Prof bug has been bee-busy posting at various economic sites, mainly libertarian (though not just them), and in large part just to get some decent fodder for the basis of some economic and political commentries for this buggy site. Here's a fairly lengthy post, revised slightly, that prof bug left last week at the Marginal Revolution . . . a stimulating site run by Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University in northern Virginia, a citadel of libertarian free-market enthusiasts. Besides posting lots of stimulating commentaries, Cowen is unusual among economists for his wide-ranging literary and aesthetic interests.
First Cowen's Commentary:
Where is inequality greater?
Bryan Caplan writes:
In the U.S., we have low gas taxes, low car taxes, few tolls, strict zoning that leads developers to provide lots of free parking, low speed limits, lots of traffic enforcement, and lots of congestion.
In Europe (France and Germany specifically), they have high gas taxes, high car taxes, lots of tolls, almost no free parking, high speed limits (often none at all), little traffic enforcement, and very little congestion. (The only real traffic jam I endured in Europe was trying to get into Paris during rush hour. I was delayed about 30 minutes total).
If you had to pick one of these two systems, which would you prefer? Or to make the question a little cleaner, if there were two otherwise identical countries, but one had the U.S. system and the other had the Euro system, where would you decide to live?
Much as it pains me to admit, I would choose to live in the country with the Euro system. If you're at least upper-middle class, the convenience is worth the price. Yes, this is another secret way that Europe is better for the rich, and the U.S. for everyone else.
I wonder sometimes whether inequality of status -- as opposed to wealth -- is greater in Western Europe or in the United States. In this country you can love NASCAR and be proud of it.
Millionaires won't look down on you much for that taste. In Europe you are expected to dress well and be educated and not watch too much TV. So the egalitarian left is in an odd position here. On one hand it wishes to elevate the European system over the United States. Furthermore it also wishes to claim that wealth isn't a final determinant of happiness (i.e., Europe is worthy), while at the same time circling back to emphasize inequality of wealth as a prima facie fault of the American system.
Tighter social networks, by inducing conformity, make a society more egalitarian along both political and economic dimensions. Yet those same networks place especially high "taxes" on those who don't follow the norms, thus creating another kind of inequality.
Happiness studies are highly imperfect but the inequality of measured happiness doesn't seem to be any higher in the United States than in Western Europe. Oddly that result doesn't seem to get a lot of attention.
The Buggy Response
Cowen Complains The Comments Left by Others Miss His Key Point
"A few of you are attacking what you thought or wished I said instead of what I actually wrote. Consider for instance the simple sentence: "I wonder sometimes whether inequality of status -- as opposed to wealth -- is greater in Western Europe or in the United States." It's odd to call what follows an unsupported speculation or to cite Finland as Western Europe, for a start" -- Tyler Cowan
Class, Status, and Power Distinguished by Prof Bug
To judge by every one of the posts here, your complaint is justified, Tyler. Not a one has dealt with this issue. So let me begin:
For several decades now, sociologists have distinguished between three categories that differentiate and rank different groups of people within and across countries:
-- Social Class: Always proxied in contemporary surveys of aggregate data by income or wealth or both, though deeper studies find that self-rankings show that "class" is not an objective category, but rather a matter of subjective interpretation. (Actually, Marxist intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th century, at any rate in West Europe and the USA, knew that this was the case too: they would rail at the British and even more American working "classes" and deplore the absence of self-conscious identification with the rest of the "proletariat", see the proletariat as unable to change its status without class-conflict and class-warfare, and see the class enemies as being the "bourgeoisie" --- which always seemed to include aristocrats, upper middle-classes, middle middle-classes, and lower middle class shopkeepers, say.
-- Social Status: This is what you are interested in, and for the moment let's just define this as the degree to which there is in a society respect or deference (or both) for certain groups of people. These may be the wealthy, aristocrats, or the intellectually or professionally accomplished (think of the deference given professors in pre-Nazi Germany or M.D.'s in the USA until the last three or four decades, with professors ranked 2nd or 3rd behind them in "respect). Note that deference for aristocrats, to single them out, is a matter of heriditary status, which marked noticeably all European societies down until 1914 . . . with uneven changes afterwards, and especially after WWII. By contrast, deference for respect for professionally or intellectually accomplished people, or self-made rich people, reflects a different sort of judgmental values: ascriptive as opposed to achievement.
-- Power: In the last few decades, at any rate in democratic countries, this refers strictly to political power. Traditionally, of course, Marxists saw all power as lodged in the ownership of production, and hence the state in capitalist countries was little more than a "committee of the bourgeoisie in different guise." In the 1950s and 1960s, some French and other Marxists --- desperate to make sense of the growing power of the state (including nationalization and redistributive tax and income policies) --- saw "some" independence, with the state controlled by the so-called far-sighted capitalists who wanted to defuse the revolutionary thrusts of the always exploited proletariat. Hardly anyone, even on the left these days, pays attention to such ideological fatuity.
European Societies Until Recently: A Huge Overlap on All 3 Categories
Traditionally --- which means in the Middle Ages, then on into the early modern age, and then into the 18th and the early and mid-19th centuries of the democratic, nationalist, and industrial revolutions --- all the countries of Europe, even in the more industrialized western and northern areas, were governed by elites who overlapped markedly on all three of these measures.
Generally, too, the further south and east you went into Europe, the more backward economically and democratically the countries happened to be, and the more landed aristocrats, traditional upper-class urban bourgeoisie (lawyers, accountants, top civil servants), many of the much smaller industrial middle classes, and top-dog religious leaders, whether in Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy, banned together to maintain traditional power, wealth, income, and status against the threats of liberal and democratic intellectuals and (some) newer middle class industrialists, then --- drawing more and more of the expanding middle classes --- banned even more tightly to stem the threats of the new industrial working classes, increasingly attracted after the 1880s and 1890s to Marxist socialism. Essentially, the power-holders and their ardent supporters in Iberia, Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Czarist Empire, much of Germany, and the new Balkan countries adopted radically reactionary ideologies that, together with ultra-nationalism, anti-semitism, anti-liberalism, and anti-Marxism, polarized their societies and led most of them after 1918 to side with more radical fascists and Nazis.
-- In Czarist Russia, under the relentless pressure of WWI, the autocratic monarchy fell; the moderate conservative-liberal coalition that took power in 1917 couldn't consolidate power; the Communists took power; the civil war that followed pitted mainly diverse and weak reactionary warlords against the Red army; and the Soviet Union became a totalitarian Communist country, reverting since the collapse of the Soviet state into a new form of reactionary autocracy in the guise of relatively meaningless democratic elections.
-- In Britain and in Northern Europe, the traditional interlocking elite groups of landed-wealth, aristocratic status, and monarchical and aristocratic political power proved flexible enough in these countries to move toward constitutional democracy, compromises with the middle classes (given the vote in Britain as early as 1832), and with the organized working classes . . . given the vote in the latter decades of the 19th century. All this occurred peacefully. Yet until 1906, aristocrats continued to dominate British cabinets, and the House of Lords ruled co-equal with the Commons until 1912 . . . its last major power of stopping key legislation removed only in 1947. Essentially, these traditions of compromise and institutional flexibility allowed Scandinavia, Holland, and Britain to escape the polarizing ideological tendencies that marked all of the rest of Europe outside the Soviet Union into Communist, radical Socialism, some moderate Socialists, waning middle-of-the-road Liberal parties, and militarized and militant reactionaries and fascists . . . with each and every country except Belgium and France experiencing either reactionary, fascist, or Nazi-racist dictatorships by the end of the 1930s.
-- As for France, it emerged as a very unstable country, politically, in and after the French revolution. There have been 14 or 15 different regimes since 1789, including five since 1939: the 3rd Republic (weak and challenged by the left and right since 1875, and collapsing in the rout of the French army by the Germans in May and June 1940); the semi-fascist Vichy regime; the weak parliamentary regime of the 4th Republic (1945-1958, the latter collapsing when the French military in Algeria threatened to invade the mainland), and the much more stable and more ideologically moderate 5th Republic.
Big Changes in Europe Since World War II
Since 1945, the traditional overlap between class (wealth), social status, and political power had been drastically modified everywhere in Europe.