EUROSCLEROSIS DECONSTRUCTED. "Europe’s economy has outperformed America’s," contends Crooked Timber, who in an adjacent post point to a Mark Kleiman riposte to some Paul Johnson comments on the French way of doing things.

Professor Kleiman is certainly correct to observe, "And the idea that we can work fewer hours and enjoy higher material standards of living is a 'fantasy' only in Johnson's Puritanical fantasy life: in the real world, it's called 'economic progress' and has been going on since approximately the seventeenth century." (If not earlier: the berserkers of the tenth century were seriously underemployed compared to their forager ancestors. It is a shame that the earliest applied research into animal husbandry, crop cultivation, cheese making, and beer brewing are not written down. These all put any "aha" moments I have whether with paper and pencil or with a little help from Waterloo Maple to shame.)

Professor Johnson's full statement, however, is "The EU is built on a fantasy--that men and women can do less and less work, have longer and longer holidays and retire at an earlier age, while having their income, in real terms, and their standard of living increase. And this miracle is to be brought about by the enlightened bureaucratic regulation of every aspect of life." The fantasy he sees is in dirigisme rather than inventiveness bringing the increases in real income about. His complaint about the mandatory 35-hour week is more to the point, although he neglects to develop it. There are two developments he might have made. First, to an enterprising person, long hours on task are not necessarily a burden. (A visiting colleague recently told me that he was once locked in at Erasmus University and had to get help from security. Why? The university offices close at 17.30 and they are locked by 18.00. My colleague was in the North American mode of working on something as long as the enthusiasm was there. That the E.U. have not yet mandated panic bars on doors suggests the dirigiste state may not be as cloying as some perceive it.) Second, to the extent that the French style welfare state mandates large fixed employee-specific benefits to individual workers irrespective of hours of service, and it further limits the hours of service, it does pose substantial costs to hiring new workers. Those benefits quite likely mean that European workers who are actually employed will be quite productive.