When academics attack

Some lefty sites are quite good; mostly they're funny, in a whiny doom-mongering sort of way. Australian lefty economist John Quiggin can be very entertaining, especially when on the attack:

Tim Blair points to this exercise asserting that the EU is twenty years behind the USA. As Tim subtly points out, it’s absurd to suggest that the EU today (home of Nokia and Airbus, and birthplace of Linux and the World Wide Web) is comparable to the US when Atari boxes were the state of the art. Unfortunately, Tim’s irony is lost on his commenters, who assume the report deserves to be taken seriously.

Surely JQ read the report, which is of European origin and states explicitly that the EU is behind the US when judged on a number of economic criteria. It's Europeans making this "absurd" judgment. JQ continues:

To ram the point home to his slower readers, Tim might do well to point to the fact that, in terms of output per hour, several European countries are ahead of the US. Of course, when hours worked are taken into account, the US regains the lead, but on that criterion, Britain during the Industrial Revolution was ahead of any modern country.

What's with cherry-picking – something the left so often accuses the right of - of "output per hour" figures? The report states multiple criteria:

Presenting the survey, Arnaldo Abruzzi, the Secretary-General of Eurochambres, said, "the current EU levels in GDP, R&D investment, productivity and employment were already reached by the US in the late 70s/early 80s".

"Even the most optimistic assumptions show it will take the EU decades to catch up and then only if there is considerable EU improvement", he concluded.

And, it would be nice if JQ explained how it is working longer hours increases output per hour. I'm no economist – I hope that's obvious – but I can't see that workers in Industrial Revolution era Britain produced more per hour than modern American and European workers. (There appears to be a heretofore unrecognised gap in my understanding of the way the world works.)

By the way, Eurochambres, which commissioned the report, is the Association of European Chambers of Commerce and Industry. It represents 43 national associations of Chambers of Commerce and Industry, comprising a European network of 2000 regional and local Chambers with over 18 million member enterprises in Europe. What would they know about economic conditions in Europe?

JQ should have finished long ago but soldiers on:

The real point is that productivity differences between modern economies are so small that, by selecting the right criterion, any developed country can be made to look better, or worse, than any other. The report is explicitly described by its promoters as a “wake-up call” designed to scare Europeans into adopting the policies favored by its promoters. Having seen this kind of thing going on since the 80s, when Australians were terrified with the prospect of becoming the “poor white trash of Asia”, I find such reports more soporific than alarming.

Look JQ, I've received a couple of wake up calls in my day, none of them alarming – Okay, that's a lie, it was a bit alarming when my cousin dropped a box of 50 .22 shells into the campfire early one cold morning while the rest of us were still zippered into our sleeping-bags. Anyway, if the report is only partly correct, Europeans should take note. It's about competitiveness and standard of living and that sort of stuff, not alarm.

I haven't discussed this with Tim Blair – haven't ever spoken with the man – and don't know how he feels about it and wouldn't presume to speak for him but I will say, keep 'em coming professor, unintended humour is the best.