Fresh off a semester of teaching comparative public policy, I'm still on the lookout for interesting/surprising comparative political facts. Two good ones today.
First, from the BBC:
The average UK person will this year have a greater income than their US counterpart for the first time since the 19th Century, figures suggest...
Mr Cooper said: "The UK has been catching up steadily with living standards in the US since 2001, so it is a well-established trend rather than simply the result of currency fluctuations."
Second, from Paul Krugman, some data comparing job growth in the US and Europe:
What the chart shows is that European countries have lower employment compared with population than the US; that’s a mixture of higher unemployment, lower female participation, and earlier retirement. But since 2000 the US employment record has been weak, while Europe has done much better at creating jobs. As a result, the gap has narrowed substantially.
This gets at a theme I’ve written about in the past, and will surely return to: a lot of the American image of Europe as a moribund economy is, like, so 1990s. They’re doing better now — and we’re doing worse.
If that's less than perfectly clear, click thru for the charts.
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