Thank you very much for this. The tendency to slime quasi socialist economic systems in Europe with slanted statistics in an attempt to defend the largely indefensible and socially cruel American system is all too pervasive.

This goes double for the health care debate.

Why doesn't the US use the German method????

Not a single country in Europe can be said to have a "quasi-socialist" economy. That's a US-centric lie, which associates everything slightly to the left of Attila the Hun to socialism.

Socialism is NOT placing restrictions on corporations, or the establishment of social programs. Socialism is the socialisation of ALL means of production, which is usually accomplished via nationalisation. Note: of ALL means of production, not just a few selected areas.

So to call any European country socialistic is laughable. Most are social-democratic, not socialistic.

Americans should take the time to learn the difference...

The whole point of the propaganda is to keep Americans from seeing the benefits of an alternative system.
This is why Bush & co. love a weak dollar -- it keeps more Americans from traveling abroad and seeing how much better the living conditions are in some countries.
Ditto for the "reforms" at the passport office, forcing Americans to wait months for a passport -- which of course they now need even to go to Canada or Mexico

Not to dispute DR's point, but I would note that my father-in-law, a well-travelled and politically-aware native German, proudly calls himself a socialist for his activities with the Social Democrats.

DR,

To:

"Americans should take the time to learn the difference..."

We in the US are fed lies by our mass media, guys like Baker are trying to correct that, but blaming the victim does not help.

We have with the internet, been able to break the iron grip of the elites over the Media....it's going to take time and it is going to take both patience and effort by those within our boundaries and those in Europe.

Blaming the general population with remarks whose criticism contains more than a whiff of self congratulation may feel good, but it subtracts from the ideals you espouse.

"So to call any European country socialistic is laughable. Most are social-democratic, not socialistic."

There are reasons for it though:

-Many European social democratic parties still have the name "socialist".

-Calling European social democrats "liberal" by US standards would be inaccurate because most of them are well to the left of mainstream American liberals and almost all Democratic politicians.

-Communism and laissez-faire capitalism are easy to define, but defining exactly where various mixed systems fall on the spectrum is much harder.

Why doesn't the US use the German method????

I should think the reason is rather obvious: It produces a lower unemployment rate, which all politicians (when they are in power) prefer. In Germany, the unemployment rate traditionally hasn't been as sensitive an issue politically because of that dastardly cradle-to-grave welfare state.

You can get something close to an applies-to-apples comparison by looking at the "alternative measure of unemployment" table in the U.S. data put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It includes a stat that captures those who employed part time "for economic reasons" (translation: They can't find anything better.)

I don't know if the methodology is completely compatible (knowing the U.S. stats agencies, I would doubt it) but it's closer than the "official" lies.

The number for August was 8.4% -- a whopping 0.6 of a percentage point below the German unemployment rate -- which as Dean points out, includes the ravaged industries of the former East Germany. (Mississippi and Arkansas don't quite compensate on the U.S. side.)

Of course, the all knowing, all powerful New York Times could have looked this up, but chose not to.

As they used to say about the old Bell System: The Times doesn't care; it doesn't have to.

Just to add to Iceman's comment:
the word "libéral" in French is an Economic adjective, and it refers to the right-wing idea of the economy, meaning "treat business and corporations liberally" i.e. let them do what they want. This just makes the jargon even more complicated. What we call "neo-conservative" the French call "néo-libéral".

B-B-But Rush Limbaugh says Germany is socialistic! So the Times has impeccable authority to call it socialistic.

Europeans don't give a flip what the NYT thinks anyway. So what difference does it make?

Well, I only moved to the US from Germany 8 years ago, and I am quite surprised to hear that I never learned how to take responsibility for my own life (not to put too fine a point on it, but in Germany, university students are not treated like children - incredible as that may sound to Americans), and apparently spent the first 26 years of said life in a socialist country. Then again, I recall sending about one to two letters a week to the corrections department of the Times during the most recent general elections campaign in Germany for getting the names, professions, numbers of children, home towns etc. of leading candidates wrong. So I'm not that surprised after all.

In reality, Germany has been (mis)ruled by the same crap neoliberals of Clinton type as so many other unfortunate countries for an annoyingly long time now.

"At heart, local analysts said, the German people did not really want aggressive reforms. They were more than content to let the state care for them, from kindergarten all the way to retirement."

Local analysts, eh? Not only "local" but anonymous too!

i guess i'll take responsibility for my life when i can control the unemployment rate and the inflation rate and the odd epidemic single handed.

and bargain as an "equal" for wages.

Europeans don't give a flip what the NYT thinks anyway. So what difference does it make?

There are lots of people who read and believe what the NYT says. This includes some very influential Americans who help determine social and economic policy, as well as many others who participate in state and local governments.

It would be nice if the paper they were reading and believing wasn't saying things that weren't true, especially as it pertains to other countries whose economic policies are actually benefiting them as a whole. Instead of learning something constructive from what other people around the world are doing right, they simply pretend they are doing it wrong and congratulating themselves baselessly for perpetuating inaccurate stereotypes.

That's what difference it makes.

By the way, I was recently in Germany for a few weeks. Yeah, what a hell-hole that was. Those Germans really are suffering over there, with all that high standard of living and their fast frequent trains and 6 weeks of paid vacation a year. I don't know how they can keep living like that.

Seems to me as though Germans have been making decisions for themselves--they vote for representatives who provide them with the "cradle to grave" welfare (I doubt if that's what it is). I'd be happy to vote for candidates who'd do the same in the US--although I can't imagine which of the people currently running (in my state, at the federal level) could (and would) effectively stand up to the health insurance industry, and all the other sectors that would prefer we do not have the same "care" offered to us by our gov't.

The NY Times is nothing compared to the Wall St. Journal. I pretty much stopped reading it about 6 months ago, but for the year prior, it seemed as though every time a news article covered or discussed Germany, you could easily imagine the writer rubbing his/her hands in glee if able to report that Germany wasn't doing all that well- and how "reform" was really needed to fix things. Except, despite the biased coverage, it always seemed as though Germany was doing as well as the US, if not better.

Hopefully the Germans'll bail us out when we go bust.

We don't have too many "deep pockets" friends left.

To Peter Principle (in action, it seems) -
'In Germany, the unemployment rate traditionally hasn't been as sensitive an issue politically because of that dastardly cradle-to-grave welfare state.'

The unemployment rate, along with inflation, are considered to be among the most sensitive political issues, as for Germans, when either of these becomes too unbalanced, society is destroyed. Of course, this is not a slippery slope argument, it is based on historical experience.

What you may have meant is that social problems resulting from more accurately reporting true unemployment (notice how prisoners are counted in the U.S., for example) are less problematic in Germany, due to such social programs as 'universal' health coverage (it isn't really, but trying to explain the German system to Americans is essentially impossible) or the right to shelter enshrined in the German Grundgesetz (that's right, shelter is considered a right to which all German citizens are entitled - and man, does that sound radically socialist), and so on.

Ok, my bad. I found the 6.4% number.
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/25/54/39251127.pdf

So if blogs are more prone to being wrong than Newspapers, I suppose blog comments, still more so.

(oh, and I meant Dean, not Peter)

It's pretty simple. In the USA, if you're not on unemployment, you're not unemployed. Of course, you can't survive for a long on American unemployment, so you take anything else you can get, even if it's 2 part-time jobs. And that doesn't even count all the "discouraged" workers who have exhausted their unemployment benefits, and are depending on their family or borrowing out equity from their home to make ends meet.

Is it political bias or just plain economic ignorance. Honestly, most economic departments are being run by the business school, and journalists---and the public---just don't understand REAL economic theory, just the ideological rap of the CEO classes that passes for economic theory.

"They have not been trained for the last 20 or 30 years to take responsibility for their own lives.”

Hm. Germany is a more democratically ruled country than the US (as of course are most of the more modern, European democracies). It seems to me that the people HAVE taken responsibility for their lives by collectively choosing the policies they have.

@christian h.

"In reality, Germany has been (mis)ruled by the same crap neoliberals of Clinton type as so many other unfortunate countries for an annoyingly long time now."

Well said. Perfectly true.

@Dean Baker

The official German unemployment rate doesn't include all underemployed part-time workers. It counts only part-timers, who work less than 15 hours and seek a job with more than 15 hours subject to full social-security payments. This is the standard for jobs with longer hours in Germany. Marginal part-time jobs ( Minijobs, mostly used by housewifes, students or pensionists or as second job ) have reduced payments. They provide their workers with social benefits ( for example health care, often paid vacancies ) that are absolutely luxurious for most low wage workers in the US.

The official German unemployment rate counts around 30-40% of the underemployed part-timers. This is nearly one quarter of all unemployed. According to the German definition the unemployment in the US actually is between 7-8%. My rule of thumb is the BLS unemployment definition "U6" minus 1.5-2% plus 1% for the excess imprisonment in the US. This would result in an actual US unemployment rate of 7.3-7.8% by German standards, compared to seasonally adjusted 7.3% in WestGermany ( EastGermany 14.7% ).

"Real" unemployment in WestGermany is not much higher than in the US. You can see this, if you compare employment-population ratios, not unemployment. In 2006 there were 144.4 million employed ( civilian employment only ) in the US ( BLS ) in a population of 299.4 million ( US census bureau ). WestGermany + Berlin had 33.25 million in civilian employment ( Erwerbstaetigenrechnung des Bundes und der Laender ) and a population of 69.1 million. That gives a share of 48.2% ( total population ) employed for the US and 48.1% for WestGermany. Working age population ( 15-64 ) in Germany is 66.7% of the population and 67.2% in the US.

0.1% in employment that's the whole difference between the German and the US model under normal conditions. And public employment in Germany is lower than in the US and most other industrialized nations.

The "reforms" of the last years have worsened the situation. They didn't improve it. We import the problems from the US or the Uk ( "precarious" employment ) without any visible gains for the economy or the broader population.

To believe that a country, which runs the highest trade deficit in the world ( Germany highest trade surplus in 2006 ), which creates for every dollar in GDP growth 5 dollars in new private and public debt ( Germany less than 2 dollars ), which has 15.5% of its population without health care insurance ( Germany 0.2% ) and which has seven times more people in prison than nearly every other industrialized nation, can be a model is ridiculous.

The fall of the dollar was inevitable. It is the only way to get the trade deficit down to size. The real problem was allowing the dollar to rise to the point that it made such a painful adjutsment necessary. This was the Clinton-Rubin high dollar policy. It felt good in the short-term (except for manufacturing workers), but just like tax cuts that lead to big budget deficits, it could not be sustained.