What America can learn from Europe about income inequality
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by George R. Tyler, The Globalist;
Our GDP growth is currently outpacing Europe’s, but their future still looks brighter. Here’s why.
The fact that GDP growth in the United States currently outpaces European growth by a large margin might lead one to believe that America’s economic future is brighter than Europe’s. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Despite all the reflexive triumphalism, the U.S. economy has produced poor investment and wage outcomes for a generation. Meanwhile, northern European economies have achieved something that increasingly eludes the United States – a growing middle class.
Remember the famous line “I’ll have what she’s having” from the movie “When Harry Met Sally”? It is apt in our context: Americans need what northern Europeans have.
There are those who argue that making this point amounts to heresy. After all, the European Union is struggling to reorder its flawed architecture, stabilize public debt and, most important, regain a decent pace of economic growth.
Yet beneath those daunting challenges, the seasoned and potent internal institutions, crafted in the postwar years in northern Europe to broadcast prosperity widely, continue to function smoothly.
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