Do We Have It Good? Do We Know It?

IIn response to Publisher Art Hall’s June 4 column, “We’ve Got It Good… and We Know It!”
To the Editor:
According to Mark Twain, Benjamin Disraeli invented the truism, “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Anybody who tries to compare wages, prices and cost of living between different times and places – even in parts of a large country like ours (and even more so, between different countries) – risks getting caught in the worst of those three kinds of lies.
Twain, himself, got into that mess in “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” The character Dowley brags about how high wages are where he comes from. The narrator, Sir Boss, cross-examines him about prices of certain goods: salt, beef, eggs, beer. Dowley gives answers demonstrating that prices are more than twice those paid by people where Sir Boss lives, and Sir Boss asks him, “What’s become of your high wages you were bragging about?”
The most obvious problem with this tale is what is included in the basket of goods and services you use to compare. Maybe Dowley and his neighbors drink only wine, so beer is rare and expensive. Americans comparing the cost of living here with that of Europeans frequently consider things like the number of square feet in the home, the number of automobiles and the number of major appliances. There’s no question but that we beat Europeans on those.
Europeans tend to look at a very different basket. They avoid commuting, so more of them live in apartments in cities, and they have public transportation infinitely superior to ours. They eat much more food that is locally grown and fresh – not shipped halfway around the world and tasteless. They like to shop every day, so they have tiny refrigerators and virtually no freezers.
Europeans have real vacations. In most jobs, in most countries, you start with at least one month’s paid vacation, and it goes up from there. Europeans all get paid sick leave. Europeans have much more job security than Americans. They are guaranteed pensions they can live on when they retire, so they can afford to retire.
They all get good health care – better than ours. It’s paid for out of their taxes, and it costs a fraction of what Americans now pay. Anybody who has need for long-term care gets it.
Children can go to school as long as they want – and as long as they pass exams – all the way to and through the post-graduate level, and it’s all paid for. And in every European country except the UK, government-run schools are the best there are. Private schools and universities are for people who can’t make it in the state schools. And that’s the biggest difference, because if you want a statistic, here’s one to chew on: “The American dream” is alive and well – in Europe. Statistically, children from families with few if any advantages now have a far better chance of rising to the top in Western Europe than they do in America.
So, as Mark Twain asked, “What’s become of your high wages you were bragging about?”