The European Dream

by Jeremy Rifkin

  In the European Union, there are approximately 322 physicians per 100,000 people, whereas in the U.S., there are only 279 physicians per 100,000 people.65 Not enough trained physicians is just the beginning of the health story. When it comes to ensuring health at the beginning of one’s life, the U.S. ranks a distant twenty-sixth among industrialized nations, at seven deaths per 1,000 births, and scores well below the average in the EU.66

  The U.S. fairs equally poorly at the other end of the life scale. While the average life expectancy in the European Union—excluding the ten new countries—is 81.4 years for women and 75.1 years for men, for a mean life expectancy of 78.2 years, the U.S. life expectancy for women is now 79.7 years and for men 74.2, for a mean life expectancy of 76.9 years. When the ten new Central and Eastern European countries are added to the EU averages, life expectancy falls to slightly below that of the United States.67 Still, the fact that life expectancy throughout Western and Northern Europe is higher than in America would no doubt be greeted with incredulity by most Americans. Even worse, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.S. currently ranks a dismal twenty-fourth in disability-adjusted life expectancy, far below our European friends.68

  The WHO also ranked the countries of the world in terms of overall health performance, and the U.S. fell down even further, into thirty-seventh place. When it came to evaluating the fairness of countries’ health care, the U.S. ranked still lower, to fifty-fourth, or last place among the OECD nations.69

  Sadly, the U.S. and South Africa are the only two developed countries in the world that do not provide health care for all of their citizens.70 More than forty six million people in America are currently uninsured and unable to pay for their own health care.71

  The irony is that the United States spends more per capita for health care than any other nation of the world, according to the OECD—$4,900 per person in 2001.72 Most of the increased cost is attributable to the high administrative costs and margins associated with running a for-profit health-care system. Moreover, because so many millions of Americans are uninsured, they cannot afford preventive care and do not attend to an illness at the outset. Waiting until the illness has advanced to a crisis increases the medical costs significantly.73 The greater cost of health care is added to the GDP. Currently, more than 10 percent of the U.S. GDP goes to medical care.74 Again, this is a perfect example of the disconnect between the measure of pure economic activity, reflected in the GDP, and the quality of life a society enjoys. The high cost of medical care in the U.S. boosts the U.S. GDP by more than 10 percent, despite the mediocre quality of the health care and the poor health of the American people.

  The GDP and the nation’s health intersect in many other interesting ways that are seldom discussed by economists. For example, obesity in the U.S. has now reached epidemic proportions, with more than 30 percent of all Americans now considered chronically obese. Worldwide, more than 300 million people are classified as obese.75 Much of the growth in girth is attributable to junk food and a snacking culture promoted in the U.S. and now being exported by U.S. companies around the world. Obesity is a major contributing factor in the onset of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.76

  Although Europe is catching up to America in the increased incidence of obesity—as fast foods become an ever more prevalent part of the European diet—the U.S. obesity rate is still more than twice as high. In the fifteen EU countries for which figures are available, the percentage of obese people is 11.3.77 Again, the more obese the American population, the bigger the GDP. Fast foods, junk foods, and processed foods account for an ever larger percentage of our total consumption of food. And the margins on these kinds of foods are much higher than for unprepared, unprocessed, raw foods. All of this jacks up the GDP still further. And then there are the medical costs. The World Health Organization estimates that obesity alone increases health-care costs by as much as 7 percent in some countries.78 So the U.S. GDP continues to expand along with our waistlines, but our quality of life continues to diminish.

  The United States has long been considered the land of opportunity. But if opportunity means starting off in life with sufficient financial resources to have a chance to make something out of oneself, then babies born in the European Union are far better positioned to succeed, from the very get-go. Childhood poverty in the United States is among the highest in the developed world. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) defines poverty this way: people in poverty are those whose “resources (material, cultural, and social) are so limited as to exclude them from the minimum acceptable way of life in the Member States in which they live.”79 The European Union defines poverty more specifically as “those whose incomes fall below half of the average income (as measured by the median) for the nation in which they live.”80 By these standards, 22 percent of all the children in the United States are living in poverty. U.S. childhood poverty now ranks twenty-second, or second to last, among the developed nations. Only Mexico scores lower. All fifteen highly developed European nations have fewer children in poverty than the U.S.81 Even if we consider absolute poverty, using the U.S. equivalent of what constitutes poverty, U.S. children are still poorer than the children of nine European nations.82 There are currently 11.7 million American children under the age of eighteen living below the U.S.-defined poverty line. And there are more poor children in America today than there were thirty years ago.83

  Living in a safe environment is also one of the hallmarks of a good society. We have come to believe that the more affluent a society becomes, the more peaceful it is likely to be. If GDP is the standard, then the United States ought to be one of the safest nations on Earth. Yet Americans can tell you that it’s far more dangerous to be out on the streets anywhere in America than to walk virtually everywhere unaccompanied in Europe. The statistics are chilling.

  Between 1997 and 1999, the average rate of homicides per 100,000 people in the EU was 1.7. The U.S rate of homicide was nearly four times higher, or nearly 6.26 per 100,000 people.84 More terrifying still, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that the rates of childhood homicides, suicides, and firearm-related deaths exceed those of the other twenty-five wealthiest nations in the world, including the fourteen wealthiest European countries. The homicide rate for children in the U.S. was five times higher than for children in the other twenty-five countries combined. The suicide rate among U.S. children was two times higher than all of the suicides combined in all the other twenty-five countries measured.85

  It’s not surprising that the U.S. incarceration rate is so high compared to that of the European Union. As mentioned earlier, in chapter 2, more than two million Americans are currently in prison—that’s nearly one-quarter of the entire prison population in the world.86 While EU member states average 87 prisoners per 100,000 population, the United States averages an incredible 685 prisoners per 100,000 population.87

  The European Commission has begun work on developing a “European System of Social Reporting and Welfare Measurement” with an eye toward establishing a more accurate mechanism for measuring the “real” economic progress of its 455 million citizens.88

  The European Commission study group on the subject has laid out an architectural blueprint of the kinds of things that should go into a social accounting, beginning with the concept of “quality of life,” which it defines as the “immaterial aspects of the living situation like health, social relations or the quality of the natural environment.”89 Quality of life also should include “actual living conditions,” as well as “the subjective well-being of the individual citizens,” says one of the authors of the initial study papers.90

  In America, while we assume that every person is endowed with “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” we believe that more economic growth will ensure the good life. In Europe, academics, policy people, and the public at large are skeptical. They say that growth, by itself, is no guarantee of a better life f
or the people. The European Commission is looking at a host of other indicators to measure happiness, including the extent to which social cohesion is deepened, social exclusion is diminished, and social capital is grown. It wants an economy that is sustainable, “that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”91

  Europe is not yet ready to abandon the old GDP scale. Yet, the very fact that a world superpower is seriously engaged in the process of rethinking what the criteria ought to be for measuring economic growth and for determining the basis of a good economy is nothing short of revolutionary. In the United States, at the federal level, except for a single speech on the U.S. Senate floor by Democratic senator Byron Dorgan back in 1995, there has been no discussion of rethinking the way the U.S. defines economic progress.92 Indeed, it’s probably fair to say that were any of the president’s council of economic advisers to even introduce the subject, he or she would be met with snickers of disbelief among fellow economists. Yet, in Europe, the powers that be appear willing, even eager, to challenge the old shibboleths and reconstitute some of the most basic assumptions of what economic progress should be about.

  What does all of this have to do with the American and European dreams? When people think of the older American Dream, what comes to mind is the idea that anyone can go from rags to riches. By contrast, the new European Dream is more about advancing the quality of life of a people. The first dream emphasizes individual opportunities, the second, the collective well-being of society. When it comes to the question of individual opportunities, however, the evidence suggests that Europe is fast catching up to the United States. As to quality of life, it’s clear that Europe has moved ahead of America.

  THE TUG BETWEEN EUROPE and America goes even deeper than questions of personal opportunity and quality of life. What really distinguishes the comings and goings in Europe and America today is that Europe is busy preparing for a new era while America is desperately trying to hold on to the old one. There is a sense of excitement across Europe, a feeling of new possibilities. To be sure, the feeling varies somewhat in intensity from country to country and region to region and even between young and old. There are also significant pockets of resistance to a transnational political space. Still, one gets the sense that Europeans know they are creating something new and bold and that the whole world is watching them. If I were to sum it up, I would say that Europe has become a giant freewheeling experimental laboratory for rethinking the human condition and reconfiguring human institutions in the global era.

  Many observers—especially Americans—view the developments in Europe with whimsy or disdain or, worse still, indifference. The hard-line cynics are even less charitable, seeing the efforts afoot to create a “United States” of Europe as quixotic, and ultimately futile. European critics voiced similar reservations about our own experiment in forging a United States of America more than two hundred years ago. They proved wrong then, and I suspect we will be proved wrong this time around.

  The emerging European Dream isn’t just a glib political catchphrase. There are profound changes occurring in Europe at the personal, institutional, and even metaphysical level. Even most Europeans, when pressed, aren’t exactly sure what they’ve gotten themselves into. Our American founders must have felt the same way. But if there are doubts and qualms, a sense of frustration and bewilderment, all that is to be expected of a people in the midst of rewriting the human story.

  It is true that Europe is becoming a new land of opportunity for millions of people around the world in search of a better tomorrow. Europe’s emphasis on quality of life does indeed distinguish it from the older American model, with its singular attention to growth and the accumulation of personal wealth. But there is much more to the European Dream. In a world growing weary of grand utopian visions and more comfortable with individual story lines, the new European Dream has dared to create a new synthesis: one that combines a post-modern sensitivity to multiple perspectives and multiculturalism with a new universal vision. The new European Dream takes us into a global age.

  In order to really understand the depth of the changes that are remaking Europe, it is essential to remember Europe’s past. The new European Dream is not so much a repudiation of the past as it is a building off of it. Dreams take us to where we would like to go, but to get there, we first need to know what we are leaving behind. Every journey has a starting point as well as a destination. In the case of the new European Dream, the starting point is not the new millennium or even the post-World War II era but, rather, the twilight period between the late medieval and early modern era, when many of the conventions we have come to know under the heading of “modernity” began to take hold. These conventions include the Enlightenment and the beginning of modern science, the flowering of the individual, the establishment of a private property regime, the formation of market capitalism, and the birth of the nation-state. The shift to a global era is forcing a rethinking of all of these well-worn conventions of the modern age. So, to understand the path that Europe’s new dream is forging, we first need to revisit its older byways to gain a reference point and, hopefully, some insights to help guide our journey.

  What we are going to find, by retracing European history, are the roots of the American Dream that we discussed in chapter 1. Although historians rarely allude to it, the reality is that the American Dream represents the thinking of a moment of time, frozen in European history and transported whole cloth to American shores in the eighteenth century, where it continued to animate the American experience right up to the present day. The American Revolution took place at the very time that a waning Protestant Reformation was making its final accommodation to the new forces of the Enlightenment. While much of Europe eventually combined elements of the Protestant Reformation theology and Enlightenment ideology into a new synthesis wrapped up in democratic socialism, America did not. Instead, successive generations of Americans chose to live out both the Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment traditions simultaneously and in their purest forms, becoming, at one and the same time, the most devoutly Protestant people on Earth and the most committed to scientific pursuits, a private property regime, market capitalism, and nation-state ideology. The American Dream, in the fullest incarnation, is an amalgam of both these earlier forces that shook Europe from its medieval moorings and propelled it into the modern age. In a very real sense, then, the American Dream is largely a European creation, uprooted and replanted on American soil and bred to fit America’s unique environment.

  We Americans like to think of ourselves as forward-thinking, with our attention focused on the distant horizon. However, our worldview, strangely enough, is locked into a specific period of time long since passed by in European history. In short, the American Dream is a very old dream and becoming increasingly irrelevant in the new era of globalization.

  In the next four chapters, we are going to retrace the philosophical and institutional changes that gave rise to the modern age, in order to better understand Europe’s own past and the American Dream that grew out of it. Knowing what Europe is leaving behind is essential to knowing where it’s heading as it prepares a new dream for a global era.

  THE MAKING of the MODERN AGE

  4

  Space, Time, and Modernity

  THE GREAT TURNING POINTS in human history are often triggered by changing conceptions of space and time. Sometimes, the adoption of a single technology can be transformative in nature, changing the very way our minds filter the world. Consider, for example, the cell phone. Europeans were the first to enthusiastically embrace mobile-communications technology. I remember sitting with my wife in a fashionable upscale eatery in Milan many years ago, when we heard a phone ring from somewhere at a nearby table. The middle-aged man pulled a mobile phone from his jacket pocket and began an animated and lengthy conversation with someone on the other line. My wife turned to me with a quip, “Wait until American teenagers get ahold of this lit
tle toy.”

  Americans Are from Mars, Europeans Are from Venus

  Americans subsequently took to cell phones. But the point is that the wireless revolution took off, in a big way, first in Europe. In 2000, the EU boasted 661 cellular mobile subscribers per 1,000 people, compared to only 308 subscribers per 1,000 people in the U.S., putting Europe far ahead of the rest of the world in early adoption of wireless telecommunications technology.1 After centuries of being surrounded by walls and living in a fortress mentality, suddenly Europeans found a way to break out, to liberate themselves. The cell phone brought with it a new kind of freedom: mobility, to be sure, but different from the kind that drew millions of Americans to buy Henry Ford’s cheap Model T car nearly one hundred years earlier.

  For Americans, the automobile was a way to grab hold of the vast expanse of the American landscape—to expropriate and colonize it and make it more manageable and manipulable. The very name “auto-mobile” struck a chord. Americans, more than any other people, have come to view security in terms of “autonomy” and “mobility.” On the frontier, where human exchange is sparse and the elements threatening, being self-reliant and mobile is a way to ensure one’s security. Autonomy, mobility, and freedom have always come as a package in America. To be autonomous is to be independent and not beholden to others. Mobility, in turn, ensures endless new opportunities. The American cowboy and his horse enshrine the myth. Fiercely independent and always on the move, he was a free spirit that captured, so pointedly, the American frame of mind. With the passing of the great American frontier, and the cowboys who tamed it, Henry Ford sold a mechanical surrogate of the horse. The automobile allowed every American to exercise the same sense of freedom that cowboys must have felt atop their steeds, roaming the Western frontier.