David Brooks tells readers that: "The U.S. has its problems, but Americans would be crazy to trade their problems with those of any other large nation." The basis for this assertion is that it enjoyed considerably faster GDP growth since 1991 than the other major wealthy countries between 1991 and 2009. There are three main problems in Brooks' analysis. First, the U.S. was in the middle of a recession in 1991. While hucksters often take measures of growth from the middle of recession, serious people do not. The appropriate comparison year is 1989, the peak of the prior business cycle. This erases some of the gap in growth over this period. However the more important error is that Brooks uses overall growth, rather than per capita growth. Countries do not get richer unless their economy grows more than their population. Most of the difference in growth rate between the U.S. and France and Germany is due to differences in population growth. The U.S. is getting more crowded. Germany and Japan are getting less crowded. If we look at per capita GDP, the U.S. still has a lead over the period 1989 to 2009, but it is not much to crow about. Our per capita GDP rose by 32.2 percent over this period. This beats Japan's 19.9 percent by a substantial margin, but it is not hugely different than France's 25.1 percent or Germany's 27.9 percent. When we consider that France moved to a 35 hour workweek during this period and Germany also moved to shorter workweeks, the dominance of the U.S. model is less evident. For those who care about the future of the planet, we may also consider the fact that greenhouse gas emissions in these other countries have not risen anywhere near as rapidly as in the U.S., and we have even further grounds to question the superiority of the U.S. model. Also, the U.S. growth was accompanied by an unsustainable trade deficit. Okay, we're getting way over Brooks' head here, so I better stop.
--Dean Baker