Customer Reviews

World We're in

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Hutton challenges - with persuasive evidence - the idea that the US is a uniquely productive economy with unparalleled levels of social mobility. Rather, he argues that Americans can learn much from the European model of capitalism, and warns of serious consequences if we fail. This book should be required reading for anyone who claims to be serious about understanding our present economic and political crises.

It's pretty hard to argue with this book.

Occasionally, his tone is a little jingoistic and sometimes the book lacks cohesion. But the case he makes is compelling.

It's extremely easy to read - as you would expect from a journalist of his calibre.

A pleasure to read a book that challenges the conservative dogma that dominates the Anglo-Saxon World.

By far the best part of this book is Hutton's expose of US capitalism's failure to provide for the American people. As he acknowledges, its `model does not itself work.' He points to US workers' reduced wages, long hours (averaging 50 a week), fewer holidays, and record levels of debt, to the USA's minimal welfare, regulation and taxes, an all-too flexible labour market, worse productivity than Europe's, falling investment and de-industrialisation.

Yet the US state tries to impose this model worldwide through the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation, demanding balanced budgets, tight money, de-regulation, privatisation, anti-union laws and mergers. There is no need for privatisation: between 1980 and 1988, NHS hospitals increased in-patient treatment by 16%, emergency treatment by 19% and day surgery by 73%, without significant cost increases. And privatisation doesn't work: the Tube PPP promises only 12 new trains, in six years' time. The West Coast line upgrade will cost £16 million a mile, three times more than BR's upgrades; and the first 14 PFI hospitals will cost £1.3 billion, twice the original estimates. Mergers don't work either: a survey of 700 mergers showed that only 119 added value.

The worst part is his effort to promote the EU. Yet he realistically describes its workings: EU summits have acted `in effect to Americanise Europe'. "The EU has allowed itself to define its task as `liberalising' and deregulation' ... in accordance with the consensus view that there is little to be done in Europe except build a single market." The EU is `developing as an engine of the conservative right' and is `trying to import the American model'. The European Central Bank has `a highly conservative monetary regime'; its `entrenchment of monetarism' is `grievously damaging the management of the European economy'.

Then wishful thinking takes over. He claims that the EU's high levels of long-term unemployment are just the short-term results of various shocks, not due to the ECB policy of deflation. All the EU's failings would magically vanish if only it would change and behave as Mr Hutton would like!

It is amazing that the US lags so far behind Europe in so many ways yet it is the one country whose industrial strength saved this utopia from ravages of the most evil men in the history of mankind, Hitler and Stalin.

Perhaps if the US had just sat back and let Adolf and Stalin go at it, the Europeans would be now enjoying a choice between gulags and concentration camps.

Hutton wrote this compilation of misleading statistics before the French ran out of caskets for the elderly who died in the heat wave in the Summer of 2003, but I'm sure he would have found some way of spinning the fact that the authorities really didn't notice all these dead people filling the morgues until some of these "highly productive" Europeans came home from their August holidays to find granny's rotting body in their un-air-conditioned apartments.

Do American's work more than Europeans? Yes, and so does every other global competitor in the world. Are Europeans more productive than Americans? Only if you exclude the statistics that compares apples to apples and doesn't muddy the water with oranges. If you include long term unemployment figures into the European numbers as is done in the US, the real number for unemployment in most of Europe is actually triple the number for the US. Hutton glosses over the unemployment rates in many Muslim ghettoes in France, or the former East German areas which are currently higher than they were during the Great Depression.

Any mention of the cost of the US military commitment to station millions of its military to protect Europe from a Soviet attack? Not really. How about the cost to the US economy to keep Europeans from starving to death after WW I and WW II. Not to be found here. The billions spent by the US to rebuild the European economies so that they could compete with the US? Nah. The billions of dollars spent in humanitarian aid all over the world? Zilch. And of course this was written long before the Tsunami in 2004, where US aid was in place within days, saving millions of lives, and six months after the disaster hit, most of the European assistance, as pitiful as it turned out to be vs. the announced commitments, is still sitting on the docks rotting in the heat.

I could go on, but it wouldn't do any good to try to deal with the hundreds of totally disingenuous assertions in this book.

But at least Hutton is consistent in all of his books. Consistently dishonest and profoundly uninformed.