an airplane, and I don’t think that this country is much of a paragon of quality living.
What Matthew said was somewhat along those lines, reminding people that the French preferred to have better health care and work benefits in lieu of quick economical and technological growth. I’m currently reading a collection of George Orwell’s work as a journalist during World War II and immediately after it, and it is quite easy to recognize this mindset on French politics.
The problem, of course, is neither in the American or French “way of life”, but with pundits’ usual inability to have an open mind and understand different opinions. You see the exact same thing when talking about climate change, where they not only can’t understand that some people might prefer to slow down economical and technological development in order to leave a smaller footprint on the planet, but say that whoever proposes such a thing is an ignorant and an idiot. Actually, it is not a question of ignorance at all, but of choice.
Copying US policies on some subject may be the best option for quickest development and profits, but it may not be the option people want the most. And it is when you mention this that you understand why these are the same pundits that hailed Pinochet as a necessary evil and who justify that by saying (.br) “a government that is democratically elected [and] which maintains its population uneducated, in misery and subdued to a tyrannical constitutional order is never superior to a dictatorship just because it is a democracy”.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Cisco // Jan 2, 2007 at 7:50 pm
On global warming: methinks some of the criticism is not that those who want to slow down economic and technological growth are stupid or evil, but that they don’t fully understand the consequences of this. For example, if the US had grown 1% per year less than it did during twentieth century, it would be as rich today as Mexico is. Maybe the environmental gain would make that worthwhile, but the fact is that people advocating “slowing down” often skip over facts like that.
As for the French: the prophecy states that their legacy will be naught but a dead, incomprehensible language. Or, more seriously: let their health care depend forever on American innovation and their benefits cause high unemployment.
My overall point here being that saying it’s all a matter of choice doesn’t mean that some choices aren’t better than others. Which works, of course, for all sides of this debate.
2 solonbro // Jan 3, 2007 at 12:43 am
My point is that “better” is a relative thing, and most conservative pundits seem to have a problem understanding that. If the majority of the French prefer to outsource innovation to the US so they can have what they consider a better lifestyle, it’s not a “worse” choice per se. It is so only under the reasoning that a society should always be striving for advancement and evolution.
Unemployment is another part of the equation that conservatives just don’t seem to get (and it was the exact point Matthew was trying to make): the French seem to think it a reasonable compromise in order to avoid having to live the stressful “american way of life”. Not that I’m advocating it, far from it. I’m just saying it is a choice with a different goal than conservatives would think correct and, for such a goal, it is a “better” one.
3 Cisco // Jan 3, 2007 at 1:15 am
Ach, but as France outsources innovation (and national defense) to the US, American liberals and Frenchmen of all stripes bitch and whine that the Americans should be like them. It is a comfy choice, which Americans allow for all sorts of arcane historical and geopolitical reasons. But when it comes down to discussing this or that feature of what makes the French French, you won’t see that many Francophiles shouting from the rooftops that the Americans should find their own Hyper-power to mooch off new meds and young soldiers.
And I’m not sure the French accept unemployment as a reasonable compromise, but rather that the structure and politics and culture of France makes it very hard to do away with it. There’s plenty of Keynesianism across the pond, Mr. Brochado, and explaining the relationship between those delightful perks and the unshakeable NAIRU.
This reasonable compromise, alas, is like choosing to play six rounds of Russian Roulette while pointing the gun to one’s right foot instead of to one’s temple: the negative side-effects are directly proportionate to the stupidity of the game, even if the player loves the thrill of it all much more than the health of his feet.
(I can’t quite remember where, but I’ve recently read about how Jospin managed to sneak in lots of free-market reforms along with the 35-hour work week which offset its negative effects by introducing some much needed labor dynamism. The tragedy here is that those very worthwhile and intelligent measures (which allowed for more flexible work-contracts) has to be snuck in instead of being publicly touted for what they were.)
(And is it me or you managed to defend ethical relativism and economic parasitism among nations with that first paragraph? It sure looks awfully close to it.)
(That said, I do love commenting away in English. The language is a much funner playground, a much grander sandbox in which to dally. Keep those posts coming and I might even join in on the fun in a separate blog in my own little corner of the sphere o’blogs.)
4 solonbro // Jan 3, 2007 at 1:42 am
I’m defending a country’s right to decide, democratically and knowingly, to be an economic parasite (and how this decision might come from culture rather than ignorance).
One might argue - and I’d agree - that it is an ethically wrong decision as long as they also agree to be part in a globalized economy, where it should be their goal to grow and evolve. But even then, I’d say we should criticize the way the system works, instead of those who take advantage of it.
5 Cisco // Jan 3, 2007 at 1:57 am
Sure, I hate the game too, not the playahs. But that’s a far cry from “it’s all just choices”, especially when one of the countries is freakin’ France, a rulemaker as much as player in the game of international trade, inasmuch as such rules can be made and unmade.
And again I state that it’s not just being a parasite, it’s (a) claiming parasitism to be morally superior, and (b) insisting, publiclt at least, that America would be much better off as a fellow leech than as the Global Host Body that it is. What you deem “choices” of the French, other, more influential pundits, would call “policy recommendations”. Disastrous, empoverishing, backwards policy recommendations.
I think I’ll start a “Greg Mankiw for President” club. Maybe even a “Greg Mankiw for President of France” club. You, who I imagine to be a fan of Pigovian Taxes (to which I’m ambivalent), would join in, non?
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