SOCIAL POLICY IN EUROPE AND AMERICA. At the risk of beating a dead horse, I'm finding Jonah's post on welfare states an almost endlessly rich source of material and fascination. His response to Jonathan Cohn's article on the superiority of the French system doesn't try and rebut any of Cohn's points, but instead lapses into this weird revery over how the rugged individualism of Americans makes them totally unsuitable for social welfare programs. That they love Medicare and Social Security and the VA and all the rest never even intrudes. It's impressive! And reductive! But in case Jonah or anyone else wants to actually study the development of the American, Canadian, and European social welfare states, rather than just muse over them, I thought I'd offer up some resources on the subject. On health care specifically, the best books are Jill Quadagno's One Nation, Uninsured, which tries to explain how America has remained the only industrialized country without universal health care, Paul Starr's The Social Transformation of American Medicine, and Antonia Maioni's Parting at the Crossroads which explores the divergent paths of America and Canada. On more general welfare state issues, Jacob Hacker's The Divided Welfare State is quite good, as is James Russell's Double Standard: Social Policy in Europe and the United States and Dan Zuberi's Differences That Matter: Social Policy in the United States and Canada. There's nothing wrong, of course, with positing culture as a source of differences between different countries and continents. But to try and tell the story of our divergent paths without mentioning the overwhelming role of race, the American Medical Association, the status quo bias of our particular system of government, America's comparatively weaker Labor movement, and so forth is really rather silly. Moreover, it's quite unclear that the various cultures remain terribly different, particularly in their approach to government, and there's ample evidence, as I showed below, that Americans are perfectly content within public safety net programs and polls, of course, often see Americans professing a preference for nationalized -- and even Canadian! -- style health care. --Ezra Klein
